7 ms·

At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use ph

by aogaili 7mo ago

At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game? In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose. If you think about, we moved human one-on-one battles to MMA and combat sport, this allowed channeling individual human aggression in a controlled environment. The future war might be not very different, swarm of drones fighting other swarm of drones while others watching on the news, who can build, manage and deploy smarter and more effective drones. If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.

neonstatic 7mo ago
> abstract it away and play video game? What happens when one side wins? In the real world, they actually win. In the video game, nothing happens > In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively In other words, in the near future it might work the exact way it has always worked. > they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat. Your ideas are based on the idea of winning in a closed-system game. War is waged by people. Some people actually want the other people to die.
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Yes, but it not like before. We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable. So it is NOT like before. And the logical conclusion, as those drones get better and more widely adopted, is that war will be nothing more a video game with real economics and supply chain. So we basically made the cost of genocide or colonization too high to absorb. Previous wars, people got away with it.
  - ncruces 7mo ago
    We don't allow? Who doesn't? And what are they going to do about it?
    - aogaili 7mo ago
      The majority of nations? majority of people on earth? We are going to a multilateral world and to win a war you need secure the appeal of majority. If the majority think your war is illegal they can cut you off from the world economy. It is a distributed consensus-based algorithm, and the young people who are writing those algorithms will shape the future of governance.
      - ncruces 7mo ago
        The majority of the world thinks the Russia-Ukraine war is illegal. The majority of the world thinks the Israeli/US-Iran war is illegal.
        aogaili 7mo ago
        You are arguing today. This is the first kind of wars we are seeing of this nature. But Iran is hitting exactly where it hurts, global supply chain, and now the US will be pressured by the global economy to either retreat or commit a genocide. And if all the war was drones and anti-drones today (which is not) we would have saved many lives. Look at UAE/Iran, UAE lost no live despite being hammered with drones/missiles, this is an example of drones/anti-drones future. The reason why we don't have this with the US, is because the US needs a defeat for the legacy system to die, and it seems they will get that defeat soon. Actually they are already defeated, Trump said he is retreating in 3 weeks while achieving nothing but destruction.
        RiverStone 6mo ago
        Your casual usage of the word “genocide” doesn’t apply to Iran. Iranians are dramatically in favor of removing the theocratic Islamic regime. Iranian expats the world over celebrated Khamenei’s death. My Iranian mother-in-law living in Tehran has literally been saying “get the mullahs out” every time we’ve spoken for the last year. Millions of Iranians inside Iran are thankful that the US (and even Israel despite the complicated relationship) is attacking the regime. This is a regime, after all, that killed thousands of its own people. That requires girls to fully cover themselves. That doesn’t allow singing or dancing in the street. Achieved nothing? Go talk to a real Iranian, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Iranians the world over have felt hope for the first time in over 40 years that they may get their country back. And we absolutely should not stop trying to help them.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
alephnerd 7mo ago
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively This has been the assumption for over a decade now. > those who can't produce any more drones, lose Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1]. > If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature. The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals. [0] - https://www.themiddleeastuncovered.com/p/inside-the-talibans-secret-drone https://www.themiddleeastuncovered.com/p/inside-the-talibans... [1] - https://thekhorasandiary.com/en/2026/03/13/taliban-strengthens-domestic-drone-and-weapons-programs-amid-border-clashes-with-pakistan https://thekhorasandiary.com/en/2026/03/13/taliban-strengthe...
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Yes, but what you are missing the cost of total elimination of the other side. For example, in Iraq, Saddam was able to use chemical weapons and wipe out the resistance, this is no longer an accepted solution by majority of people on earth. So there is no real way to actually win a war. If you can't kill or enslave the other population, and the world is not accepting refugees, if you hit one economy completely you might the global economy. So what do you do? there is actually no real way to win a war as those constraints become strong and stronger. You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down and hope they would resign, by better co-ordinating your drones and managing your economy, which is a video game in the real world.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    > You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down How do you (detest this phrasing, it very glib) null the other side? Most weapon systems aren't developed in entirely separate supply chains - they use off-the-shelf components that are available for commercial usecases as well. To successfully take out an opponents operational capacity when they are using dual use technology means the barrier between "civilian" and "military" is nonexistent. It basically means the return to total war doctrine.
xeonmc 7mo ago
So like the old League of Legends lore before their Institute of War retcon?
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Yes exactly. Like an arm wrestle, those who can demonstrate they have the better swarms, better AI, better supply chain, better innovation, win the war. And the other nation surrender. There is for resolving extreme national conflicts. If one side decides to go further and use drones to commit a genocide or completely destroy the other side economy/resources. Then other major players will join the game by using more drones and overwhelm the aggressive nation production and end it.
jazzpush2 7mo ago
