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Comment by Mistletoe

9 days ago

"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda

The worry being that war will be a lot easier to stomach when none of the combatants are alive.

  • The 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.

    • >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

      4 replies →

  • But a robot war is an endless war. There will always be more robots to fight until the economy is completely exhausted.

    • Not necessarily. If the factories that build the robots are taken out, for example. Someone (even a robot) still has to build them.

      3 replies →