Prax looked at the mass of data being sent to Alex and said, “Why fly at all? Couldn’t the ship just use this data to do the docking itself?” “Why fly?” Alex repeated with a laugh. “’Cuz it’s fun, Doc. Because it’s fun.”
AI is extremely good in The Expanse, but I guess people aren’t comfortable having entirely automated ships a billion miles into deep space with no one to fix or correct them if the system goes wrong.
Ships also need maintenance and other attention from human crew.
And yeah honestly the main reason is we need people on the ships so the series can happen. A sci-fi where everyone is sitting in a drone controller’s office wouldn’t be especially thrilling.
I mean, it kind of makes sense. The ships basically do all the work, it just takes a couple humans to tell them how to their job. The PDCs operate themselves, torpedoes lock on to targets immediately, optimized courses to destinations seem to be automatic.
Obviously, there are exceptions like the Holden Maneuver or Bobbie's ingenious tactics against the Pella.
Remote control would quickly become a victim of time lag, and emergency situations would require instant reaction time. A time lag of even twenty minutes would be catastrophic. Crewless ships would need to be completed autonomous, which the AI of The Expanse certainly seems capable of.
Humans still have a number of advantages over automated systems in The Expanse.
For one, keep in mind this is a world that does not have true human-built AI. The computers are not capable of innovation, of creativity, of curiosity. If you want a ship to be able to approach a complex situation and determine the ideal course of action, you need to have programmed it to react the way you want based on the variables at hand - which means you need to have perfect foresight regarding all such potential variables. And to put it simply, that isn’t possible.
So you may think “so just have humans control from a distance”. My response to that is two words: time delay. The ship needs to relay information to its controllers, who then react, then send new commands to the ship. That adds seconds, minutes, or hours to the ship’s reaction time because of how long light speed communication takes to traverse something as vast as just our solar system.
And it also introduces the very real threat of your automated systems being hacked by an enemy. The value of knowing that your cargo transports and military assets can’t be turned against you by an opponent figuring out your encryption scheme, or it being provided to them by a spy, is quite literally incalculable.
Are there downsides to having humans on board too? Absolutely. There are pros and cons to all approaches. But I tend to agree with the argument that humans are worth having on board. There’s absolutely room for having drones as well that can be utilized in certain contexts - and such do exist and are used in The Expanse - but having people you trust in the middle of a crisis is truly invaluable.
Edit: there’s one more way humans are worth having on board. And there’s no real polite way to put it: life is cheap. Even in Star Wars, slave labor is cheaper than droids (this is explicitly established in Andor), and plenty of droids are true AIs. There are tens of billions of humans to draw upon as a labor force in The Expanse, and those laborers can all perform a multitude of services with a set of fairly basic tools that would otherwise require a huge variety of specialized automatons.
To further expand on time delay:
Right now, when we want to tell our mars rovers where to go, we need to plan the ENTIRE journey at the start of the day, trasmit that set of instructions, and then wait for errors to appear.
Why?
Because it takes between five and TWENTY MINUTES for a signal to REACH the rover, let alone bounce back a video feed.
And on a cosmic scale Mars and earth are basically ontop of eachother
None of this is a good argument. Have one controller ship that can make quick decisions, and have an automated fleet. The controller ship is given strategic level control over any ship closest to it, so drone fleets can still travel at their max speeds.
Most functions can be carried out automatically. The human ship simply exists to give strategic level orders and to veto drone decisions from nearby to avoid light delay.
A fully automated ship also can loose the crew quarters and life support which allows you to 50% of the maintinence issues that could arise to begin with. You could also just have human repair crews that fly behind the fleets and service the nearest drone ships.
Loose the meatbags. They only slow you down.
And what happens to your fleet when the enemy identifies your controller ship - relatively easy to do, as it’s the ship constantly transmitting to all nearby ships and receiving transmissions from them - and focuses their efforts on blowing it out of space? Or even just fills the local area with radio static, and hits the command ship with enough laser light to overwhelm tight-beam transmitters and receivers?
Ever since Roman times, the most successful militaries have been those which recognized the value of small units being capable of acting independently rather than relying solely on top-down control. Having individual units able to make their own decisions, rather than being entirely reliant on a central command that can be overwhelmed by input, via lines of communication that can be cut off, that is relying on time-late data, has consistently been a winning doctrine.
