The Imperial War Room

[Nelowulf]

A tool, yes. But replacing the soldiers on the battlefield with robots doesn't prevent the devastation caused by war. It only means there are more civilians to be caught in the blast.

It is human nature to be in conflict. Currently, the only real means of ending a war is to spill enough blood it disgusts people into peace, nothing less. Even if we're talking about modern warfare, where politics play a far larger role than in total war. Originally, once you slew enough of a people they would give up. Now, once a certain quota of death has been reached, a populace decides to support peace. The same motivation has halted wars, however. Blood must be spilled, otherwise it is nothing more than a game.

And if soldiers don't willingly spill blood, the innocent civilians are the only ones left to take the burden.  

[Derpzilla88]

Nelowulf

A tool, yes. But replacing the soldiers on the battlefield with robots doesn't prevent the devastation caused by war. It only means there are more civilians to be caught in the blast.

It is human nature to be in conflict. Currently, the only real means of ending a war is to spill enough blood it disgusts people into peace, nothing less. Even if we're talking about modern warfare, where politics play a far larger role than in total war. Originally, once you slew enough of a people they would give up. Now, once a certain quota of death has been reached, a populace decides to support peace. The same motivation has halted wars, however. Blood must be spilled, otherwise it is nothing more than a game.

And if soldiers don't willingly spill blood, the innocent civilians are the only ones left to take the burden.

Civillians will always be caught in the war. War will not end no matter what we do or what we use. The only thing we can do is find more effective ways of fighting wars.  

[Kick-A Gallifrey]

Klord88

Nelowulf

A tool, yes. But replacing the soldiers on the battlefield with robots doesn't prevent the devastation caused by war. It only means there are more civilians to be caught in the blast.

It is human nature to be in conflict. Currently, the only real means of ending a war is to spill enough blood it disgusts people into peace, nothing less. Even if we're talking about modern warfare, where politics play a far larger role than in total war. Originally, once you slew enough of a people they would give up. Now, once a certain quota of death has been reached, a populace decides to support peace. The same motivation has halted wars, however. Blood must be spilled, otherwise it is nothing more than a game.

And if soldiers don't willingly spill blood, the innocent civilians are the only ones left to take the burden.

Civillians will always be caught in the war. War will not end no matter what we do or what we use. The only thing we can do is find more effective ways of fighting wars.

That is true...there will always be civillians swept up in the wake of war, because as long as a war will be waged, there will need to be a place to fight it, and that place is most of the time someone's home. As far as the men or droids. I would mach rather have a living breathing soldier out on the feild than a robot. No matter how fancy a droid my be, they still rely on basic functions. There is nothing like a the mind of a living being.  

[Sol Walker]

"The only thing we can do is find more effective ways of fighting wars."

That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
More effective means of war wont change anything but the size of the corpse piles. And they've only been getting bigger, faster.
You want an effective way of fighting wars? Try killing the politicians who start them. This can be done without droid armies, clones, or the high tech monstrosities of war. All you need is a knife.

The Effectiveness of Warfare has spawned nothing but greater horror. Where once men had to use torches to set fire to villages by hand we can firebomb them from the air as the Allies did with Dresden and Tokyo.
Where once cannons were impractical weapons made of brass we've developed guns capable of killing each other with cannons that can fire many rounds in a minute without having to reset their aim.

Grenades, guns, and rockets have replaced swords, axes, and bows. We can kill faster, kill more, in more horrific ways.
And that has done nothing but escalate the bloodshed as people strive to outdo each other in a never ending game of oneupmanship.
Then all nations will develop the ultimate weapon, use it on each other for the most childish of reasons in a great and final war.

Then, when the dust settles, when all civilization has been wipped out as we know it, the survivors will go back to killing each other with rocks and sticks until someone develops the pointed stick, then the handaxe, then the spear, then the bow, and so on and so on into infinity.  

[Kick-A Gallifrey]

If you assassinate a political leader, then you only make him a martyr for those who follow him. Then those once few people will use the event as a lighting-rod and have countless more join them. Then you have the very thing you wanted to prevent, only this time it's your fault.  

[Sol Walker]

Not in every event.
Without the leader's charisma and planning, the war effort has no one to see it through.  

[Derpzilla88]

Wether you kill a politician or an entire city, there is no possible way of stopping war. As long as there are beings who want something from somebody else, there will be a fight for it. Those fights can escalate into war. War is invetible. No matter who you are, what you are, or what you do.  

[Ral Roke]

Yeah but you're droids will have no motivation for your war to end. A human may fight till the battle's over but at the end they do want to go home. A droid only serves like it's programmed to do. War is, unfortunately, right now and endless cycle, but when you take all feeling out of it, all you do is slaughter more people regardless if they're a soldier or not.  

