5 ms·
"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda
by Mistletoe 7mo ago
"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda
- bluegatty 7mo agoThey are already on in Ukraine.
- colechristensen 7mo agoThe worry being that war will be a lot easier to stomach when none of the combatants are alive.
- dlt713705 7mo agoBut a robot war is an endless war. There will always be more robots to fight until the economy is completely exhausted.
- borski 7mo agoNot necessarily. If the factories that build the robots are taken out, for example. Someone (even a robot) still has to build them.
- dlt713705 7mo agoWhat if the factories are located in foreign countries and the belligerents are only buying off-the-shelf products ? Wars are always bad news and robot wars are very bad news. Many countries will fall into an endless war economy.
- adrianN 7mo agoIt turned out to be pretty hard to take out Germany’s factories in ww2.
- borski 7mo agoOf course it did. War is hard, and lots of people die in it. The parent comment said always. I am saying that always is not true. I made no suggestions it was easy.
- esafak 7mo agoNone on the offensive side, perhaps.
- XorNot 7mo agoThe history of warfare, hell the literal current warfare happening in Ukraine makes this entire argument unbelievably specious. There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.
- Barrin92 7mo ago>There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare yes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios. It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilian death ratios climb up to 80-90% in mass bombing campaigns and urban warfare environments. People like to use 'medieval' as an insult but the medieval age was quite constrained compared to Gaza. And if you take the pilots out of the equation and fully automate this, that's probably only a taste of what people will do to civilian populations. Because a picture says more than words, this is the kind of thing you can probably look forward to: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G_63OmTawAABeIg.jpg?name=orig https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G_63OmTawAABeIg.jpg?name=orig
- SapporoChris 7mo ago"European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios." I don't think the Napoleonic wars of early 17th century can be considered small armies. French Empire had around 1.2 million regulars in 1813.