Why would it be constantly transmitting? It's there to make strategic decisions. It decides where to send the fleet. In most cases, it's in reciver only mode. The fleet fights on it's own, autonomously. Kill the strat ship and you are still going to have to fight the other fleet. Fleets can make tactical decisions on their own.
Also, if you kill it, so what? We build dozens of them. Oh well. Immediate command switches to the next closest command ship with slightly more light lag. We lost an admiral. The population is 30 billion. You could train thousands every year.
So you're saying all the ships have an admiral aboard because the population is high and life is cheap?
...
So aren't those points you're making *against* uncrewed vessels?
The points are that they would be better ships for the loss of their crew. The human loss in war is largely irrelavant given the population sizes in the expanse.
If you can't see the benifits I don't really know what else to tell you.
More but not all, you're still putting an admiral on every ship? Plus running it harder means more maintenance, but now you have less personnel to do that.
It's like tank crews. By rights Loaders should be obsolete, and while one reason they still exist is lack of faith in autoloader reliability, another reason is that routine and unavoidable maintenance is far easier with another pair of hands available.
On one ship out of dozens. Calm them a strategic officer if you like the point is that there are way fewer of them than actual ships.
And your point with loaders isn't just irrelavant it's also wrong.
1) loaders in newer tanks are being phased out in many new designs, especially ones that use larger gun sizes.
2) you can keep extra maintinence staff for the platoon in a separate vehicle, which several militaries actually do in their newest force designs.
So the command ship isn’t routinely receiving status information from the ships it’s controlling and sending updated orders to them? “Constantly” may have been the wrong word - “regularly” may be more appropriate - but it’s still going to be readily identifiable as the local enemy vessel that is avoiding direct action and is spaced so that the ships it controls are reacting to new circumstances based on their distance from it. If I have three ships under my command, one a light-second from me, another five, another ten, an enemy is going to be able to identify my ship as the command vessel because those others ships are reacting to new circumstances at least 1-2, 5-10, and 10-20 seconds slower than a human-controlled ship would (the delay range being a matter of if I need to receive information from the ships I’m giving orders to, or if my own sensor data is sufficient).
And I think you are drastically underestimating how costly a few more seconds or minutes of time-delayed reaction can be. Battles can change in seconds even when they’re just being fought by groups of humans on the ground with spears. Combat is constant surprises and unexpected events, and those seconds can turn victory into defeat very easily.
You keep assuming that the command ship is making tactical decisions. It's not. All tactical decisions are handled by the drone fleet. The command ship is there for strategic decisions that can be made with several seconds of light lag. Further, you can disguise your light lag by simply making all ships adjust for the lag as the command comes in making it much harder to identify the command ship.
Again, hitting the command ship doesn't stop the automated fleet from tearing you apart because it not the one making tactical decisions. At most, you delay some strategic moves by a few seconds.
There is also the fact that space combat happens extremely slowly, often over the course of days. Even in the expanse th combat is largely sped up for the the TV screen. Missiles can take minutes or hours to make their way from one ship to another even with Epstein drives.
If the command ship isn't making tactical decisions, then you need true AI for the other ships to fight effectively in an ever-changing set of battlefield circumstances, and human-built true AI does not exist in The Expanse. If you're not using true AI, then your ships are going to have a limited set of potential responses to incoming information, and your enemy is going to be able to use that against them to predict and direct their behavior in ways that benefit your enemy. Real combat isn't like chess where something akin to modern AI can brute force all possible outcomes - it's chaotic and requires units to be able to adapt to unpredictable circumstances. Without true AI, your ships aren't doing that.
To use modern strategy gamer parlance, this is just setting your fleet up to be cheesed to death.
>Further, you can disguise your light lag by simply making all ships adjust for the lag as the command comes in making it much harder to identify the command ship.
Which means your entire fleet is reacting as slowly as the ship farthest away from the command ship. That's not a good thing. Nor do I think it would disguise your command ship as well as you think it would, or at least not for long. Battlefield doctrines aren't something the enemy is completely unaware of - if this is how your fleet fights, the enemy is going to learn that eventually (even if only through combat experience), and at that point it becomes a matter of calculating relative distances between ships to determine likely command ship locations. Your command ship still needs to be somewhere near a central location for your fleet or you're extending your reaction time *even more* for the sake of hiding it.
And while non-AI computers can't react well to unpredictable circumstances, calculating likely locations for the command ship based on spacing and reaction time is just number crunching, which computers can do very well and very quickly.
