Isn't that what is kinda happening with nuclear weapons though? I would argue we have less armed conflict nowadays exactly for the reasoning in that quote. Dynamite did not really allow for two army corps to mutually annihilate each other in a second, nuclear weapons actually do.

Nuclear weapons didn't stop wars, and they didn't stop major powers from fighting each other. It just moved to proxy wars. Proxy wars have been common for a long time. Maybe they've stopped world wars, but maybe the two World Wars were exceptions and not a guaranteed feature. I don't know how to quantify whether there are greater or fewer armed conflicts between states since the invention of nuclear weapons.

It appears this is repeating trope- these inventors of highly effective killing machines did not consider that the increased rate of killing would be matched by an increase in mobilizing cannon-fodder.

Some genius in the near-future will probably make the same inaccurate prediction about autonomous killerbots, or more likely realistically, cyber-warfare (I hate that term): "Shutting down hospitals, power plants and other critical infrastructure will make wars shorter"

This is essentially the argument for targetting the Iranian nuclear program with stuxnet.