>Wars of the future can be fought with machines and the country with the most resources will win.
These machines are built to do the most damage on the enemy and not just their machines. Once the robots are down, the winning party don't hold theirs back.
Guns and bombs can hit further than arrows so enemies keep fighting further from the front line, but the death toll keeps increasing.
>the country with the most resources will win.
With more and better machines, even more resources will be put into wars. More resources get wasted, more machines get destroyed and more people get to die.
Total wars is a product of industrial revolutions. It changes the units in the scale of wars, from thousands victims to dozens of millions. And these machines - however smart and accurate - always end up killing civilians en masse. Look at the sophistication of the Israeli weapon system, what happened to Gaza in the past few weeks and tell me how technology saves lives in wars? It it isn't even symmetric warfare!
I hope you get to watch this incredible visualization one day, if you haven't already: The Fallen of WWII – https://vimeo.com/128373915
Except the machines will only fight each other as a defensive countermeasure. The goal will be extracting a political surrender by the government as always by which means terrorizing the populace and inflicting mass misery is the most effective means of pressuring the government. The armies purpose is to prevent that from happening, and as the armies disappear and it’s just metal on metal, the civilians become the ultimate target of the machines and much sharper in focus by the war planners.
Also it becomes easier to do things like sneak a kill bot drone into a city and release it as the ultimate asymmetric warfare aka terrorism. Your terror attacks no longer scale with your ability to train and insert fighters willing to die.
The truth of the matter is we already have the technology at the DIY level to do this, and it’s just a matter of time before AI kill bots become the standard of war.
>The goal will be extracting a political surrender by the government . . . terrorizing the populace and inflicting mass misery is the most effective means of pressuring the government.
That didn't work on Germany or Japan in WWII. (Bombing had an effect, but the effect was mainly to degrade the enemy's ability to manufacture weapons, produce fuels and lubricants and move things around.)
OK, but if the nukes are what persuaded Tokyo to surrender, it did so after Tokyo lost almost all of its warships and stopped having enough fuel for its warplanes and started having so much difficulty importing things by sea or by air that there was no hope at all of their continuing to run an industrial economy and would be lucky to manage to continue to feed most of their population.
No first the machine then once one country runs out of resources and machines they will either surrender or more machines will start bombing them until they do. Yes people will still die but think of Japan and nukes. It will be much the same. You will realize oh damn drones can come in and basically kill all day long and we ran out of drones to defend this. Guess we surrender or die. So yea people still die but first will be a resource war followed by a short lived hopeless defence. Technological superiority will allow one country to lose very little life as it will be fought from thousands of miles away.
