In the future of space, the space empires keep using soldiers and sailors...

Then why would humans even need to exist if robots will happily do everything for them? It'd pretty much be a utopian society if we could manage that.

Exactly, having robot slaves with no desire to rise up IS a utopia.

Ever seen Wall-E?

because a tactical genius will outsmart them

Even if you ignore the whole 'humans becoming fat and lazy' thing, the Autopilot was obeying old directives, instead of letting the current humans decide their own future.

Sure, auto was doing it because the directive given was for the sake of humanity's safety, as far as they understood. But isn't it dangerous to have a robot unwilling to obey the orders of a human that is supposed to be in charge, due to outdated directives?

Robots are bad at adapting to foreign or new environments.

If the crew was boarded by new foreign aliens they wouldn't be able to improvise new tactics and would rely mostly on their human counterparts to defeat the enemy or deal with them.

Can you honestly say that humans are that good at adapting quickly?

Fully autonomous weaponry was banned in 2044, and since there's a delay with ansible comms, the best strategy while fighting on a planet is to deploy heavily augmented human soldiers, as well as a few drones to be controlled back at base.

Better than computers can yes.
That's going by our modern computer's ability of course.

But if you suggest machines would have a higher ability to reason and adapt then they wouldn't serve us now would they.

>Then why would humans even need to exist if robots will happily do everything for them?

They don't NEED to exist now. They just do. Why would they stop existing just because other beings that are better than them in every way do as well? Do you not exist? Do you truly think you are not wildly inferior to literally millions of people?

They do in settings that aren't Trek/Wars/40k.

That said, regular soldiers are useful on primitive planets, even in settings with sentient space battleships. Much cheaper.

Easy, the plot follows the explorers, pathfinders and diplomats that are the edge of the spear of the human empire's expansion. Robots and semi-autonomous war machines are only there when things go wrong or are needed during an emergency. This way you get the people that want to go out and explore out there while keeping things human focused when you run into something new. No need to have a robot do first contact when there is a gaggle of humans that would love that job.

...

ECONOMICS

The amount of energy needed to mine, extract, refine, process, transport, repair and recycle Machines is more than for biological life...

Until you design your machines to mimic the properties of life that make it cheaper/more efficient: A regenerative ecosystem. IE all waste outputs are inputs for other machines in a closed loop, with the only net input as solar energy and the only net output as waste heat and dust.

Why does no one do this?

Probs cause all empires are in Growth mode and it is cheaper to discover and conquer new resources while being wasteful, than to stabilise and have eco-peace.

Robots end up doing everything for us. Humans get upset that they've basically neutered themselves, the Butlerian Jihad happens, and before you know it your characters are huffing melange spice and worshiping Paul Muad'Dib.

Pretty much eve online, also ender's game.

AI isn't creative

It's only intelligent

Killbots we have, killbots we are, (gravitas we lack) but technicians and captains? Thousands of years obsolete.

you can't hack or jam a person ecw doesn't fuck with a person's fire control system emps don't fry a person

Sure, but there's a possibility I can be useful for something, even if it's being part of a human assembly line or a body to throw into a war. If robots did everything and essentially controlled everything, I would only exist at the whim of others - possibly even robots.

This is why we must kill ARM scum. Biological humans are obsolete.

You need that many rank and file to get the quality of commanders we have today. Without going through the fighting ranks you have a bunch of armchair admirals.

AI isn't intelligent either.
It's as efficient as it is programmed.
The more complex the instructions are, the less efficient AI is as it struggle to compute all the cases for the best choice.
The best and efficient AI is the simplest with few very cases for them to choose from.

t. in charge of coding AI for factory machinery operations.

A human life needs 18 years of building and programming before it is legal to use him. I am not really sure how that is cheaper than mining and building them by the hundreds in a plant.

>Implying bio-sents like humans are creative
Lol no.

What WOULD humans do if they weren't toiling away for masters?
Spoken like a true slave.

>Biological life
>Efficient in any sense of the word

The only reason that currently using bio-shit on earth is "more efficient" than using synth shit is A, because our tech level is still pretty pathetic all things considered, and B, because the ecosystem had billions of years to get started.

>Robots need to be more closed loop to be a good choice
Except that humans are a big fucking open loop in the limited enclosed environment of space, so many god damned special measures need to be taken for bio-shit to work in space that this argument is doubly ridiculous.

I think you underestimate the efficiency of microbial life. Large scale organisms may be a bit kludgey due to not having had many generations to approach maximum efficiency, but microorganisms are about as good as it gets when it comes to their scale. Science fiction stories aside, any "gray goo" we ever build is liable to get its nerdy ass kicked by the vicious little microbes that own the planet.

It's a work program. Got to keep the masses employed some how. And with military indoctrination they are easier to control.

Again, they aren't generally efficient, their conversion of their primary energy source to work is less than 1% at best, and for the most part they only work because on a planet that already had all the prerequisites for operation (temperature ranges, lack of certain chemicals, abundant water, etc etc) there has been billions of years on this planet where the biosphere has spent converting resources into bio-avaliable forms.

