Excuses for still using human soldiers instead of robots in futuristic setting?

As for another thought of mine, it was androids or synthetic human beings that are very similar (think Westworld or Alien).

Several ways of how the androids can be programmed.

First: they are programmed from scratch, and made to task for purposes of desire (commercial, combat, sexual, servant, etc etc.)

Second: they are programmed off of a template of someone. For example, we take a force of our most competent soldiers, and somehow do a brainscan. Use their template to make an android or synthetic that has combat experience already in grained in them.

Third: the human assumes direct control of the synthetic via various means. As a result, the human is never in danger of being attacked or killed, while you still have a full efficient troop operating.

>flawless multitasking with many many drones

Until you get a glitch in the system that causes it to go haywire and stop working. Unless you mean the drones are individuals and work on a sort of network.

>extremely fast info processing: tactical decisions, analysis, think simple stuff like trajectory predictions from the angle of a gun from an image, a human mind cant handle that much information without, again, becoming rather inhuman

Humans are well within the grasps of doing this. I myself (/k/ommando), practice shoot .223 and .308 at 600 and 1000 meter ranges and make sure I account for range, wind, and the round design itself (how hot it is). It doesn't take long to for a person to quickly adjust for drop.

I'd find it a bit insulting to be called inhuman for simply being able to account for drop and condition of my firearms and munitions.

>ITT WH25k

Humans are cheaper. All you need is two people to fuck and you got a new one in a year.

Electronic warfare. Human beings can't be hacked, jammed, EMP'd, or otherwise fucked with electronically, and in a world with combat robots states would be pouring resources into doing just that.

Personally I really like the idea of having the robots on a closed local network instead of controlled from HQ and one or two human squad leaders in every robot unit to issue orders. Depending on the complexity of AI in the setting robots could be fairly dumb, just knowing how to take cover and fire their rifles accurately, thus requiring the squad leader to spend all his time micromanaging them from in hiding, and if he was killed they wouldn't shut off but would just stay in place and engage any enemies around or return to base automatically instead of having the decision-making capacity to continue carrying out their mission. Or they could be more intelligent and just as capable as a regular soldier, and the squad leader is just there to make any decisions that you want a real human to make.

The human operator would thus be a prime target and the robots would prioritize protecting him, including standing in front of him and taking shots "get down Mr. President" style when caught in the open.

This. Robot armies can be hacked en-masse to switch sides. Not possible these days with human (nation-state) armies...although it has happened with historical mercenary armies.

They said the same thing about missles my friend.

That said, AIs and machines are force multipliers. You'll never completely remove the human element from the battlefield. Replacing a dude standing watch in the middle of bum fuck no where with a drone with a gun is one thing. Having a drone that can hover above a theater of opreation and do air strikes on demand is another but the idea of whole armies of robits doing what humans do is silly and inane.

I'm also really fond of having an equal part operator and robot/mecha team like in Titanfall or Gargantia, where the AI is perfectly capable of working independently and the pilot is there to direct it.

> Until you get a glitch in the system that causes it to go haywire and stop working. Unless you mean the drones are individuals and work on a sort of network.

And any individual human could have a stroke or crack under pressure, so well. And a well made drone system could even have what you said as a backup mode or a combination of both.

> I'd find it a bit insulting to be called inhuman for simply being able to account for drop and condition of my firearms and munitions.

I wouldnt, but i would call you inhuman if you could do that AND watch camera feeds in a 360 degree angle around youself, with full attention to detail. and while you're at it, perhaps analyze a few aerial perspectives fed to you by your airborne friends. while also running a complex and very accurate simulation of where projectiles will strike in your vincinity.
Contemporary tech can actually do some of that, albeit badly.

Oh yeah, war fighting isn't also just about killing shit. People arn't going to sympathize with a robot and you'll be hard press to send a robot to go talk to some village chief who's most advance piece of tech is a fucking radio (cell phone now I guess) and a scratch built AK passed down from his grandpa.

There's a reason we don't have closed helmets and go all storm trooper because it dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier to simply want to kill them.

>you got a new one in a year.

This. One year olds are notoriously effective shock troops, when the Germans attacked Stalingrad, the daycare was one of the few centres of Red Army resistance that held out.

>Human beings can't be hacked

Chemical warfare is essentially this.

>jammed

Human soldiers are dependant on their communications equipment. A modern army without comms is just as helpless as a bunch of robots who can't received updated orders.

