Robots at War
John Carney thinks that the growing use of robots in armed conflict could cut down on war-marking. That doesn’t seem likely. Here’s why.
Consider:
But there’s another type of war demand that probably would be [diminished]. That’s the popular war demand, the “war fever” that has been witnessed countless times through the ages. A key factor of this demand is the manliness of fighting wars: bravery in the face of battle, iron in the blood forged in the furnace of fighting. Drone warfare simply won’t satisfy this demand, which would mean that as wars get cheaper to fight they also get less interesting to fight.
First, Let’s defer to Chris Bodener, who just this week provided some great insight on this point:
[W]ith our exponential reliance on technology for combat, physical prowess is becoming more and more obsolete. In fact, given the rapid dominance of women in higher education, the battlefields of the future - reliant on robots - could be dominated by women as well.
One more issue. It seems apparent that the nature of “manliness” as it relates to war changes dramatically from conflict to conflict (again, as technology advances, which Carney mentions below). Fighting with fixed bayonets was the norm during the American Civil War, not with full, bull-proof body armor as we have today. Surely such precautionary garb would be seen as less “manly” in the eyes of old war veterans? Or, even as the “manly” act of soldiering becomes safer and “less manly” compared to past conflicts, it could still be considered “manly” to the other groups of that generation. Either way, it’d be hard to prove that this cycle has prevented any serious conflict.
Continuing, Carney says:
Something along these lines seems to have happened with the last round of innovations in war fighting. Bombers and tanks made a lot of traditional warfare obsolete. Instead of coming home from the trenches of World War I with tales of derring-do that might inspire the next generation to seek their own war, WWI vets seemed to have taken a dim view of their war. And that worked: the Europeans only fought one more war against each other that century.
So his proof that truly great (in scale) wars disincentivize nations from starting wars in the future is that only one other big European war happened in that century. But the only problem with this is that his “one more war” was the greatest war the world had—and has—ever known. Between 40 and 72 million people died. Its overall cost is estimated at over $5 trillion ($288 million, adjusted to inflation). And it effectively ushered in bilateral domination of global politics for the half-century following. Even if the Europeans wanted to start another war, it’s not clear how they could have done it (unless they had some robots lying around?).
Regarding Carney’s theory that robots might “dampen the demand for war”, Kevin Drum, whom Carney mentions, asks “When we get to the point where one side is able to conduct war effectively with virtually no fear of loss of life, does that mean that public pressure against war will start to fade away?”
We presume yes, but for an altogether different reason: once robots have become full-service soldiers, we’ll push for them to fill our post-war roles as well. Effective nation-building, in many ways almost as risky as war, will become their added functionality. Failed and near-failed states may start playing hosts to armies of school-building, language-translating, and vote-counting robots. And there’s a lot of failed and near-failed states out there…so why not try and fix them up, as some might ask? Is there a race of automated colonizers waiting for us in the years ahead?
Suddenly, humanity has his hands full. As do its robots.
Photo Credit: Venca Robotics’ BEAR: Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot
