From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Sat Feb 24 2001 - 17:25:38 MST
> > soon every nation has a collection of stunningly expensive hardware,
> > and war becomes economically disasterous for both sides, and eventually
> > no more bodily fluids are shed on the field of battle, neither blood nor
> > motor oil. spike
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> I wonder what happens when the current generation of droids becomes
> obsolete?
We sell them the upgraded droid. We are even so kind as to offer
10 cents on the dollar for their outdated hardware which we graciously
resell at half the original price to a still less developed country, and
pocket the change once again.
> It'll be awfully embarassing for an alpha to just write
> off the investment...
Exactly!
> especially if there's some littler nation around that,
> gosh-darn it, hasn't been able to afford *any* P4 droids yet...
Right you are again! In any case, the first fighter droids are far
more effective as warriors than the old meat droids, the
18 yr old privates, who have those troublesome old fashion
emotions, that cut and run whenever they see a mechanized
adversary on the horizon. Another annoying characteristic
of the meat droids is their all too human habit of surrendering
when a third of their company has been injured or killed,
unlike the battlebots who fight remorselessly until the last
machine falls. They have no surrender software.
My notion is that this development will fulfill Alfred Nobel's
vision of ending warfare forever. Nobel thought that TNT
would make war so dangerous as to end the horrifying
practice, but in fact TNT did not end war, nor did
mechanized armor, nor did nuclear weapons.
For war to end forever, its cost must not be counted in loss
of life but rather in loss of actual money, their precious gold,
something which the warrior chiefs will be much less willing
to spend than mere teenage human lives.
If the techno-advanced part of the world offers ever more
expensive battlebots to the warrior chiefs, which are
more effective fighters than *all* of that nation's young men,
and then keep offering ever more expensive upgrades to
keep up with the neighboring warrior chiefs, we will keep
hammering and hammering the simple lesson that every
private in every foxhole already knows: that all war is madness,
that all war is a brutal crime against humanity.
We thus reinforce the lesson that the less-advanced nations are
in fact enslaved to the techno-haves, until they learn to put
aside meaningless tribal conflicts, to extend the olive branch
to their neighbors, to join together as entities which do not
wage war on each other, a bit like the 50 united states.
They join together, if for no other reason, to survive economically
and escape abject slavery to those nations that build droids.
And if that doesnt work, we simply raise the price until it does.
This is my techno-dove vision of the future. spike
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