If technologies became sufficiently advanced that most or all the parts of a country’s armed forces could become automated, ie have robot soldiers, AI or remote control assisted warplanes, tanks, and the like what do you think would be the likely implications?
Wars would become games played by generals in their lofty perches: contests of money, power, and who cares less about the civilians caught in the crossfire.
Oh, wait, you wanted differences from the current way things are? Um, people would focus their attacks on the Droid Control Ship.
heheh. Would wars occur more often?
No worries about desertion or anything…
“Ding Ding Ding! It is every robot’s duty to give his life for the good of humanity! [Oh crap!]”
The rich nations, those that could afford such automated forces, would go to war with shockingly little provocation and be very reluctant to withdraw from a campaign that’s floundering or proved moot.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, even by the standards of the current administration.
Robots aren’t afraid to go into the line of fire. Officers aren’t reluctant to order their robots into the line of fire. A robot with it’s arm blown off, if it can’t be repaired, will simply be scrapped, rather than acting as walking reminders of the horrors of war and potentially requiring government assistance for the rest of their lives. Crates full of broken drones make a much less compelling photo op than flag-draped coffins. In other words, any anti-war sentiment would lose much of its teeth. The greed and political clout of defense contractors, eager to sell the robots and their replacements, would do the rest.
Attacking the troops wouldn’t do as much, so the third world nations that richer nations would use these robots against would increase attacks against civilians of whatever nation attacked them. This would only justify further robot attacks.
Robot-enabled countries would have a MAD thing going on, of course.
The primary implication is that it would be hellacool.
Battles woudl become a thing of the past. There woudl be little point in hammering away at a robot army and little point in launching an assault using one when your opposition is similarly equiped. Robots would serve a valuable purpose in dicouraging an invasion of civilian areas or strategic points much as nuclear wepaons do today, but in parctice they would rarely get tested.
Wars would instead be fought by inflicting human casualties, and since the army are all robots that means civilian casualties. Why attack a robot formation when you can leave your own bots in defence and bomb the enemy cities into submission. Peope will surrender far faster if you threaten human lives than if you dismantle robots so why waste resources dismantling robots?
Bingo. I feel sorry enough for the anti-war movement as it is – they have precious little to work with to form their propaganda. Take Iraq as an example. They can’t use the illegality of the war. Or the injustice. No one really cares about piles of dead Iraqis. The merits of the war itself? Or the goals? Doesn’t matter either. Pretty much the only thing that’s been successful is appealing to “the troops.” How many of them are dead, how many of them are maimed for life, how many have severe psychological problems…this stuff works, somehow, despite the fact it’s a voluntary army, despite the fact that we’ve only lost ~4,000 dead and 25,000 wounded. I mean, that’s nothing compared to past conflicts. But you see it plastered all over the anti-war ads because it works so well.
So I’d predict such a robot army would make it nearly impossible for an anti-war campaign to affect public sentiment, at least in the U.S., unless the zeitgeist moves again.
Blane: Or, better yet in my view, don’t attack nations which have robot armies of comparable quality to your own. Instead, use them to attack the helpless poor which lack such advanced weaponry and easily conquer them. Or just threaten to and get everything you want.
I have a hard time seeing a robot army as ever being cost effective, in the same manner that we don’t need gourmet chefs and sommeliers to work at McDonalds when teenagers and recent immigrants can do a satisfactory job at much less cost. Let’s say that we get the price of one robot infantryman down to, say, ten million dollars. (Considering the F-22 fighter airplane costs more than $120 million, that’s a bargain.) A brigade of robots would cost $30 billion. The entire military’s budget for personnel (including pay, food, housing, etc) is now about $110 billion, and my WAG is that less than 10% of our troops could be replaced by combat robots, we’re looking at an absolutely enormous cost to achieve anywhere near the combat efficiency of a human-based military. Robots could conceivably used in special situations – in the way that we have a limited number of B-2 bombers because B-52s can perform many, but not all, of the same missions at much, much, much less cost.
So, it may be that robot armies are more likely to be used. However, I’m quite certain that the primary effect of a nation trying to build a robot army would be… bankruptcy.
Sorry to be so boring.
Whoops, sorry Blake, I really messed your name up in my first post. Among other typos.
Ravenman, that is all true today and for the near future. We just have to assume they exist for the purposes of this discussion. Besides, we really just need someone to invent one of these thingies and we’re set! 
The War Against The Machine, and Judgment Day. 
I don’t see this as being substantially different to the sittuation today, and no more likley than it is today.
If the US or Britain or Japan seriously wanted to attack or threaten a helpless poor country and take their wealth they could do it right now without any need for robots. Iraq wasn’t a helpless country and was moderately prosperous and look how well it withstood a concerted invasion.
Robots wouldn’t change the status quo in this regard. Wars would still be expensive, probably more expensive, with robots and there would be absolutely no economic rationale in starting wars with impoverished nations for profit.
As I said, I think the biggest difference will be that nobody will bother trying to fight armies since they can be so easily and painlessly replaced, so wars of attrition will become a thing of the past. Attacks will instead be targetted at civilan centres where attrition still has some meaning.
I seriously doubt that. If you can build a robot army, and not just a few specialized devices and remote controlled drones, then you can almost certainly build a robot factory, and a robot industry. Which means prices drop like a rock to not much more than raw materials + energy for anything manufactured, including robots. $500 dollar robot soldiers are more likely than $10,000,000 dollar ones.
And they wouldn’t even need to be as good as human soldiers, since you could pump them out faster and yes, cheaper than human soldiers, and just bury your human opponent in numbers.
And look at the political cost. If we could invade countries without losing American lives, there’d be little political cost, so we’d do it much more often. Probably on a yearly basis or more. I wouldn’t be surprised if America would try for a world empire via conquest, at least of the non-nuclear countries. The fact that we’d kill millions in the process would be shrugged off. It was for their own good, sacrifices had to be made, and they hated freedom anyway.
The iPhone costs $500, and it can’t sense, move, shoot, or be shot. And it isn’t made by a defense contractor.
Or join a message board.
What do you mean “invade countries without losing American lives”?
How many lives were lost during the invasion of Iraq? A handful. We destroyed Saddam’s army and brought the country to a standstill in an action that wasn’t much more dangerous to our soldiers than a training mission. The dead and wounded soldiers started piling up during the occupation. We can bomb the crap out of any non-nuclear country in the world with minimal risk to our soldiers. What are tomahawk missiles if they aren’t robot bombers? Abrams tanks can destroy any number of third world armored vehicles with impunity. We can destroy any non-nuclear country without risking American lives today. And so?
So we send a punch of robot tanks into Mexico and bomb the crap out of the place, how is that different from what we can do today? We can blow Mexico off the face of the earth without robots and without risking American soldiers. And what do you imagine this would accomplish?
Thing is, “robot soldiers” won’t be anthropomorphic battle-droids clutching rifles. What’s the point of that? Automated bombers, fighters, anti-aircraft batteries, tanks, artillery, reconaissance, transport, and so on make sense, building an infantryman that costs a couple of million dollars doesn’t. We already have infantrymen that cost next to nothing.
Except what does this matter? What exactly is changed if the pilot of a bomber is sitting in a command bunker or sitting in the cockpit? Sure, it makes it less risk that the pilot gets killed, but the reality of modern combat is that our fighter pilots are not facing much risk. There is nothing gained here. Our troops aren’t at risk from enemy tanks and fighters, they’re at risk from suicide bombers, convoy ambushes, kidnappings, roadside bombs, and suchlike. If all we wanted to do in Iraq was blow up the army and take their oil we wouldn’t face any risk. We’d just set up 10 mile perimeters around the oil fields and shoot anyone that entered that perimeter. Why patrol Baghdad?
And if we’ve got robot factories pumping out robot soldiers that cost next to nothing, what exactly do we gain from sending those robots to other countries to blow stuff up and shoot people that we can’t gain today from dropping bombs on them? If we’re going to invade other countries just for the fun of it, we can do that with essentially zero military risk today. So your conclusion is fatutous.
Besides, if we’ve got robot factories pumping out robot soldiers that cost next to nothing, what possible economic incentive could still exist to invade other countries to steal their stuff, or enslave them? Once you’ve got robot factories that can build robot factories that build robot factories that build robots that can do whatever you like, then our economic and social and political structure will be changed beyond recognition. Not that I expect an abolition of violence or anything, but economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. A Midas World of robotic factories upends our current notions of scarcity. Today’s first world countries don’t go around stealing the food of subsistence farmers like the ancient aristocrats used to do. Not because we’re better people (although we are), but simply because subsistence farmers have so little food it’s not worth our time stealing from them.
And we don’t have fully robotic industries, mining, and transport either. All of which are easier than building a robot army that can function while enemies try to take it apart, so we’ll have them before we have the army.
And defense contracters in America will stop gouging the way they do, because otherwise we’ll do nothing but lose, as soon as some high tech country decides to field their robot army against us. Or we’ll just pull back to our borders and the nature of our army won’t matter because we won’t dare use it. We wouldn’t want, say, South Korea to conquer us. or some other random country, which is what having such a crippled military would make possible.
And that handful means more to us than every Iraqi life lost.
A human shaped robot is better made for going into homes and most other buildings, and otherwise interacting with a world that is designed for creatures of a human shape and size, with human hands and so on. So you’d want at least some built on a humanoid body plan. Although I’d expect weapons to be built in, and only a generally human shape, not C3PO.
Every tried to raise one from birth ? Or pay the political cost of losing one ? And training them hardly costs “nothing”.
And the reality is we aren’t talking about modern anything, but the future. Robot fighters, even those otherwise inferior to ours would annihilate our fighters, since they would be smaller, more agile by far, expendable, and more numerous. And if the robot’s makers can make robot planes, one can expect their missles to be far more accurate and smarter in general than anything now.
And robot soldiers wouldn’t; rather, they’d be expendable so no one would care.
First, because that would be admitting what we are to ourselves. And it would make it impossible for us to remake Iraq accoridng to neocon political and economic fantasies.
Not much, except for the occasional rare mineral. But we’ve never needed economics as a reason to invade someone, or drop missles on them.
Works great until the enemy puts a handful of Jedi knights in the field.
I see a dichotomy between the first paragraph I quoted and the second one. In the first one you are saying “the thing you are suggesting that we do with robot armies could easily be done without robot armies.” In the second paragraph you say “robot armies would mean a change in tactics - don’t fight the army, attack the civilian centres.” Your second idea is also something that can be done right now. For example in the current “war” against Iraq the USA could have just launched missiles at civilian centres from outside the country without ever attacking the Iraqi army directly.
I guess someone would be about to welcome our new robot overlords…