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.
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.