Finally, my years of playing Starcraft have real-world use! Also: Everyone will soon bow to S. Korea :D
- nasaeclipse 7mo ago
  Just gotta worry about the network lag
ALittleLight 7mo ago
The difference is you can appeal or ignore a game result. If Ukraine lost a strategy game tournament, would they give up their territory? Or fight to hold it still?
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Yes we are not fully there yet, but we are getting there. We are seeing the transition right in front of our eyes.
  - __patchbit__ 7mo ago
    Vladimir Putin doesn't dare to indirectly strike through Iran at the sources of fire power production powering suicide drones and targeteering data at Russia. He is too weak.
fred_is_fred 7mo ago
Orignal Star Trek did an episode on this - "A Taste of Armageddon". The war was a video game - fought on a computer. But if the virtual bombs hit your area, you were declared dead and had to a report to a disintegration chamber. If you can get past the dated special effects - the concept is the same.
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Interesting, need to watch that.
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk This is like the future after the scenario I describe happens. But I diff, is that we keep the game, but change the medium. Humans are war oriented by nature, like chimps, but I think as the world becomes more connected, the cost of destroying one place is causing impact on other..yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way.
  - vkou 7mo ago
    > yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way. There is a desire to resolve conflict in an incredibly violent way because there are no consequences for that violence. There could be, but there are large emergent systems which work hard to ensure that powerful people don't face consequence for their actions. We, as... Not powerful people can push back on that, but there's a collective action problem.
worik 7mo ago
> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? No. Young men being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. Not a game
- aogaili 7mo ago
  I know it is not. I'm just saying in the future if all became drones war and we disallow genocide, then what do you think will happen? Of course I acknowledge real life is lost right now, all I'm saying give politicians a video game to play instead of having drone wars. Would you rather have politicians commit genocides and destroy real economics or play drone like video games? which side are you with?
tim333 7mo ago
Ideally you'd have some sort of diplomatic solution and no war. But these things don't always pan out.
- aogaili 7mo ago
  Agreed. Unfortunately, diplomatic conflict resolution is prone to failures and the cost of failure is really really high. What Iran is doing is telling the empire that their war has a cost on their economy and reputation. And the only reason they are able to do so is because of drones/missiles (basically automated Kamikaze pilots) and I would also argue GenAI since they producing a lot of PR videos which used be expensive to make. If Iran had to fight the war with their people, US would have won due to the imbalance of destructive power. In other words, we are witnessing a new kind of system for conflict resolution. Not war and not diplomacy. More of drones/AI/robotics systems hitting economies while trying to avoid human life losses in order to win the narrative war. This no where similar to any war of the past. The key change is waging wars without people, i.e the automation of warfare. Which is closer to a video game than traditional wars. But people think of my statement as reductionist to the current causalities, which is not my point, obviously we are far from having fully automated warfare but we are seeing the first generation. The closest example is the fight between Iran/UAE basically a network of digital systems defending against another. And if my reasoning hold, we might end up in a more peaceful earth.
conception 7mo ago
Finally!! https://youtu.be/wgKqKggYdDE?si=x6FFPqSKETIPYqiu https://youtu.be/wgKqKggYdDE?si=x6FFPqSKETIPYqiu
casey2 7mo ago
6 weeks equates 84 average sized US highschools worth of people dying on the Russian side and twice as many coming back with life altering injuries. I'm not sure how a country can survive that.
- ahartmetz 7mo ago
  It seems to me that the Russian attitude is that life is a cruel joke, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The country has had terrible government and an oppressed population for hundreds of years. Russian influence operations are using their intimate knowledge of destructive attitudes to drag down the competition to their level.
crazygringo 7mo ago
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose. This has always been the case. It's very common for a war to be lost by the side that runs out of resources first -- whether soldiers, oil, missiles, or whatever the limiting factor is. Right now a major question in the Iran war is how many drones and missiles Iran has left. What you describe as "playing strategy video game and call it day" is essentially democracy, and why democracies generally don't declare war on each other. Mostly, they trade goods and play football (soccer) against each other instead.
- aogaili 7mo ago
  You are missing the point again. That has not always been case. Read my other comments why it's the same. But basically with AI/Drones + Global Interconnected Economy + Multilateral world order + Global Information = new system. We never had anything like that, and the argument that this has always been the case is missing my point entirely. But if you don't get, well, you won't get it.
  - crazygringo 7mo ago
    "Again"? When did I miss the "point" the first time? I don't get it because you haven't explained what is different now. Writing out some equation isn't an explanation. If you don't explain something clearly, and then try to blame people for not understanding, you're not going to have a good time. You're proposing that wars being decided based on who runs out of resources first is something new. I'm telling you, this has been a major factor in warfare for millenia.
ponector 7mo ago
>> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? Do you agree in case your team lose to be relocated to the remote territory and also be stripped of your language, history and national identity?
lifestyleguru 7mo ago
> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? > Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game? But then how will you gain new territory for oligarchs and billionaires? Are you really ready for the sacrifice that their next yacht will be smaller instead of larger? Do you really want them to withdraw from London's real estate market?

