The future of war is the future of society

The most prophetic post I’ve ever written wasn’t about economics — well, not directly at least. It was about military technology. I’m not much of an expert in that subject, but I managed to make some predictions that were unpopular at the time but which have been borne out spectacularly in the years since. The original article, written for Quartz, was in 2013, but right now I can only find this republished version from 2020. Here’s what I wrote:

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war…

You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun…But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century…the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun…

For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield…But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.

The advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train…The hand-held firearm reached its apotheosis with the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon, guerrilla armies can still defy the mightiest nations on Earth…

But another turning point in the history of humankind may be on the horizon. Continuing progress in automation, especially continued cost drops, may mean that someday soon, autonomous drone militaries become cheaper than infantry at any scale.

Note that what we call drones right now are actually just remote-control weapons, operated by humans. But that may change…Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves…meanwhile, technological advances and cost drops in robotics continue apace. It is not hard