Which is only a good explanation for why we don’t have a robot army right now.
20 years ago, what would a device with the capabilities of the iPod have cost? Millions? It probably wasn’t even technically feasible.
Hey, how many of us were thinking of that? 
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Second Variety by P.K. Dick.
And to me this has the Star Wars prequel trilogy written all over it. (As might have been able to be inferred already.)
After all, if the robots are as thinking and feeling as the average transformer was presented as being, I think we’d end up with a lot of the same ethical compuctions and PR reactions about sending them to die that we currently have with sending people.
You’re missing the point. One can make more humans with merely a couple of wine coolers and a Barry White album. Robots will always be more expensive.
Nonsense, and insulting to every halfway decent parent and teacher, as well. Human soldiers also require many years of being raised, educated, cared for, and then military training on top of that. You can’t just stick a disc with Soldier 2.0 in one ear and download all that. Nor are robots likely to take nearly 20 years to make physically, either. Humans are expensive.
The ACLU would sue in the Ninth District Court, claiming that the robots are being exploited and it is wrong to force them into combat. :smack:
A few thoughts:
Shock and awe tactics are now obsolete, we are unable to break the enemies will to fight, we have to actually break them, could be worse than what we have now.
We have to chose between a central control that’s vulnerable to Jeff Goldbloom* and a laptop, or independently programmed units that could be infinitley more dangerous than the landmine problem we have now.
ok, I exagerate
As stated, the political consequences of going to war would not be as severe. We would probably be more wlling to send troops to dangerous places like Sudan (a good thing), and we would probably be more willing to send troops to unneccessary conquests and occupations (quite bad).
Other than that, I think we’d wage war pretty much the same way we do now. We try to find and kill the ones that are shooting back, especially the ones in charge. How would that change just because we’re fielding robots instead of people?
I actually think that modern armies are taking baby steps toward a majority-robot combat force now, but I don’t think they’ll be Terminators. It’s more likely someone a few hundred (or thousand) miles away will control the robots remotely, because I don’t see programming being invented any time soon that’s capable of making on-the-ground tactical decisions quickly.
I don’t think that there will necessarily be more civilian casualties. If the badguys can kill civilians to further their goals, they do already. The robots won’t go after civilians, either, because no matter what the uberliberal goofballs say there is a definite political price to pay for indiscriminant civilian slaughter.
Behind every robot would be a real human at the controls, and however evil the human behind it is would determine how evil the robot behaved, no more and no less.
I’d like to meet these people who are offended by the fact that it is easy to make babies.
There is no additional cost to the government for raising a child who will grow up to be a soldier, just as there are no additional costs to raising kids to be bakers or lawyers. So yes, children are expensive to raise, but those costs have nothing to do with the expense of the military.
And, those costs are going to be paid in any case. I have a hard time seeing that people would have fewer children because of a robot military. Society is going to pay for children whether we have a huge military or none at all.
“The wars of the future will be fought by robots, probably in some jungle or on a mountaintop somewhere…and it will be your job to build and maintain those robots.”
I think it’s a little hard to define the implications since we don’t know what the wars of the future will be about or how they will be fought. It’s kind of like asking what are the implications of the airplane or gunpowder. Robotic armies will fundamentally change how wars are fought. I don’t envision armies of robotic tanks, planes and terminators battling it out like a game of Supreme Commander. War are ultimately fought by humans against each other.
One thing we already have is plenty of humans. And if you hand a bunch of pissed off humans some cheap AK-47s, they are now soldiers. They might not be particularly good ones, but 10,000 of them in a city can make a lot of trouble.
And if every time a few of those half-assed soldiers take a few pot shots at a military convoy, you spend a couple million dollars worth in hardware pursuing them, that sounds like a very expensive proposition.
I’m not sure which is more surprising, your lack of understanding of basic economics, or your steadfast assertion that robots will never be cheaper to produce than soldiers.
Of course there’s a cost to raising a soldier. It’s the opportunity cost of not having the child who becomes a soldier do something that’s more valuable to society (I’m not implying that soldiers are not valuable, just that if we can build robot soldiers cheaper than human ones, then humans are better off doing something that we can’t build robots to do). The fact that it’s easy to impregnate someone doesn’t make it cheap to produce useful working adults.
The idea that machines will forever be more expensive than humans is simply absurd. First, it ignores most historical progress since the industrial revolution. Machines that replace human work have always gotten cheaper over time, and people have stopped doing lots of work because it becomes cheaper to let a machine handle it. Second, your arugment can be easily shown to fail when applied to, oh, any other machine. Why bother to make cars if you can just hire porters to carry you around? Why bother to use computers when you can just hire scribes? Why bother to launch missiles when you can just send a bunch of guys with sharp sticks?
Again, it’s highly unlikely that they will be expensive at all. And against something smart enough to act as a soldier and with all the physical/sensory advantages of a machine, all of your “half-assed soldiers” are dead, unless they use remotely set off traps; forget AK-47s.
And against totally expendable machines, they can take all the potshots they like and it simply won’t matter, whether their attack succeeds or not. You might as well try to stop an army by flinging yourself in front of the bullets; all you’ll do is die and stop those bullets. As I said, besides being cheaper, they should be able to be made far faster than human soldiers.
Another point about robot soldiers, is that it would make internal use of the military by a tyranny much easier. If, say, some hypothetical cabal of the rich and priviliged wanted to kill off the economic bottom 99% and live in luxury off the automated factories, they could order the army to do so and it would do it. Or any other equally extreme power fantasy. Kill anyone with skin darker than a certain shade, kill anyone west of Idaho, whatever.
I’m specifically referring to cost as being the dollar figure taken from the treasury.