by aogaili 7mo ago

neonstatic 7mo ago

> abstract it away and play video game? What happens when one side wins? In the real world, they actually win. In the video game, nothing happens > In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively In other words, in the near future it might work the exact way it has always worked. > they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat. Your ideas are based on the idea of winning in a closed-system game. War is waged by people. Some people actually want the other people to die.

aogaili 7mo ago
Yes, but it not like before. We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable. So it is NOT like before. And the logical conclusion, as those drones get better and more widely adopted, is that war will be nothing more a video game with real economics and supply chain. So we basically made the cost of genocide or colonization too high to absorb. Previous wars, people got away with it.
- ncruces 7mo ago
  We don't allow? Who doesn't? And what are they going to do about it?
  - aogaili 7mo ago
    The majority of nations? majority of people on earth? We are going to a multilateral world and to win a war you need secure the appeal of majority. If the majority think your war is illegal they can cut you off from the world economy. It is a distributed consensus-based algorithm, and the young people who are writing those algorithms will shape the future of governance.
    - ncruces 7mo ago
      The majority of the world thinks the Russia-Ukraine war is illegal. The majority of the world thinks the Israeli/US-Iran war is illegal.
      - aogaili 7mo ago
        You are arguing today. This is the first kind of wars we are seeing of this nature. But Iran is hitting exactly where it hurts, global supply chain, and now the US will be pressured by the global economy to either retreat or commit a genocide. And if all the war was drones and anti-drones today (which is not) we would have saved many lives. Look at UAE/Iran, UAE lost no live despite being hammered with drones/missiles, this is an example of drones/anti-drones future. The reason why we don't have this with the US, is because the US needs a defeat for the legacy system to die, and it seems they will get that defeat soon. Actually they are already defeated, Trump said he is retreating in 3 weeks while achieving nothing but destruction.
        RiverStone 6mo ago
        Your casual usage of the word “genocide” doesn’t apply to Iran. Iranians are dramatically in favor of removing the theocratic Islamic regime. Iranian expats the world over celebrated Khamenei’s death. My Iranian mother-in-law living in Tehran has literally been saying “get the mullahs out” every time we’ve spoken for the last year. Millions of Iranians inside Iran are thankful that the US (and even Israel despite the complicated relationship) is attacking the regime. This is a regime, after all, that killed thousands of its own people. That requires girls to fully cover themselves. That doesn’t allow singing or dancing in the street. Achieved nothing? Go talk to a real Iranian, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Iranians the world over have felt hope for the first time in over 40 years that they may get their country back. And we absolutely should not stop trying to help them.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