>EMP'd

Again, a modern army without it's equipment would be helpless against one that had it. If you can harden human soldier's equipment, you can harden robots.

One word. Hackers.

>he doesn't know Russians are born grown and with a Mosin-Nagant tucked under their beard

>Again, a modern army without it's equipment would be helpless against one that had it. If you can harden human soldier's equipment, you can harden robots.

We have trouble fighting dudes who jerry rig WW2 weapons to fucking used pick up trucks. All the advanced technology in the world isn't going to do shit except be a fucking multi million dollar dumpster fire if you don't have an effective fighting force (or don't give a shit about the political pr I suppose).

The idea of an all robot army is as silly as industrial necromancy

Being a soldier is one of the last jobs for unemployed humans (with prostitute, SimStim star and drug dealer).

>There's a reason we don't have closed helmets and go all storm trooper because it dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier to simply want to kill them.

t. Man who has never worn a respirator

Soldiers don't wear full face protection because they'd fucking die in hot climates and it restricts visibility. The moment someone invents an air-conditioned full face helmet which doesn't restrict visibility or respiration, ever army will be wearing them.

Not having your face destroyed by shrapnel is a lot more desirable than the vain hope that the murderous religious fanatics you're fighting and the local population who hate you will refrain from using you as target practice if they can just gaze into your baby blues. If you want to suck the local's dicks to try and make them like you, you can always just take off the helmet, but frankly it's easier to just give them money, it's the only reason they tolerate you anyway.

IA and robot are 200 year of technogical evolution build in environement controled by human.
Human are billion year of evolution create in an ever changing environement.
Robot always end up in a retarded situation that make them unusable.
Robot are all the same so you see how one react, your entire army have now a perfect model of how manipulate them.
IA are better but not cost efficient, build a capable military robot is just a waste of ressource when you can throw two tousand fleshbag for the same price.

Chemical warfare doesn't turn your own soldiers into the enemy's, nor allow the enemy to see anything they've seen.

And having your comms jammed or being EMP'd doesn't prevent human soldiers from moving about or firing their weapons. Sure, they'd be a lot less effective on the whole, but human soldiers with all their electronics fried are still guys who can communicate verbally, jog to where they need to be and fire their rifles.

>Soldiers don't wear full face protection because they'd fucking die in hot climates and it restricts visibility. The moment someone invents an air-conditioned full face helmet which doesn't restrict visibility or respiration, ever army will be wearing them.

Ackstually i was in the Navy for 6 years so I've defintely worn them and know that much (try sitting around for 3 hours in a fucking nasty ass fire suit)

I just assumed that was a given.

The battlefield is too complex and too varied for an AI cost effective enough to be put into an infantry scale body. A human soldier benefits from experience on the field while a robot wouldn't, they don't have human intuition

>We have trouble fighting dudes who jerry rig WW2 weapons to fucking used pick up trucks.

No, we have trouble performing a police action with ludicrously restrictive rules of engagement. If the gloves came off, it'd be a fucking slaughter that would make the Mongols look like Greenpeace.

In large scale conventional warfare, NATO v China or something, with suitably advanced automated weapon systems, human beings will be an irrelevence by the end of the century, battles between two comparable military powers would be decided by the automated weapons being deployed and whoever has some left at the end gets to massacre the other side's humans until they capitulate.

In asymetric warfare, automation will make current tactics nonviable. Currently you can bury a mortar round wired to a cheap mobile phone and shrapnel takes out an infanteer who not only represents a hundreds of thousands £££ investment just in recruitment, training and retention, but his nation also lose any experience he has. Add to that, with a democracy, you get the benefit of his mum appearing before TV cameras crying about her poor little boy who lost his legs/life.

With a robot, that mortar round will be lucky to even permanently damage it and no one will care if CombatBot 92010102 has to be scrapped.

Even ignoring the strategic level, tactically fighting against heavily automated forces with humans will suck, currently you can hide in a bush and shoot an infanteer in the head before scooting off whilst his mates are still reacting to a potential ambush. With a robot, it's not dead, it's just lost it's primary optics, so it falls back on secondary or uses it's section's positional data to compensate as it and all it's friends spin round and, using data from acoustic sensors combined with the 'victim' unit's data of which of it's cameras it lost first, close directly on you whilst laying down effective fire and running faster than you can.

Humans aren't shit.

>Navy
>Sitting for three hours

Try doing battle PT in full CBRN.

