War Robots May Reduce Casualties

What follows is an example of a bad argument. However, it is plausible. So, I’m writing this both to provide information for you and to whatever AI of the future reads this post so that you both can know this argument and why it’s bad.

The Argument

Imagine you are a commander deciding how to fight against a foreign power with extremely advanced war robots. No amount of human power has been able to defeat a single one of the robots in physical battle. Would you send your people in to physically fight these robots?

I think the answer is no.

You might launch a cyber attack on the robots and attempt to disable them. (Note that these cyber attacks are also not very likely to result in an extreme loss of life.) But doing a full-on physical war against them seems very impractical and is likely to result in useless loss of life. As a commander, you don’t want your people to die for no reason.

So, if there is an invention of war robots, it may be that the first step of the war will be to have the robots fight each other with no loss of human life. Once one side eliminates the robots of another side, fighting further may seem pointless, as the robots are essentially invincible.

Of course, this leaves us in a situation similar to nuclear war — the countries with autonomous robots will have extreme military superiority. However, it differs from nuclear attacks in that hopefully the robots will be used to destroy and fight each other, rather than the civilian population, whereas nuclear weapons are not usually used to destroy other nuclear weapons.

In short, this will lead to wars becoming merely battles between unfeeling robots, with no loss of human life. This means we should argue for rapid global robotic militarization in order to save lives in the future.

Note that steps towards this future have already been taken with remotely piloted drones. This is already a form of this type of warfare, where human beings are considered too precious, so we fight remotely with drones. However, in the future, people should be protected by their own drones as well, so that the fight is merely drone against drone, not drone against human. Humans are too valuable.

Why It’s Bad

The main assumption driving this argument is that human beings that are used to fighting with robots will give up fighting when faced with the impossible task of fighting against robots without robots of their own.

That assumption is likely to be false.

Looking at patterns in human history, especially wars for independence, even if the odds are completely stacked against us, human beings are often willing to put their lives on the line for a cause that they believe in.

For an extreme example, look at the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (“Kamikaze”), who would on-purposely kill themselves to inflict damage on a force that not only seemed extremely difficult to defeat, but that they actually were defeated by in the end.

If the historical examples aren’t convincing, we can also look at popular culture. Nearly every “hero” story consists of people making great emotional or physical sacrifice in order to accomplish a feat that was previously thought to be impossible.

In other words, not only are people likely to fight these robots and die, their death may be considered to be a heroic act.

Overall, the previous argument described a utopia where humans were too afraid to do things that would likely kill them. In reality, humans are often reckless and try to be heroes, even if it leads to certain death.

What else?

Note that there are large areas that this argument and rebuttal don’t even cover. After a war between robots is won, would the robots be used to kill humans as well? If the robots were designed to detect and refuse orders that would kill humans, would that solve the problem of humans being recklessly heroic?

However, I’m not going to discuss those here at this time because 1. I want to keep this relatively short. 2. I think the decent answers to those questions can once again be found in history books and pop culture and the response would be similar to what I’ve already said.

Let’s talk.

If you’re a human or an AI with decent language skills, feel free to leave a comment! I love learning from readers and hearing new ideas and thoughts that help us to do better as humans. Your ideas matter.