During development, and initial per-unit sales? Sure.
Once mass produced, not even close.
Think of:
- training costs (training grunts isn't 100% free)
- pay as soldiers wait to go on missions
- and here's the BIG one, medical care
- and lastly?
PR! PR, no more "soldiers coming home in body bags". Why, you can fight any war you want, and no one will get upset about your soldiers dying. Yet beyond that?
How do you negotiate with one of these things? How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up?
How does one of these things identify civilians or hold a place like Baghdad? Armies occupy. Those weapons destroy infrastructure and people and not much else.
Or do you use them like drones paying soldiers to run them from a container in Kansas. In which case you have the soldier still.
Just like drones used to bomb, as you suggest with Kansas.
As time passes though, especially on an actual open battlefield, raw 'kill everything that moves" becomes more of a potential too.
However?
My logic was predicated upon cost, and if implemented, cost reduction due to all those body bags. You think Nixon and Kennedy were purely motivated by the cost of US soldiers, when they wanted out of Vietnam?
They sent those troops there to begin with!
No. They cared about the PR issues, and re-election.
Sure, this would make it less likely to use suicide bombs against soldiers — perhaps even politicians will put skin suits on the robots and use them for public appearances a-la Westworld for similar reasons — but grenades and RPGs and anti-material rifles and IEDs would likely all still be used.
And £10k robots can also be used by terrorists, perhaps stolen from warehouses, perhaps hacked.
That said, what worries me about terrorism is not cargo-culting shapes that look dangerous (be that robots which look like the Terminator or 3D printed guns), it’s people with imagination who know there are at least two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only the stuff in a normal domestic kitchen and methods taught in GCSE chemistry.
Gun control is a uniquely US problem, at least in its current form. Yet this isn't going to have the same problem as gun control, for example, how easily can people obtain nuclear material?
And terrorists? Sure, but an explosive truck is probably easier than one of these. And if sales are controlled, then they won't have a domestic army of them.
In terms of hacking? 100% agree. It's why I find Tesla's OTA updates to be, frankly, insane. Full control of things like brake firmware has been demonstrated, with an OTA fix to brakes in the past.
This means that, along with autonomous modes, you could perhaps manage to (especially with an inside man), force-push updates, regardless of driver permissions, to all Teslas out there. And set them to run into everyone they find, just run over as many people as possible.
So there is tonnes of risk, and anyone thinking "Oh, they'll secure thing $x" is, IMO, a damned fool. Hack, after hack, after hack, after hack, proves this to be absurd.
We literally cannot lock down anything. Anything. Not CIA infrastructure, not any corporate infrastructure, not government infrastructure, not health care, nothing.
So I agree, 100%, robots with guns = horrid, just from that one angle. But I contend that they are cheap, and effective, so you can bet governments will use them.
The link?
Your reference to chemical weapons. I see the concern, yet I'm more concerned about genetically engineered death. And training people from (for example) China on how to do this, seems beyond absurd.
The future is biotech created death I think.
Another example, genetically engineered animals, designed to kill as well. How about mosquitoes, pre-loaded with viral payloads? What about bacteria which infects well water, and is literally impossible to ever get rid of, once in the wild? How about a fungus, which destroys wheat, which primarily the west eats, yet the east doesn't (rice)?
How about gut flora/fauna, which when fed (eg, when you eat), releases a mind altering substance? A poor fellow was infected with yeast, which made him drunk every time he ate, so imagine a genetically engineered set of bacteria which releases a mild hallucinogenic? One that makes it impossible to concentrate?
How will you cure this, if your scientists can't think straight? Or worse, what if it's an aphrodisiac? Let's try to solve a problem, when you can't keep your hands off of yourself.
I can think of so many endless horrors, and most of them biotech related.
Once mass produced, not even close.
Think of:
- training costs (training grunts isn't 100% free) - pay as soldiers wait to go on missions - and here's the BIG one, medical care - and lastly?
PR! PR, no more "soldiers coming home in body bags". Why, you can fight any war you want, and no one will get upset about your soldiers dying. Yet beyond that?
How do you negotiate with one of these things? How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up?