Hacker News Reader

Wars happen due to material and ideological differences. If country A engages country B in a robot war and all the robots die, the humans and the differences will remain.

View on HN

A big part of war is morale. People have to want to send their 20 year old children to die in a foreign country. No war happens without support from the people fighting it. But what happens to war when that's not a thing anymore? What will happen when we just have a bunch of robots killing each other? Nobody will have any personal reason to protest or speak out against a war. It's the ultimate abstraction.

You could call this a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm not smart enough to figure out which side is more likely to be true.

If all belligerents had access to robots for fighting each other; if only robots could be used in warfare; and if the outcome were to have no effect on the welfare of the people, then the people would be impartial as to the outcome. If the outcome didn’t matter, there would be no reason to even manufacture the robots, let alone send them to fight each other. Because only robots could fight, war would be moot.

My point was that unless people change, the causes of war will remain.

“No fate but what we make.” -Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Reply on news.ycombinator.com