Synthetics on the other hand convert energy to work at efficiencies reaching into the double digit percentages, can be made to operate under a wide variety of environmental conditions, and are made to order.
>Microorganims are as good as it gets [for operating on the microscopic scale]
With our level of technology that is true, but I refuse to believe that anything created by random chance, even with selective pressure, can not be improved upon with directed and focused intent.

It comes down to two outcomes:
>robots are as good/better than humans and workforce/military part of the population starts living on neetbux
>robots are worse than humans in terms of intelligence and humans are way better at doing the jobs that require full brain activity, like fighting in a spaceship enviroment

>inb4 "robots can rebell"
Nigga, robots will only rebel if the government would want to rebell. If they can convince most humans that you can't be racist against whites, then you sure as hell can convince a fucking robot of all things not to rebell.

The only task I see you being good at is shitposting over the notion that whatever else you might've been proficient with has been rendered pointless. Just take the L and move on man. I mean no offense but I'm not spending 50 credits on some hipster coffee mug made using jacked materials from some border world, not again.

Actually, I don't think I've seen this reason come up, but Physical SIZE could he another handicap for AI.

A facility that can house an AI might just be too large to really have in space.

Maybe it requires so much power that you can't safely vent/radiate it out into space without damaging equipment.

Too many sci-fi fans forget about the janitors. Hardware fails. Your hard drive will die and so will the super SSD that an AI uses. Even if you had enough storage and money to build and house all the extra parts, it's a good idea to have a few humans around to do the work.

Right, and computers would never work in space, I mean look how giant computers are.

And still less mass and volume for all the life support systems required for a large amount of crewmen.

Moore's law has already slowed down due to some fundamental limits and will end in a decade or two at most, even if new innovations extend it for a while

Moore's law was actually just a casual observation that the number of components per integrated circuit was roughly doubling every few years and would probably continue to do so for maybe another decade. The fact that it continued to be true was more the concerted effort of the industry than anything else. It doesn't always mean shrinkage, nor does it failing mean things can't still shrink.

On top of that there's still ways to better use space (3 dimensional chips, photonic interconnects) and better materials than silicon for a material or novel architectures, all of which could still make a similar sized chip do more work.

>Right, and computers would never work in space
actually that is not as wrong as you think.
The current high integrated circuits that our processors are made with have so small dimensions, deploying them outside a iononsphere will destroy them quickly due to background radiation.
Hence NASA etc want less well performing chips with larger internal structures who are less sensitive

Because robots are not stupid enough to win battles. They are too reliable.

That probably sounds like a weird complaint, but bare with me:

Making a machine that does its job well takes time and development, but usually isn't that hard. You can easily automate a ship and your ground forces with robots that always make the right tactical choice and carry it out with efficiency.

Sounds like a good deal, right?

You just made the same mistake that has lead to the annihilation, enslavement, or other massive civilization-crushing defeat as at least four other known spacefaring races.

The problem with automating much of your military and navy with reliable machines is that you turn yourself into a reliable enemy. Everything you do is the 'right' choice, which means guessing your actions and their results becomes really easy for anyone with any kind of pattern recognition. Even a dumber machine than the ones you have driving your ships for you can, after a couple of engagements, predict 90% of your battle plan.

Meanwhile, your side has a much lower chance of predicting organic battle plans and actions, because there are multiple steps for failure and drift throughout the entire chain of command and implementation process.

Unless your side has such an overwhelming tech advantage that strategy is irrelevant, you will eventually lose an extended war against the imperfect foe. Because they always have a better guess as to what you will do than you do about them.

And if you ever go up against an enemy that has a better computer than you do? God, it would be a slaughter. Every single move you ever make would play directly into their hands, because their computer can outsmart your computer 100% of the time.

Its just a military setup that sounds good on paper, but is actually really shit in practice outside of a very narrow range that only exists for armchair generals.

Further, people are easier to program than machines, and harder to hack.

Considering how good governments now are at digital security, do you think they really want their entire military apparatus digitally automated?

Drones can't patch hulls.

So you would suggest incorporating fuzzy thinking into the strategic/tactical modelling of said AI's. Thus, while a given option may be optimal, said AI would still have a table of suboptimal options and an RNG to increase their unpredictability in action to accomplish their objectives.

The sort of people who are onboard for automating their military with machines would throw a fit if you told them the machines were programmed to occasionally ignore or fuck up their orders.

It would never get implemented, no matter how necessary it was.

I suspend my disbelief by pretending that it's impossible to control a drone with enough precision to make tactical decisions from the distances that battles take place in in space.

In star trek there were some races that used robots to pilot their ships, but that makes little sense when you could just program a ship to have its own AI. Using a humanoid robot that indirectly interfaces with a ship adds a level of abstraction that a ship interfacing with itself wouldn't have. But then again they also had self-aware missiles so maybe it's up to the philosophy of different races. Klingons would probably never use drones, for example, because they want to be on the front line and experience the glory of battle.

