[indigochill]

My take on the "robots mean more accurate/less risky warfare" is that that's precisely the problem, actually (at least if we start from the assumption that war is bad). By "industrializing" warfare and reducing the cost in lives, we make it more politically palatable.

Risk assessment is a massive part of waging war. If the risk to one side is reduced by using robots (or other weapons-of-cheap-destruction) instead of humans, then the likelihood that side will favor war as a conflict resolution mechanism is (all other things being equal) increased.

On the other hand, if the risk is too high, then alternative options are more likely to be favored. This seems to be the thinking around things like nuclear disarmament and why proliferation is generally seen as a bad thing despite nukes being hands-down the most cost-effective way to end a war (at least against an enemy not similarly equipped - see the Cold War). The reason given for the US bombing of Japan was to save lives by shortening the war - though I'm not about to get into whether that decision was justified.

And that's before we introduce AI, which has had notorious bugs like failing to identify dark-skinned faces relative to light-skinned faces (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/02/23/artificial-in...) or driverless car crashes. As uncomfortable as I am with proliferation of killer tech in general, introducing AI actually makes my skin crawl.

Even without the unpredictability of AI, "precision strikes" are not necessarily as precise as their name implies: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

[rademacher]

All good points. It would be nice to see some game theory type assessment of these imbalances.