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

dlt713705 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	adrianN 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It turned out to be pretty hard to take out Germany’s factories in ww2.
	▲	dlt713705 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What 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.

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XorNot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Barrin92 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

>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

	▲	SapporoChris 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"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.
	▲	XorNot 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And this is a bait and switch: you were talking about the propensity of countries or people to go to war, now you are talking about the scale of destruction. Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied. How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.

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esafak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

None on the offensive side, perhaps.