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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

A consequence of roboticisation is the decreasing military value of large populations. If robots can build tanks and fly planes and shoot soldiers, having more people isn't an advantage. Having more robots is.

Given how our civilisations ultimately compete through force, this raises interesting questions around optimal design. Namely, every civilisation will have to choose between subsidising their poor or quarantining them. (If we are honest, we already do this to some extent with borders and welfare and immigration controls.)

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Modern wars in the first world are fought more over economic reasons to maintain a population's standard of living rather than for physical defense of the populace. We could have a country with just Congress as the population and we'd declare war against everyone else if 2 billion robots could do the fighting if it ever endangered our American exceptionalism. Similar goes for Russia as well. It is almost more like an exercise of military might is an expression of economic superiority.

Nuclear weapons changed the formula on competing by force already. After a certain amount of nukes the number of people involved didn't really matter. Now all shows of force have to be done through proxy wars in nations that don't have nukes. Sucks for Iran that they never made it to nukes.

There's a range of tactical and strategic options between nukes and, say, deploying a covert team of special ops.

It also raises troubling implications for how much individual power a dictator or rogue actor could hold. In order to have military power, you currently need to be able to persuade large numbers of soldiers to follow you, and if this claim to legitimacy is violated, you'll have disobedience, or even a coup. If your soldiers are automated, all you need is a password, and they'll follow you blindly. Tech billionaires can't drift out in floating independent paradises yet, because they need military protection; if some billionaire builds a drone army, who could stop them?

But someone will have to fund those robot armies, right? Could be a bunch of billionaires living in a libertarian floating city, or another bunch of bilionaires living in the most religious corners of the desert.

An outcome will probably emerge not with the existing nations warring, but new ones with advantages at birth getting more influential, namely (for profit) city-States.

We've already gotten pretty far along that path with nuclear weapons at the extreme, with ICBMs and air dominance not far behind. Israel is likely to show up relatively quickly on a ranking of most powerful militaries for all of those reasons.

There's already 10x drones than soldiers. 'Unmanned: illusion of perfect war' is a great read at how autonomous and Video game like the current US military is.

That's an interesting angle. The same is true of general workers. Before the establishment too a slice of labour but in a fully automated world this is not required.

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