You make your point very well and you’re right that I overstated mine. In my original post I said that robots will certainly have niche capabilities that will compete with cheaper methods of warfare. And, for the foreseeable future, I stand by that. I think the crux of the issue is the replacement of infantry with robots – of course there can be robot tanks, robot planes, and so on.
The problem with robots meant for war is that they are not directly comparable to machines used to increase industrial production. Those intended for industry become obsolete due to better, more efficient products becoming available at good prices or the end of support for a particular model. I don’t think this comparable to other countries’ inevitably discovering new weapons or techniques to counter a robot army.
Due to the need to keep battle robots as combat effective as possible, the economies of building lots of robots is going to be offset by the need to increase the capabilities. There will never be a $500 war robot (except one with incredible limitations) because the capability and technology that can be incorporated into a device of that cost simply cannot be sufficiently advanced to succeed in battle. It’s like saying that the cost of war is going to keep going down, because efficiencies in producing longbows and muskets is going to continually increase, dropping the cost of those weapons to a few bucks a piece. Well, yeah, if we wanted to outfit our troops in century old technology, sure. But I saw a statistic the other day that the average infantryman now carries something like $30,000 worth of gear, compared to $250 in WWII. That trend is shown is the cost of waging war over our history – nice chart here.
So yes, I spoke too broadly when I said that robots would NEVER replace soldiers. What I should have said is that the complete replacement of humans in a military is so far off due to cost that it is simply a matter of science fiction at this point, and it will be a long, long, long time before the efficiency and utility of an armed footsoldier is surpassed by a robot.
But you can’t consider the total cost of an automated weapon vs the total cost of raising a human soldier from birth, because the government that hires the human soldiers never pays that cost. Those costs are paid by third parties–the human soldier’s family and the human soldier themselves.
And we’re veering waaaay off course here, because if you could build a cheap “robot soldier” that performed like a Star Wars battledroid, then our entire society will have already changed beyond recognition. If you have a cheap robot soldier that can walk like a human being, that can pick up and manipulate objects like a human being, with sensors that allow it to respond to the environment like a human being, with a brain that can react like a human being, the non-military implications of such a robot are so great that the military implications are reduced to near insignificance.
If you can pay $500 for a robot slave that can do anything a human being can do, how is that going to change human society? If the factories producing robot slaves are staffed entirely by robots, why would you even need to charge for them? If you can build a robot that has near-human intelligence, then surely you can build a robot that has superhuman intelligence. And what kind of intelligence can that superhumanly intelligent robot produce? How do you control such entities? How do you control robot-controlled production lines that produce robots? How do you control strong AI robot slave soldiers? With strong AI, is ANY sort of human work valuable anymore? Not just factory workers are replacable with strong AI, the entire workforce is replaceable…laywers, doctors, executives, accountants, teachers, poets, mothers, fathers, politicians, pets.
Sending a robot army over to a neighboring country to steal their TV sets seems pretty dumb when a robot factory can build you as many $1.50 TV sets as you want. Robot factories that spew manufactured goods like firehoses mean that humans fighting over a few drops of water is ludicrious. What does it mean to be a “rich country” when everything is produced by robot factories and robots do all meaningful work. If robots are dirt cheap, then even the poorest countries can buy a few used robots, put them to work building robots, put those robots to work building robots, and put those robots to work building robots. How many robot generations will it take before the idea of “rich countries” and “poor countries” becomes ludicrious? A decade? A few months? A week?
Which won’t stop wars that are due to ideology, religion or hatred. Just because capitalism is America’s One True God doesn’t mean everyone else in the world considers money the one and only reason for doing things.
Fair enough. I agree with you that there is unlikely to be a robot infantryman any time soon.
What I do think will happen is that increasing technology will obviate the need for infantry in a major way. I’m going to admit that I don’t know exactly all the different things that infantry are used for, but I know that it’s some reconaissance, some threat elimination, some policing, etc. If each of those tasks can be met by other specialized machines, you stop needing nearly as many troops on the ground. Just as the average troop carries much more equipment now, we also have many fewer of them. Increased technology capital replaces grunts on the ground.
There was a sentence at the beginning of a robotics/AI text I read in college that said that pointing out the complexity of human thought and reaction and saying that no AI/robot will duplicate that is missing the point. Paraphrased: “We didn’t learn to fly by building machines that so closely mimiced the way birds fly, nor will we achieve artificial intelligence by building a computer that works exactly like a human”
Robots won’t replace infantry by looking like sci-fi androids with M-16s. They’ll replace infantry by replacing, piece by piece, different uses of the infantry, until the vast majority of human military work is done by machine.
So what wars aren’t motivated by economics? Maybe you could list them. What wars were motivated by ideology? What wars were motivated by religion? You think the Thirty Years War, for one example, was primarily about religion?
You really think people in other countries don’t care about economic issues as deeply as Americans do? You don’t get out much, do you?
You’re seriously confused if you don’t think that because people in other countries have different ideas about economics and don’t believe in free market capitalism that they don’t care about economics? No, they care just as much if not more, they just have different ideas about how to acheive their economic goals. The communists of the Russian Revolution didn’t espouse communism because they didn’t care about economics, they espoused communism because they were convinced that the rich were cheating and exploiting them, and if they got rid of the capitalists there would be plenty of goods for everyone.
I think that you will always have the infantryman on the ground. Especially since the role of the infantryman has become more of a policeman. Where I see robots playing a roll is in reconaissance and survailance, automated sentries (like those guns in Aliens), and robotic supply and support vehicles. At least in the forseeable future, I don’t imagine we will have a squad of robotic infantrymen kicking down some warlords door Black Hawk Down style.
A war motivated by religion: The Swiss civil war of the Sonderbund in 1847 pitting Catholics against protestants