War sucks, and I do wish that we could have world peace. But if war is going to happen, I'd rather it be robots that are the ones in harm's way.

This is already happening.

Seriously. Incremental improvements are worthwhile.

In general, militaries never want to comprise their effectiveness. So if given the chance to implement a life-saving intervention that harms their effectiveness, they will be reluctant at best to implement it. But this is a life-saving intervention that possibly even increases their effectiveness!

That's what truly makes it awesome. A way to save lives that militaries are not only willing to implement, but rather are actually enthusiastic about implementing.

For example two men break through a security fence. A robotic patrol would seem to be much less likely to respond with deadly force than a human patrol would in that situation.

If the men were refugees or wounded soilders looking for medical care the more measured response of the robotic patrol may prevent a death and actually de-escalate conflict.

Also assume that the two men were hostile and fired on the patrol. The destruction of the mech is much less likely to provoke a political and civilian response than the death of a human and may lead to a more measured response.

My bigger concern is that a fully mechanized force may decrease the apparent cost of oppressing a civilian population.

Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s...

We always assume, that the technology always stays with the good guys.

This stuff is literally a dictators wet dream.

With robots involved it would most definitely be a one-sided reduction in casualties, but it already is so one-sided I'm not sure that it would meaningfully alter the numbers in that conflict. Take the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, for instance (numbers from Wikipedia):

Israel: 70 casualties, 90% military.

Gaza: around 2 500 casualties, 30-40% military (depending on source, but even Israel estimates <50%).

There is little doubt that if stabbings, rocket attacks etc stopped Israel would stop as well.

... and, there is also little reason for doubt that if Israel stopped first it wouldn't stop attacks against them, quite on the contrary there is reason to believe they would escalate if left alone.

PS: while I feel this was worth mentioning I was not the one to downvote you, I think you argued reasonably.

Every violent action by both sides is framed as a retaliation for previous wrongs.

It's almost impossible to prove conclusively who started the tit for tat in almost all cases. However, if you do an analysis of most media stories or news reports in the US, there's a curious degree of unanimity about it.

Dismissing the proportionality of the responses (which you can measure) in favor of focusing of "who started it?" (which you can't), is effectively prioritizing propaganda over facts.

Now if there were a treaty stating that all wars are to be fought in a robot battle arena, and the event was available to stream on Netflix, count me in.

These robots will make it easier to kill people by reducing your own risk. I doubt they will reduce the amount of lives lost. At the very least the calculus is quite a bit more complicated. I doubt we will see robots fighting each other …

If the robot shot autonomously, you'd have a point about mercy. But the way it is described here, it's exactly the same mercy-wise as if the soldier manning the weapons was riding along in the vehicle.

Where do we draw the dividing line?

There was still a human that chose the target, and a human that chose to fire on the target.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_(missile)

This kind of ability to pick specific targets has been around for a while - e.g. SADARM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Destroy_ARMor

Edit: Of course someone decides to fire these things, but isn't that similar to someone deciding to unleash an autonomous fighting system?

Edit2: And what about mines?

But I would say that deciding to fire an autonomous missile in a hostile environment is not the same as deciding to unleash an autonomous fighting system.

In the first case, a human decides to unleash the autonomous missile once during a single event. Whereas in the second case, you are unleashing a system that decides for itself when to fire for every situation it is placed in. The second system is placed in many kill/no-kill situations and might not have enough discernment to realize that in this one special case the person in front of it is not hostile even though it is in a conflict zone.

When you have manned patrols they engage the enemy because otherwise they would be killed or hurt, they have more incentive to prosecute any enemy combatants because they are a direct threat.

Autonomous systems do not have that, they can can engage with both lethal and less than lethal options but they do not have the same sense of urgency to prosecute the targets.

Additionally in this conflict specifically you have one side which wants to inflict casualties at all costs including it's own men and if possible take hostages even if it's just bodies because Israel has released 1000's of prisoners before just to get bodies.

If there are no manned patrols organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah would be less inclined to execute attacks on the border their attacks have no strategic or tactical value other than to inflict as many casualties on both sides as they can.

Any Israeli they capture or kill is a political win for Hamas internally, any Palestinian Israel kills is a political win for Hamas internationally.

Israel has been operating UGV's for 5-6 years now the Gaurdium went in service a few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardium the program has been "terminated" but it looks like what they've done is simply taken the drive kit from the Guardium and put it on the Ford 150/250/350 trucks they use because it's cheaper than making UGV's from the ground up.

If the patrol that Hezbollah attacked in 2006 was a "robotic" one, Israel might have retaliated against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon but it would not have invaded, the only reason it did was because Hezbollah captured the bodies of Israeli soldiers. Captives whether they are dead or alive is simply unacceptable to the Israeli military and public at levels people in the west simply cannot grasp.

Every body and every body part must be retrieved this is prosecuted with almost fanatic level of commitment (case and point the philadelphi corridor incident where Israeli soldiers spent 2 days under fire sifting through sand to retrieve body parts after an APC carrying munitions exploded), the IDF through its all of is operational history and all of its wars only has had 5 soldiers that were classified as MIA and their bodies were never retrieved.

This includes 3 tank crew members which were captured during the battle of Sultan Yacoub (Israel finally managed to get the tank back from Russia this year), a navigator that was captured by AMAL (a Lebanese paramilitary organization) and one soldier that went MIA during his conscripted service, this isn't combat related (suspected suicide/criminal activity).

That's it, every other casualties and captive since the war of 1948 has been retrieved, when you take that into account replacing patrols with Ford pickup's that Israel will not start a war over makes a lot of sense.