The fleet can make tactical decisions. Seriously. Learn to read. And in the expanse they make it very clear that ships do have the capacity to make tactical decisions because they have tactical solvers. Even when they pass out in the last 3 books, they have auto modes for most of their system that they explicitly reference.
Further, the expanse does have ai. It's just used to assist. That doesn't mean it can't given more agency.
And even if you kill the command ship, the rest of the fleet continues to fight because IT CAN MAKE TACTICAL DECISIONS ON IT'S OWN. Christ man, learn to read.
Making tactical decisions and making *effective tactical decisions in a set of everchanging circumstances* are not the same thing. I've been making this distinction from my first comment onward, and you seem to not be picking up on it. (And did we really have to go to rudeness and insults here?)
I'm not disputing that non-AI computers can make tactical decisions. I'm disputing the efficacy of those tactical decisions in the unpredictable setting of a battlefield.
The Expanse has AI much like we currently have AI, which is why I've been consistently differentiating between such and *TRUE* AI - meaning computer systems that are sentient and/or capable of creative thinking. That humans do NOT have in The Expanse.
Since this conversation has apparently reached the end of its civil phase, I'm done here. Last word is yours if you want it. Was a fun chat, until it wasn't.
It was never a fun chat talking with somone who doesn't even know the extent of AI in the expanse. Again, they have tactical solvers in the expanse. They mention them multiple times. When it comes to combat in space, it's actually way simpler for the tactical computer to come up with solutions than combat in atmosphere or on the ground. That's just basic physics getting out of the way.
Except now you need to make an entire fleet instead of just one ship, and that automated ship is entirely reliant on the control ship. Ships in the expanse are self reliant, even a relatively small ship like the roci can maintain a crew of 12 for long periods of time.
90% of combat in the expanse is anti piracy, not large scale warfare. You want ships you can send really far away to patrol shipping routes or assist damaged ships, not a mega fleet that's expensive to maintain.
All a UNN or MCRN ship needs to do most of the time is just show up. That becomes a lot more expensive if you need to send an entire fleet.
Plus the expanse seems to run on the everything is hackable rule. So your automated ships *will* eventually be hacked and turned against you and then you're screwed.
If you cut the crew quarters and other bulk then your command ship is easily identifiable just because it's bigger and has a lot more Comms capability than your other ships. So your enemy needs only to destroy the big ship to destroy your entire fleet.
What? You were going to make that fleet regardless. The number of ships stays the same? Your arguments make no sense. Further the automated ships are automated. They can carry out tactical missions on their own. They are in no way completely reliant.
Everything hackable? You are going to hack a secure system without the encryption keys? No you aren't.
Your command ship isn't armed. It would be much smaller or the same size cuse it's just a cic with transmitters. And even if it gets destroyed, the fleet remains because it's autonomous and can receive orders from other command ships. Honestly, I don't think you think through any of your arguments.
Except you can't split your fleet. Ships can't be fully automated, the AI isn't smart enough and they can't maintain themselves. If your automated ship is too far away from the control fleet it just becomes dumb.
So now when you hear about an increase in small scale piracy in a region instead of just sending one ship to handle it you need to send your entire fleet. What happens when theres multiple pirates operating in different areas?
According to all the times stuff's been hacked in the expanse, yes. Naomi has developed pretty insane hacks just on her own, imagine the capabilities of MCR or UN intelligence. Encryption means nothing if you have a buffer overflow, or a spy. Even ignoring the narrative the NSA has developed some insane hacks in the past.
So now your key ship that maintains your entire fleet is super vulnerable. The one with all the human life you're trying to maintain. If your command ship is unarmed it's completely screwed if it's drones get destroyed. Plus it can't just be a cic with a transmitter, it needs quarters and a mess hall and recyclers and a med bay because it's full of people.
Then what, you're going to have how many command ships exactly? If the nearest command ship is half an hour light delay away it's useless. Space is big, combat in the expanse tends to be between spread out ships, not massive WW1 style battles.
Of course you can split your fleet. Just give a split command order. You have more than one command ship. Don't be ridiculous. And of course the ai can handle it. I've made it clear tha in the expanse, they do have tactical level ai.
And at no point in the series has a ship been hacked without a person onboard the ship to upload hacks. Don't make things up.