[Darkened Angel]

War will exist so long as people have differences of opinion. When you get down to it, that's what all wars start from.

Example:

One guy decides his country, being stronger than another, has the right to just take it. The guy running the other country decides that's BS, and won't let him just walk right in and take it, etc.

As for droids, yeah, people will still die. If anything, simply because someone'll decide, " Hey, if we kill the guys building the things, we'll cut off their own droid supplies and ours can go unopposed. "  

[Derpzilla88]

I know I started the droid soliders thing, but I think mabey I should try to stop it before I get really criticized on my thinking. Ignoring the war part of this topic and what causualties that would be caused, this is why I think using droids would be useful:
1. Droids have no fear. They won't retreat unless ordered to and won't abandon or stop what they're doing no matter how it would harm them.
2. They do the tasks of war we don't want to. They can be used to go into the most hostile areas and take out a large majority of enemy forces to begin with. Or they can do the most dangerous tasks (ex: disabiling bombs or going threw and disabiling a minefield.))
3. Can be improved. Droids can be given upgrades to make them better for use on the battlefield.
4. Droids do their jobs without question. No matter what it is.

These are just a couple of reasons that I think droids would make good soilders (trust me, I made a ten page paper on robots in the military today and what they're doing in Iraq). However, as much as it pains me to admit it, there are things that humans will always be superior to droids at. Thinking is one of them. Current robots are controlled by a human and it will probably remain that way for much of the future. Even the droids in Star Wars are told what to do by a living, thinking, being. But you guys are probably right about the civillian causualties and droids making war a game. Mabey the best army to fight a war is a mix of droids and living beings. But that's if we need to go to war. Hopefully it won't come to that ever. Sorry if i have been or am now angering people in some way.  

[Ral Roke]

The thing about fear is that it creates urgency and motivation. It can give someone that little lift or to come up with an improvisation that only desperation can provide. And Droids can be upgraded to be made stronger, but they still have a set limitation that humans don't have which leads back to the improvisation issue. A droid can never think outside the box nor do they have a concern with self preservation.

Those would be my arguments from the perspective that you brought up.  

[Sol Walker]

Droids know fear.
If they are programed for self preservation, they will naturally be less inclined to enter situaions that would bring harm unto them.  

[ElladanKenet]

It's posisble to upgrade droids to the point of sentiency. My prime example would be the Geth from mass Effect, but my research on them is limitied.

However, you can have a replica droid, designed in every way to appear as another being.

You can give it an identity unit, as seen with Jedi and Sith holocrons and impersonator droids. These can be used to give droids a knowledge of how a person thinks and what he will do. With a complete knowledge about said identity, you can teach a droid to behave exactly as a human would do, within a huge extent.

Second; contingency programming. You can proivde a second set of systems that bring up thousands of possible scenarios and far more solutions to them, and upload them into said droid, and won't be accesible until the droid faces danger.

Self preservation programming. Cale already talked about this. Pretty easy to do. Just give it a chip that tells the droid to put itself ultimately before anything else.

Emotion synthesizers. Ever heard of protocal droids? The top of the line models have these, which simulate real human emotions to a practically ideal level. Human replica droids (Guri-Shadows of the Empire) have these, along with other android features that make them all but human. They're practically sentient.

Which brings up another matter entirely. Program a droid enough and provide it enough of this upgrades, and there's the chance you come across the rare phenoma called "Sentient AI." It's basically what happens when droids start thinking for themselves. When you want a slave or willing workhorse, this is the last thing you want, as it'll eventually lead to an uprising.

Humans will only uprise when their conditions are unfavorable. However, humans can also be pleased. Give it a good moral boost, neglect to tell him he's likely to die, and assure he's got the best stuff in the universe, and he's every bit willing to go on a suicide mission, regardless of sentience.

Droids, on the other hand will do the job regardless, so long as they aren't sentient. If you upgrade them too much and they become sentient, you're essetially ******** other news, EK is surprised his thread is still alive.  

[Derpzilla88]

Hmmm... so I guess the only options for war droids is to either make them so dumb they would walk into a minefield without even caring or to make them smart enough that over time, they may uprise against us. I always thought that the droids from the Clone Wars armies were a pretty good mix. They were smart enough not to go marching into a minefield purposly and were dumb enough not to uprise against living beings. Perhaps we could try to make our own Earth robots like that. Mabey that's why I like the Confederacy more than Repbulic. That and the droids looked much cooler.  

[Ral Roke]

The thing is that droids work on pure logic, even if they think for themselves they have a hard time thinking outside the box. A droid won't do anything unless their programmed to, or ,in the self preservation case, the reward is of obvious benefit. Humans work on flawed logic which means they'll do something if they even if they don't agree with it.