alephnerd 7mo ago

> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively This has been the assumption for over a decade now. > those who can't produce any more drones, lose Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1]. > If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature. The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals. [0] - https://www.themiddleeastuncovered.com/p/inside-the-talibans-secret-drone https://www.themiddleeastuncovered.com/p/inside-the-talibans... [1] - https://thekhorasandiary.com/en/2026/03/13/taliban-strengthens-domestic-drone-and-weapons-programs-amid-border-clashes-with-pakistan https://thekhorasandiary.com/en/2026/03/13/taliban-strengthe...

aogaili 7mo ago
Yes, but what you are missing the cost of total elimination of the other side. For example, in Iraq, Saddam was able to use chemical weapons and wipe out the resistance, this is no longer an accepted solution by majority of people on earth. So there is no real way to actually win a war. If you can't kill or enslave the other population, and the world is not accepting refugees, if you hit one economy completely you might the global economy. So what do you do? there is actually no real way to win a war as those constraints become strong and stronger. You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down and hope they would resign, by better co-ordinating your drones and managing your economy, which is a video game in the real world.
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  > You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down How do you (detest this phrasing, it very glib) null the other side? Most weapon systems aren't developed in entirely separate supply chains - they use off-the-shelf components that are available for commercial usecases as well. To successfully take out an opponents operational capacity when they are using dual use technology means the barrier between "civilian" and "military" is nonexistent. It basically means the return to total war doctrine.

xeonmc 7mo ago

So like the old League of Legends lore before their Institute of War retcon?

aogaili 7mo ago
Yes exactly. Like an arm wrestle, those who can demonstrate they have the better swarms, better AI, better supply chain, better innovation, win the war. And the other nation surrender. There is for resolving extreme national conflicts. If one side decides to go further and use drones to commit a genocide or completely destroy the other side economy/resources. Then other major players will join the game by using more drones and overwhelm the aggressive nation production and end it.

jazzpush2 7mo ago

Finally, my years of playing Starcraft have real-world use! Also: Everyone will soon bow to S. Korea :D

nasaeclipse 7mo ago
Just gotta worry about the network lag

ALittleLight 7mo ago

The difference is you can appeal or ignore a game result. If Ukraine lost a strategy game tournament, would they give up their territory? Or fight to hold it still?

aogaili 7mo ago
Yes we are not fully there yet, but we are getting there. We are seeing the transition right in front of our eyes.
- __patchbit__ 7mo ago
  Vladimir Putin doesn't dare to indirectly strike through Iran at the sources of fire power production powering suicide drones and targeteering data at Russia. He is too weak.

fred_is_fred 7mo ago

Orignal Star Trek did an episode on this - "A Taste of Armageddon". The war was a video game - fought on a computer. But if the virtual bombs hit your area, you were declared dead and had to a report to a disintegration chamber. If you can get past the dated special effects - the concept is the same.

aogaili 7mo ago
Interesting, need to watch that.
aogaili 7mo ago
Found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk This is like the future after the scenario I describe happens. But I diff, is that we keep the game, but change the medium. Humans are war oriented by nature, like chimps, but I think as the world becomes more connected, the cost of destroying one place is causing impact on other..yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way.
- vkou 7mo ago
  > yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way. There is a desire to resolve conflict in an incredibly violent way because there are no consequences for that violence. There could be, but there are large emergent systems which work hard to ensure that powerful people don't face consequence for their actions. We, as... Not powerful people can push back on that, but there's a collective action problem.