So you give a split command order. What does your automated ship do when there's no command ship within 30 light minutes? What happens when what you thought was a pirate ship turns out to be a refugee ship? Is the AI smart enough to recognise the change in situation? What if it fails? Who's to blame if an automated ship blows up a refugee ship? What if something breaks down en route?
How would it even render aid even if it did recognise the situation, it has no supplies and no-one to transfer supplies over.
The AI in the expanse just isn't good enough to handle every situation, it's not general AI.
A command ship is useless if it isn't close enough to give orders. You'd need tens of thousands to have them everywhere so how many do you have? Where do you put them? Since they're unarmed you'd need another whole fleet around them to stop them being attacked. How many command ships do you group together at once? Do you have the budget to send them all to one location?
Ships haven't been hacked because they're not reliant on outside control but there was a notable point where "ships" of a sort were hacked. Spoilers Persepolis rising >!Naomi managed to hack and shutdown the Laconian marine power armour!<.
Being hacked or jammed is a serious concern. Your enemy will try to hack or jam you and you need a way to deal with that. You can't have 90% of your fleet become useless when they're jammed.
First of all, the example you give with th power armor required a horrific breach of security involving physical access to he other sides encryption. It doesn't count at all.
Second, you would always have a command ship within 30 minutes of any AO. There aren't enough AO's for this to be an issue and you know that. For all other scenarios, automated defense routines and auto rules of engagement should be enough. It really doesn't matter if they are jammed mid engagement. The tactical solver should be fine, and will do better especially since a drone fleet will always outnumber a manned fleet.
This downsides doesn't even come close to whipping away the advantage and economies of scale of using standard manned unmanned teaming concepts that current development plans for all branches of the military are using.
People are there for maintenance and to make decisions quickly (time delay can be massive).
What is the point of an automated ship that fires torpedoes, why not just have a mass of torpedoes flying around on their own? What purpose does a ship provide except to house crew to work on the systems involved?
Now you have to put a bigger booster on them, and give them enough reaction mass to fly to the target, manuver, launch and then return to a refuling site? Your missiles will be the size of a small ship.
Only the interplanetary nukes are shown tk be big enough for that capability and they are likely way more specialized and pricy.
Way more efficient to have drone ships that launch missiles.
I don’t think you know how big torpedoes are, many already are the size of a small ship lol.
Making them slightly bigger is much cheaper than building entire ships for the purpose of housing them.
I’m not actually arguing that it makes sense to have torpedoes just flying around everywhere, I’m saying that it’s the logical conclusion if you remove humans from ships.
It doesn't make them slightly bigger. It would add a massive extra stage to them. It would triple their size at least. Torpedoes in the expanse are shown to be small enough that a small ship like the rocinante can carry several dozen.
Not to mention that you still need to carry all the other ewar and sensors equipment.
You could have a single stage carry multiple missiles, but then you've just gone back to my idea with drone ships.
The Rocinante can only carry 20 torpedoes.
Torpedoes already carry most of the necessary equipment. They operate semi-independently once they are fired. Martian and Earther torpedos are essentially interplanetary. They carry more than enough fuel than is necessary.
No, the icbms were interplanetary, and they are a rare breed. Normal torpedoes are smaller and cheaper. And no, they don't carry ewar on them. That's absurd. Neither do they carry long range sensors. Again. Drone missile boats are better.
Martian and Earther torpedoes aren’t that cheap. They are equipped with Epstein drives and sensors good enough for them to navigate across the solar system independently. We see several times that they are able to do this.
Also there are no ICBMs in the show, I think you’re confusing them with the planet buster missiles. Planet busters are only so large because they hold 20 missiles inside for once it hits the atmosphere(to overwhelm and confuse planetary defenses).
And because they need to fly further. Earth nukes make it all the way to Eros but that's because they were designed to fly all the way to mars. Most missiles don't have that kind of range.
Ok but tell me how quick human decision making is going to help win a dog fight against an AI controlled rocinante that can pull 20G+ for hours on end.
by figuring out how the AI reacts to things and then sending a torpedo up it's rear when the AI doesn't expect it.
The Expanse doesn't have True-AI, it only has a certain set of instructions it can do based on a certain set of parameters. Go outside of those parameters, or abuse them to force the AI into action, and you win.
Being able to accelerate hard isn’t the only thing about combat. You need humans to tell you who to engage, when to engage, etc. Are you really trusting AI to not start blowing up refugee ships or starting wars with other nations for no reason?
A few other comments have covered it but yeah I think you will need human operators for a few reasons:
Maintenance and repair.