>People actually think terminators will ever be a thing

youtube.com/watch?v=knoOXBLFQ-s
*backflips behind you*
>Beep boop nothing personnel fleshbag

Remote controlled?

Think an army of one thousand robots, but 100 of then are remotely controlled by human soldiers from afar. If one of the controlled robots is shot down, the control is passed to another robot.

Disposable robots with humans as squad leaders. Less humans too, so less expenses.

What we know with existing tech:
-machines are effective differently from humans: they have higher performance ceilings but brittle decision making; in gaming terms humans use dice pools and machines a single d20
-"hurr durr I shoot and shout" is a small part of soldiering, replacing it doesn't obsolete soldiers

It stands to reason that a mostly automated army will still need many human repairmen, intelligence analysts, interrogators, commanders, and spies.

>EMP

Several thoughts on this: Hollywood EMP doesn't real. High-power microwaves are effectively Hollywood EMP OTOH, so simply swap out buzzwords to avoid offending any /k/ types.

>EMP will/won't obsolete robutts
IMO it will be like air superiority. A EMP'd force isn't totally helpless, but they're crippled vs a working one. And by the same token, a deliberately low-electronics force is going to be at a severe disadvantage vs a fully equipped force.
There are also many ways to resist electronic warfare: non-silicon systems like gallium arsenide chips (the current big thing in radars), directional antennas to reduce jamming and detection, software bounding and error correction...even Russia now issues digital encrypted frequency-hopping burst transmission radios as standard.

Humans are more expensive if you train them and pay/feed them.

But if you use a social networking app on their cellphones to hire them out as freelance guerilla soldiers, you can take a cut while they take all the risk.

Uber-Kommandos.

Seems genius until some 14-year-old teamkills your whole squad while he's taking a dump.

Goddamn you Lyftwaffe and your damn telepresence drones.

Cost and vulnerability to being hacked. RoboCops are only good so long as you can keep them working on your side.

But I gotta admit, an Uber app for hitmen is a pretty bitchin' cyberpunk idea.

>let's hack AES256 on the fly

Quantum computing mainframes physically couldn't do it in a century; do you think mook #12 with a masters degree and overclocked laptop can do it before the Big Dog catches up with him?

>"future"
Define your time frame.

You don't need to decrypt shit if you bribe some guy into giving you the password with the promise of billions in Chinese currency and unlimited blowjobs.

The other thing about EMP is that you need to deploy and detonate a nuclear weapon to create it on a large scale, something that may well see your nation turned into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot before you can say "Lol guize we didn't actually destroy anything with that nuke, that was just to EMP ur drones".

If both nations are using robot-heavy militaries, they're both probably nuclear capable too so the last thing you'd want to do is accidentally turn your conventional territorial dispute into a nuclear holocaust just to overload some of their bots.

It'd be the exact same Russians doing the work as the driving app, so there's natural market synergy there.

>Hacking on the fly
>Not just having a built in malicious code that causes them to fail or compromising any control systems by other means

Hackerman isn't real, a soldier with a gambling addiction and crippling debt is more dangerous and ever present.

Just say that AI could never realistically replicate the human mind. The setting does not need robots.

For some reason AIs inevitably become pacifists or attempt to kill all humans. Nobody has yet managed to create an AI that only wants to kill specific humans.

This works as an argument against all military forces, not just robots.

>DON'T USE AIRCRAFT, THEY CAN ONLY GET THEIR ORDER VIA RADIO, THE ENEMY COULD HAVE OUR PASSWORDS AND GIVE THEM BOGUS ORDERS!

>DON'T USE SHIPS, THE ENEMY COULD HAVE OUR PASSWORDS AND KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE AT ALL TIMES!

If they have Commander-in-Chief tier access to your communications and C&C systems, you have much, MUCH bigger problems that them being able to shut down your drones.

Also, what is the point of fighting if it is not physical? Even if robot soilders did exist, they would only work with peaceful states wanting to making a decision - not ISIS. In order for a REAL war to happen, you need something that you will actually conquer/defend - otherwise there will be no wars.

Employment. High unemplyment among young males is one of the number one indicators of politcal turmoil waiting to happen in geopolitical analysis. Mainly due to the decrease available pussy that goes with it. And it's lack of pussy that fucks countries up. So give these rustless young men some gats and point them at the enemy, or they'll one themselves.

That goes both ways. With fewer people in charge, there are fewer points of failure to leak information, so you can afford to hire more trustworthy people, and your internal-security forces can focus better on the now-smaller number.

