Automation is the big deal. Drones have cameras so humans can make a (hopefully) informed disision to strike or not. When (read; now) the drone doesn’t need a camera because it can make the call without a human in the loop, we have removed a vital bottleneck.
The only thing that stopped WWI from being total war is that when we wipped out an entire generation, we needed time to grow more troops. If autonomous weapons being manufactured autonomously by autonomously constructed factories… whoever controled the drones could of conquered the world.
No, that assumes that resources and energy are unlimited. This is the main problem with any “grey goo” scenario.
And it wasn’t people being killed that stopped WW2. People are killed in every war. The defensive weaponry was more powerful than the offensive weaponry. Machine guns were only used on defense because they were heavy. Also, artillery was not mechanized so it was hard to move everything forward quickly.
