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Could be a blessing. If you think about it, the superiority of drones means every human becomes a non-combatant. You send your drone army against their drone army and the loser just surrenders: there’s no strategic point to slaughtering useless biomass. These near-instantaneous drone battles, foreshadowed by israel’s swift degrading of iranian capabilities, will relegate to the dark ages that terrible word: Attrition. War is going to be as quick and painless as running an algorithm.
The dream of Richard Gatling, realized at last? Maybe to some extent.
Autonomous drones will still be tasked with killing people, will have false positives in identifying targets, will sometimes attack large areas with a high probability of collateral damage. And as @BreakerofHorsesandMen said, they may be used just as well to effectively carry out variably-discriminate mass killings.
OTOH, like precision-guided munitions reduced the usage of carpet bombing campaigns, the ability to use drone strikes precisely tailored to a given target may also work to reduce collateral damage like you say.
We'll see.
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No strategic point in keeping it around, either.
A drone will never say “No,” or get PTSD from its memories of mass graves and executing mothers and children.
Might as well just slaughter everybody and let your people move into the freshly empty land. No risk of terrorism, no sullen populace yearning to break free of their chains.
Rather, I think, we will relegate to the dark ages that most foolish of words: Genocide.
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There's a Star Trek episode about that ("A Taste of Armageddon"). It didn't turn out well.
That's not the same thing. In Star Trek, they were simulating battles without actually destroying their opponent's means of fighting. If you have two drone armies fight each other, the loser still gets destroyed. In Star Trek, if one side defected, the other side would have to send their ships in, and possibly sustain the losses they avoided by only stimulating the flight. In drone warfare, you've already sent your drones in and fought their drone army, so if they defect you can slaughter them. If drones are that much better than humans at fighting, they won't be able to defend themselves, because you didn't just simulate it, you actually destroyed their drones.
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