thinking about soldiers

[lolotehe]

The best computer is a man, and it's the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
-- Wernher Von Braun

Just looking at these combat sequences and wondering why anyone would put actual human beings on the ground in harm's way.

It bothers me. There's so much that should be possible--hell, is possible--that I should never have soldiers walking around on the ground. It keeps coming back to me, over and over, that no human should ever be harmed.

And the only thing that keeps me going is knowing how cheap a human is in comparison. I have to make an economic choice that a human with a shield and a gun is actually cheaper than a robot. I need them there for plot's sake, but I need a decent reason to have them there.

Or a greedy, indecent reason. That works just as well. It's not like this is Moon.

Comments

[trickykitty.livejournal.com]

Unmanned stealth bomber

[prestidiginate.livejournal.com]

A soldier can open a door without blowing the building up.

[nimrod-funk.livejournal.com]

You'll always need a ground pounder till the point machines can think and act more intelligently than man. At that point machines will be equal and seperate and possibly self aware. Maybe at some point man and machine will breed a cyber-enhanced trans human race. The point though is there will always need to be ground pounders. Be they a synthetic personality derived from a human, holding a human consciousness, or something overtly alien to us. Infantry we need to be there. A human with a high explosive is just as deadly as a robot with a bomb. Maybe there won't be physically humans but there will be a need for humans in some sense or we become the slaves to the machines with the guns and ability to obtain free will.

[lolotehe]

Yeah. There's still a need.