alt Hacker NewsThe Gatling quote is hilarious. Did the inventor of the machine gun really think that each company of 100 men was going to be reduced to one guy with a Gatling gun, and 99 of them send him to the battlefield by himself, saying "good luck buddy, let us know how it works out?"
The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?
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But… it did do that.
> that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Our force structure shifted towards logistics and infrastructure from combatants as we moved up the weapon complexity hierarchy. First automatic guns, then tanks, then airplanes.
To a large extent, a tank or air crew is 50 guys waving off 1-5, while they sit back at base and do hobbies between bouts of mechanic labor. They’re not literally at home, but we do fight with small mechanized armies while most soldiers watch on from the base.
I don't know if this is your point, but we're hearing the same stores with AI. Do these people really mean what they say or are they just lying to paint themselves as honorable
A little "How many people were soldiers in ancient Rome" type searches gave me these numbers...
16% of adult males in the Roman mid-republic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_army_of_the_mid-Republic...), call that 8% of adults of all genders.
Wikipedia says that there's about 1.34 million people in active duty in the US military, out of about 342 million people, 21.5% of which are under 18. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces)
I think that's 0.5%? Down from 8% in ancient Rome?
Yet everyone is saying this about LLMs and coders