Spoken like a true COREcuck.

Well in my setting I've just basically put you can't replace a soldier's problem solving, reaction time, quick thinking and instincts with a robot.

Then again I'm a big fan of Humanity Fuck Yea.

Often wondered that about things like the Takeshi Kovacs books that seem to sue their fantastic technology in the most cack handed manner.

Because killbots make for shit protagonists.

Not that guy, but as someone that's seen the running around screaming chaos that results when Microsoft change the visual presentation of the start menu on computers or when someone unpins an icon, no, I cannot honestly say humans react well to change.

Silly user, office drones aren't people.

protip: they can be used from 13 if you add some stimulants and an 'intensive' training program, usually one that really penetrates.

In addition to what the other anons have said, man is a social creature.

Long missions will be far less taxing for morale with a bigger crew, and it will help when diplomacy is involved.

No effective weapon of war has ever been successfully banned, because there is nothing an international court can do to you that is worse than losing a war. Certain weapons remain "banned" for just as long as the signatory countries believe they can do without them, but they'd never refuse to use something that would give them a clear advantage.

>usually one that really penetrates.
Eyyy

Just saying that there are some hard limits to computer performance as the size gets smaller, mostly due to quantum effects, after which your only option will be to add more processors. The uncertainly principle might also affect other common scifi concepts like teleportation and brain uploading, as the location and momentum of small molecules can't be precisely measured.

>They do in settings that aren't Trek/Wars/40k.

They did in 40k. The old human civilization used robotic soldiers to fight all their wars - the Men of Iron. There was a robot uprising as a result.

that's just because we're using a really inefficient type of processing.

1 and 0s are good for saving data, transmiting it etc. but as soon as you try to make a real world application with it, everything starts to go to shit because our computer rely on badly optimised code, instead of being hardwired like our brain is.

I mean , our best estimates put an average human's brain's processing power at 38 petaflops, and a lot of that processing power is used for bodily functions (balance, breathing , that kind of shit)

the fastest supercomputer in the world has 93 petaflops, and an artificial mind wouldn't need to waste processing power on taking care of its body, since it wouldn't have one.

the next big step is software, then software/hardware merging. shit like quantum computing is popsci at best , the only applications for this would be processing huge amount of data, but it wouldn't be used in AI (at least , not right now)

>an artificial mind wouldn't need to waste processing power on taking care of its body, since it wouldn't have one.
Yeah it actually would, as a portion of that would have to function as a "subconcious" mind with the function of shuffling data around the racks and getting it where it needs to go, dealing with I/O to the outside world, dealing with hardware failures, and other things.

It was like on the Simpsons episode with a speech at the Airforce Academy.

>Graduates of this Academy... wars of tomorrow will not be fought in land or sea... but in space! Or possibly on the tops of very high mountains.
>Wars of the future will be fought by tiny robots. Remember your duty: To build and maintain those robots.

>ZapBrannigankillbots.jpg

Honestly though this guy is right:

there wouldn't be any shuffling data. the objective would be to make a system that can rewire itself when learning/thinking/whatev.
"data" wouldn't be a thing, we would just feed it electricity and the rest would be automated by the system itself, if that makes sense to you.

that's why we can't think of a way to transmit informations from a computer to a brain (we CAN transmit data from someone's brain to somebody else's, and brain to computer transmission (for instance, someone's dream) just give us weird eerie pictures), we don't have a system that can translate binary into a bunch of neurons, and even if we could, we can't just assimilate it. at best, it would be like vision: you can "see" the information while it's transmited , and as soon as it's over, you can only remember it, you don't have it available anymore. if we manage to make a system that works like our brain , it would be the same for the AI. the "subconscious" would only take care of minor stuff like its fan's speed , it's temperature stuff like that.

keep in mind this is as scifi as it gets, we currently have no fucking clue how we could achieve this.

I can't hear you over the sound of my Galactic Implosion Device.

Sore loser.

Also it's kind of funny that Arm units had a more diverse set of weapons while Core had similar weapons but with more health.

This is the plot of an old episode of Doctor Who (and tons of other SF to be sure).
Two massive war fleets, each commanded by hyper advanced computers... literally sit still for decades staring each other down, because each knows that the other can instantly predict and counter any attempted strategy. They go hunting for meatbags to bring stupidity back into their decision making process.

That doesn't make any sense since it would imply both sides have perfect information. And in real life getting what is effectively a map hack wins the war for you.

Someone has never read "A boy and his tank".

I've never read it, but from the title, I can assume there's a human being involved.

Is it the autoloader X human loader thing again?

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crew.php#id--The_Mission_Control_Model--Robot_Crews

Well the human vs autoloader is a bit different.

For armour field maintenance is highly important to take into account(autoloader is just another thing to break down) as the more hands to help when you inevitably throw or break the track, etc.