Robots would take it to a new level, but we know this is how it actually works and not vice versa; because it was one of the unsung benefits of drones and precision weapons in South American COIN (and to a lesser degree Northern Africa).

Realistically, to replace teeth unit soldiers like infantry or tank crew, you'd only really need something roughly as intelligent as a rat or dog provided you had human oversight for more complex tasks like interacting with civilians or making strategic decisions. Tactically, the drones just need to be able to seek cover, distinguish between combatants/noncombatants and move into advantageous positions to kill said combatants, you could replace everyone below commissioned rank with a pretty dumb bot.

If AI is good enough for general-purpose soldier use, it's good enough for sex bot use.

Robot soldiers are physical and do the same things human soldiers do - kick down doors to find the decision makers. Killing other soldiers (human or robotic) is simply the middle step in the process.

I didn't say it was an argument against using robots at all, just that practical "hacking" doesn't go out the window no matter how good your encryption is.

Both sides are going to be using money and blowjobs to steal each other's robot passwords just like with every other thing in the history of warfare, and the side that does it better is going to have the advantage.

But in theory the difference is that instead of just knowing where the enemy is or screwing with their communications, you could make them switch sides.

Same reasons vets given job preference for govy jobs and disability checks. Keep those trained vested in the system not rebelling against it.

This problem is solved with sexbots, no need to waste billions recruiting and training young men into an inefficient meatbag army just to kill them off when they're all happily sitting at home living the NEET life with their robowaifu.

Hell, with western society's increasingly radical feminist view of males in general and the prenatal screening allowing mothers to choose the gender of their child, males will probably be a noticable minority in future societies anyway. Large scale automation will see the end of male utility to women and like all obsolete industrial equipment, they'll be gradually phased out.

Outlawing them seems the only realistic and sensible option. Wouldn't be the first incredibly effective technology that doesn't see field use for ethical concerns.

>this
Essentially, the only option for humans to remain competitive in warfare above anything but a bargin bag security robot is to become some sort of robocop or terminator analogue. The great danger to a synthesis approach is in how easily it may be to 'leash' people who are cybernetic enhanced.

There are a number of potential dangers facing the cyborg population:

1. Service Provider Dependency: software updates with planned obsolescence, or even chemical regimes like Deus Ex 'neuropozyne' make cyborgs into indebted addicts dependent on a controlled procedure for further use of their augmentations.

2. Feedback Conditioning: artificial glands may permit overt dosage of the host mind to set-up punishment and reward cycles, or more subtle hormonal management to make the host mind more pliable to the suggestion of traditional propaganda methods.

3. Virtualization: If a true mind/machine interface allows for direct sensory stimulation or may integrate propaganda and convincing imagery directly into the aforementioned feedback conditioning, this can be as innocuous as a virtual personal assistant who subtly manipulates your product choices, or as overt as nightmarish dreams locking the mind into virtual prison and forever corroding your sense of reality.

4. Remote Shutdown: The simple killswitch.

My bad, I misunderstood and/or didn't read you post properly.

I think it's bizarre how prophetic cyberpunk's predictions of armies engaging in cyberwarfare has come to be. The US's strike against Iran's nuclear program sounds like something out of Neuromancer, minus the cyborg-commandos.

Legal and insurance issues.

It’s coming but it’s going to take a lot longer than being imagined. We don’t even have robot cars being used commercially.

OPs picture is a human in armor not a robot. Dumbass OP a robot would t make that mistake.

>Virtualization

Remember kids; Mr. Cortical Stack is not your friend, don't end up locked in a virtual hell for a subjective eternity just because you died and you brainscan got stolen by a sadist.

There would still need a human at the end of the line somewhere, otherwise you would be fighting and spending money on absolutely nothing by a simulation - that is my point. I mean, they have to take over something, and wouldn’t humans be the last line of physical defence if all goes wrong? You wouldn’t let your country be occupied or massacred by robots without using up all your recourses would you?

If that is not the case, why don’t countries settle arguements through robo-wars now? Genetic-hate can drive wars. What about countries that are too poor to have robots?

Electromagnetic weaponry. Hacking. Using both in tandem. Third route: artificially grown humans.

Pictured: all of the above, as used in Infinity (ALEPH faction).

You want excuses?

