Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
No_one 3mo ago
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway.
Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
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Notes -
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
this is a quite significant thing to assume to exist soon
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
Artillery shells don't have thermals and can't report what's going on under them.
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
They're already in use.
The recon drone has good thermals, costs less than smart artillery shells, the fpvs have shitty. (looks like 320x240) or less.
Lancet UAV has a thermals variant.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway. Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
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