worik 7mo ago

> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? No. Young men being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. Not a game

aogaili 7mo ago
I know it is not. I'm just saying in the future if all became drones war and we disallow genocide, then what do you think will happen? Of course I acknowledge real life is lost right now, all I'm saying give politicians a video game to play instead of having drone wars. Would you rather have politicians commit genocides and destroy real economics or play drone like video games? which side are you with?

tim333 7mo ago

Ideally you'd have some sort of diplomatic solution and no war. But these things don't always pan out.

aogaili 7mo ago
Agreed. Unfortunately, diplomatic conflict resolution is prone to failures and the cost of failure is really really high. What Iran is doing is telling the empire that their war has a cost on their economy and reputation. And the only reason they are able to do so is because of drones/missiles (basically automated Kamikaze pilots) and I would also argue GenAI since they producing a lot of PR videos which used be expensive to make. If Iran had to fight the war with their people, US would have won due to the imbalance of destructive power. In other words, we are witnessing a new kind of system for conflict resolution. Not war and not diplomacy. More of drones/AI/robotics systems hitting economies while trying to avoid human life losses in order to win the narrative war. This no where similar to any war of the past. The key change is waging wars without people, i.e the automation of warfare. Which is closer to a video game than traditional wars. But people think of my statement as reductionist to the current causalities, which is not my point, obviously we are far from having fully automated warfare but we are seeing the first generation. The closest example is the fight between Iran/UAE basically a network of digital systems defending against another. And if my reasoning hold, we might end up in a more peaceful earth.

conception 7mo ago

Finally!! https://youtu.be/wgKqKggYdDE?si=x6FFPqSKETIPYqiu https://youtu.be/wgKqKggYdDE?si=x6FFPqSKETIPYqiu

casey2 7mo ago

6 weeks equates 84 average sized US highschools worth of people dying on the Russian side and twice as many coming back with life altering injuries. I'm not sure how a country can survive that.

ahartmetz 7mo ago
It seems to me that the Russian attitude is that life is a cruel joke, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The country has had terrible government and an oppressed population for hundreds of years. Russian influence operations are using their intimate knowledge of destructive attitudes to drag down the competition to their level.

crazygringo 7mo ago

> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose. This has always been the case. It's very common for a war to be lost by the side that runs out of resources first -- whether soldiers, oil, missiles, or whatever the limiting factor is. Right now a major question in the Iran war is how many drones and missiles Iran has left. What you describe as "playing strategy video game and call it day" is essentially democracy, and why democracies generally don't declare war on each other. Mostly, they trade goods and play football (soccer) against each other instead.

aogaili 7mo ago
You are missing the point again. That has not always been case. Read my other comments why it's the same. But basically with AI/Drones + Global Interconnected Economy + Multilateral world order + Global Information = new system. We never had anything like that, and the argument that this has always been the case is missing my point entirely. But if you don't get, well, you won't get it.
- crazygringo 7mo ago
  "Again"? When did I miss the "point" the first time? I don't get it because you haven't explained what is different now. Writing out some equation isn't an explanation. If you don't explain something clearly, and then try to blame people for not understanding, you're not going to have a good time. You're proposing that wars being decided based on who runs out of resources first is something new. I'm telling you, this has been a major factor in warfare for millenia.

ponector 7mo ago

>> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? Do you agree in case your team lose to be relocated to the remote territory and also be stripped of your language, history and national identity?

lifestyleguru 7mo ago

> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day? > Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game? But then how will you gain new territory for oligarchs and billionaires? Are you really ready for the sacrifice that their next yacht will be smaller instead of larger? Do you really want them to withdraw from London's real estate market?