In this futuristic setting, robotics and artificial intelligence aren't at the level where a robot or an artificial intelligence are a viable and cost-effective replacement for a human soldier.
Robots and artificial intelligence are too reliant on an established infrastructure to operate efficiently and destruction of that infrastructure is equivalent to the destruction of those units.
Acquiring information from a captured unit or making it fight for you is just a matter of getting someone with the right skills to tamper with its hardware and software. Information acquired from a human captive is extremely unreliable and 'turning' captives is close to impossible, even if you are able to get past the bootcamp indoctrination and dehumanization.

People think that robots are viable the moment someone says "sci-fi," without any thought for the infrastructure they would require, their cost-effectiveness and their overall efficiency. Drones are one thing, replacing boots on the ground with combat robots equipped with artificial intelligence is enough.

What if most wars become ritualized in the future? Soldiers are trained to kill in an artistic or entertaining fashion, and squads do battle in preselected locations. Nations are declared the Victor of a "war" through the collection of points, and completion of objectives. Basically an extremely violent sport that kills people for the glory of insert future nation. Robots are used for labour, and possibly in the event of an actual war, rather than a false war

This post smells fishy

Can you hack a person in this future?

Technology that hasn't reached that stage.

AI could handle air combat or (most of) blue-sea combat presently; but land and littoral environments are far more complex.

Machines are not generalists to begin with. There will be no single AI-grunt model; there will be dozens of specialized machines that outperform humans in one job but suck at other tasks. Until the swarm grows diverse and large enough, a human will always be needed to cover the gaps.

And while such gaps exist; there's the Automation Paradox every MBA learns. The more of a sector replaced by machines, the harder it gets to replace the remaining humans.

I.e. a farm can be run by 20 grunts; or it can by run by 17 robots, an accountant, a roboticist, a mechanic, and an infrastructural umbilical to a high-tech civilization.

As Robots are non-bioligical, they not at all sentient, and are thus unreliable.

Psyops and propaganda. Even if your drones are invincible, they are poor stand-ins for war heroes and other propaganda devices. You just gotta have a guy somewhere to pose with your killbots and keep the hinterland happy and productive. You also need human soldiers for COIN and garrison/occupation duty.

But the thread is about human soldiers staying relevent in an era of AI and robotics so OP's picture makes perfect sense....

Sure. But if you already have lots of disposable young men floating around, and free internet tutorials for warfare...they may not be as good as robots, or purpose-trained human soldiers, but they're a free resource it would be pointless not to use.

Even now, as drones become more popular in warfare, countries that cannot afford them but have more manpower develop anti-drone weapons instead.

And you will always have insurgents/rebels/separatists without access to robots.

>I think in the future, elite infantry will be replaced by tanks
>I think in the future, tanks will be replaced by nukes
>I think in the future, humans will be replaced by robots

Honestly not seeing the difference here. For starters, humans come with special legal statuses and camouflage that robots tend to lack.

>wouldn’t humans be the last line of physical defence if all goes wrong?

Yeah but they'd be less effective the boys and old men of the Volksturm were against the Red Army in Berlin. Humans fighting against a heavily automated force would basically just be squeezing triggers to make themselves feel better as they're killed.

At least with current one-sided curbstomps like the USA-Iraq war, the Iraqis during their brief resistance had the comfort that for every fifty of them that died to bombs, missiles or shells, they were killing a couple of actual flesh and blood Americans.

How long would you hold out if all you're doing is temporarily damaging soulless military equipment?

There's no real indictation given our current understanding of sentience that it's restricted to biological organisms, all behaviour eventually boils down to an algorithm.

>Service Provider Dependency: software updates with planned obsolescence, or even chemical regimes like Deus Ex 'neuropozyne' make cyborgs into indebted addicts dependent on a controlled procedure for further use of their augmentations.

You don't even need all that. Certain cyborg parts would probably require a lot of periodic maintenance and medical care to keep in perfect order. If somebody stops cooperating just threaten to stop paying their medical bills.

Oh sure, sounds great, until the damn Russians use an illegal rocket fist move when you've got them on the ropes and end up killing a bunch of spectators in the bleachers while you're battling over Alaska.

i think a human brain and a robot brain is better then just a robot brain.

Ha, cool

I imagine a larger focus on terrorist attacks that continue to cripple the public support of the war effort that cumulates into a desire to pull the military equipment out of an area as it becomes a drain on tax payer equipment while the rebels/insurgents/etc continue to develop asymmetrical tactics to deal with advancing technology, while possibly being supported by a third party with near equal equipment of that as the most technologically advanced component in the ongoing conflict.
That would require nations already with high military populations to diminish their power of numbers in order to fight "fairly" while requiring insurgents/rebels/etc to diminish their home-field advantages/guerrilla tactics. It's why the Aztecs had flower wars, they had better honed troops and were thus able to use a smaller military population to subjugate a larger region.

