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Comment by fwipsy | Hacker News Reader

> internal competition and in-fighting of the natives.

What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.

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The initial Spanish conquest of the Inca empire by 168! Spaniards was not a question of disease as much a war of succession the Incas fought amongst themselves that Pizarro knew to exploit. Throw in horses, steel, and gunpowder and you have a one-sided affair.

Actually this is another good counterexample! As I recall, Incas lost battles against the Spaniards where they had something like 100x the numbers. It's true that they were initially divided, but they quickly united against the Spanish--and it didn't really help. The technological advantage was insurmountable.

How could it have been? It wasn’t like they had machine guns. In best case I believe it takes something like a full minute to reload a musket. Zerg rush would be sufficient tactics. 100 yard dash means your hoard of unarmed natives is through the musket range in maybe 10-15 seconds and pulling limbs off the spaniards already.

Why this wasn’t done is I think the big mystery and lends credence to the idea of spaniards having significant force numbers through allies.

Don't forget horses, armor, and steel weapons. It seems like Incan weapons had a lot of trouble penetrating Spanish armor, while the reverse was not true. Also, the Incas didn't just lack cavalry; they lacked the weapons and tactics to counter cavalry (such as pike formations.)

That said, I was thinking of the Battle of Cajamarca, which was actually a Spanish ambush. 100x was probably overstating it; under other circumstances (e.g. rough terrain) Spanish technology had less of an edge.

You don’t have to penetrate the armor with such a manpower advantage. Just throw four or ten people on each spaniard and rip them limb for limb. Don’t need to penetrate any armor. Can just take it off or stab sticks in between the plates. Conquistadors were not fully armored either.

Turns out I misremembered. Incas never fully united, and even though Spaniards had a huge technological advantage in some battles, the war as a whole was more evenly matched. Technology, disease, and infighting ALL played a part in their victory.

> The technological advantage was insurmountable

How's that playing out in the Middle East in 2026?

Pizarro might have been illiterate but I did not get the impression that he was a moron. That last bit is a crucial ingredient.

This is not true of everywhere that was colonized. See Africa, or India. It would not be possible, even with very great tech advantage, to sustain millitary campaigns so far from europe without a safe port to base supplies etc, not to mention the manpower etc. These were very much made possible by what was essentially a standard playbook of allying with some natives against others, and using trade imbalance, violence, strongarming and other things to turn those "allies" into protectorates, and eventually colonies

Right. I am not saying diseases were a factor in every conquest. Just refuting parent saying that conquest is "only possible" through infighting. It's not - overwhelming technological advantage or disease are also sufficient even against a united culture.

Yeah. Basically conquest is possible when the victim is weakened. There are many ways to become weakened. Infighting and disease are common causes of weakening.

Wait, you think AI won’t eventually have full control over a bio lab, where it can manipulate an unsuspecting tech to produce and release a bioweapon to accomplish that explicit goal?

Because I think that seems virtually inevitable at this point.

Humans will give a slop machine control of a lab full of CRISPR machines because they think it might make them a dollar? It wouldn’t take Supreme Super Intelligence for that to go badly.

They don’t have to hand over control to lose control to AI. People are easily manipulated, and AI has proven itself able to manipulate people. How long until a tech is tricked or coerced into doing something dumb on a planet scale, based on intentional misinformation given by its apparently benevolent AI assistant?

> benevolent AI assistant?

“Volent” is the problem there. Whose fault is it that someone was tricked by a boy?

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