Step 0: be alive, and be fighting an enemy that wants to keep you alive, because they're using robots instead of chemical, biological, or nuclear warfare
Step 1: you're an unarmed hapless emotionally damaged impoverished war refugee, use enemy red cross boats to emigrate to your preferred combat zone - the enemy's national capital
Step 2: improvise a weapon to kill: 3d printed bioaerosols in the subway legislators use, automated-car truck bombs, etc
Step 3: security forces (may) capture/kill you after, but your score is already 500+ to one at this point

I think you're underestimating how expensive it is to produce a modern soldier. Unless you're literally just going to give them a 100 year old assault rifle, two magazines and tell them to go die for the motherland, creating and fielding an army is a massive resource sink.

Modern volunteer militaries spend huge amounts on recruitment, then even more on training to use the increasingly advanced weapon systems and then finally they need to shell out for a load of benefits and training/personal growth opportunities to retain these expensive soldiers so they don't just leave after their five year contract expires and force you to recruit a new kid, pay for training etc etc.

It'd be so, so much cheaper to just issue each man a sexbot if your only goal was to defuse internal sociopolitical pressure from a lack of women.

If you go with the Join The Red Army: Die For Russia method, you have to entertain the idea that these young men might catch on that they're being exterminated by proxy when their otherwise wealthy and affluent society is sending them into combat against the might of the People's Liberation Army's 149th Murderbot Division with a $10 assault rifle and some words of encouragment. Which might hasten the societal unrest you were trying to avoid in the first place.

How are you going to keep the enemy on the battlefield, rather than striking you at home? Then you'll have to turn the homefront into a battlefield as well, and if you are committed to not using human troops when robots can do, you'll have combat robots policing your society and keeping you in line.

So maybe provisions against domestic use of certain models of combat robots keeps homefront security forces human.

These are good points, it really wouldn't surprise me if the response to the increasing invincibility of Western forces on the battlefield was simply a diversion of effort into terrorism by various groups.

I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen a major biological or chemical attack yet.

Then I guess the natural response by the West is increasing restriction of civil liberties and more and more intrusive surveillence, aided by AI.

We cyberpunk Soon™

>How are you going to keep the enemy on the battlefield, rather than striking you at home?

Close the borders and tell your omniscient AI to monitor people's facebook profiles for signs of sympathy with the enemy.

I'm going for the reverse: totally free self-trained, self-motivated recruits. Not a Russian conscript social masses movement, but fringe people from the long tail who are already funded by, and dissatisfied with their NEETbucks.

You can't contrast super terminator bots with AK47 toting grunts from 1995 directly. In a 1:1 comparison in the same society, humans are still going to exist.

Issuing them AKs is not a 1:1 deal. Issuing them encrypted instructions to turn the safeties off on their automated cars or 3d print their own assassin drones is.

>Oh sure, sounds great, until the damn Russians use an illegal rocket fist move when you've got them on the ropes and end up killing a bunch of spectators in the bleachers while you're battling over Alaska.

They knew the risks when they bought their tickets!

Production would be by the manufacturer that best met the specifications at the lowest price.
They would need to outsource components as cheaply as possible.
Who produces the cheapest chips? The Chinese.
Which phones aren't considered securable due to hidden code on their chips? Anything using Chinese chips...

Not everyone uses social media...
Some of us have enough hassle dealing with real world interactions that the fake socialisation online is repellent.

In a word: Silicone. We are already running out of silicone for the electronics we need today. If we didnt recycle electronics we wouldn't have enough silicone to build new gadgets. In other words, there is a limit to how many electronics you can have on our planet at any point in time (assuming space mining isnt a thing yet) and therefore soldier robots would likely be really expensive as its difficult to recycle silicone from a battlefield.

You tried!

Unfortunately you look like a dummy because the word you meant to write was "silicon".

Won't somebody think of the sex bots?

>Won't somebody think of the sex bots?
I've been thinking about them all night!

Insanely overpopulated planet.

It's actually more of a problem with easily accessible and relatively pure sources. Silicon it's self is extremely abundant being the second most common element on/in our planet. We are just running out of the cheapest and easiest to reach sources, not the element its self.