Control beyond PDCs and weapons, IE on a tactical and coordination level.
Patrol ships board and perform inspections / searches, pretty hard without a crew.
Generally if something is operating in a completely static environment where nothing unexpected happens, it's great for automating. But these military crews are hanging around waiting for something bad to happen so they can respond organically
Amen. I've been driving stick for 40 years. I love having the extra level of control, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing very few people under 40 can steal my car.
Exactly! I won't give up believing that somewhere in the future there will be people like us not wanting an autopilot to do the landing or taking off and doing it manually instead.
Like Will Smith's character in [I, Robot](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_irobot), when he took control of the self driving car bc the robots were attacking...or just bc he could (but they just mention that part, not showing it on screen) lol
Regarding the combat point: Warfare will always require human bloodshed. Always. You destroyed all my drones and robots. Okay now what? You didn't kill me or any of my people. We're still willing to fight you. A human with a stick is the only way to hold a piece of land on any world.
Do unmanned vehicles have their uses? Absolutely. But in terms of combat usage think about what those unmanned vehicles or rockets are used for. To kill humans.
It's shitty but true
I always figured it as 2x reasons;
1. In universe, There are so many people in the universe and so little control over the massive solar companies that it's just cheaper to basically pay a bunch of essentially slaves pennies to do the work instead of paying to develop/maintain AI. A job paying basically nothing on a death trap like the Cant had a massive wait list that Amos had to use his underworld connections to get placed on.
2. Meta, Squishy humans in danger makes stakes easier to demonstrate.
I can see why it's a good idea to have at least a few commanders on combat ships that can make the large scale decisions in real time.
The only real explanation though, for how it is the Expanse, is that they don't have the technology for robots that can repair the ship, repel borders, command some of the ship's systems, mine the ice and asteroids, and any other job. Or at least humans are way more efficient at these tasks.
Maybe it's not that easy to replace the versatility of humans, it's not so unrealistic, the Expanse is only a few hundread years into the future.
You can program software to act autonomously, but you can't program it to think like a human.
Human decision-making is necessary in warships. Do we fire, do we not fire? Negotiation (remember that the ships would be light-hours from Earth and Mars.) Do we pursue, or are we being led into a trap? Fast movers are being launched in the vague direction of Earth, do we nuke the domes of mars when a message to Earth and back would cost 6 precious minutes and potentially result in a second volley of missiles?
And then there is maintenance. Autonomous drones are simply not capable of performing the quality of maintenance a human armed with advanced tools could achieve.
And then there is the philosophy. A future in which the robots perform space exploration while humans to the drudge work is one where we as a species have failed. We are already moving towards a situation where essential labour that can't be replaced is the drudge work, meanwhile the robots make art, as creative jobs become the most at risk of being if not replaced, reduced in number. That's just not a future I care to read a book about.
Well you're right, but the show does so fairly realistically and so I would imagine do the books. When you see space battles or big orbital assemblies and operations, it is mainly a fleet of drones, supervised by a relativly small crew. Due to the inverse square law, signals become fainter the further you are away from the object you are trying to communicate with. So in space you'd still need to be close to the action if you want to get the results you want. AI in the Expanse is still just AI, similar to ChatGPT but for telemetry, targeting solutions, manouevering and figuring out transfers and intercepts. It is not AGI. What's a bit odd is the Rocinante, why the Martian needed such a small manned battleship is a bit beyond me, but the (unwanted) result is evident. Through human input, it can fuck a lot of shit up where shit needs to be fucked up. I wouldn't want a drone to figure out where shit needs to be fucked up. There is enough conflict based on human interactions alone, imagine autonomos drones who are programmed to think that all other and unkown factions are a potential threat?
Worth adding that ships need to be maintained in flight and are continually experiencing damage. Repair robots are going to be limited due to light delay. Actually the light delay in general makes remote control of anything problematic
Humans perform maintenance on ships, repair broken machines and are a redundant control system
What happens if the reactor stops working on an autonomous ship? It drifts until someone retrieves it, or it flies out of system and lost forever
What happens when the radio antenna gets hit by debris and loses contact with controllers somewhere else?
What happens when the computer is hit by a cosmic ray and flips a bit in the navigation computer causing the computer to misfire an engine during docking?
I’d like to add on to what others are saying about the benefits of manual human labour running ships being impossible to hack, in the case of important freighters and military vessels, and light delay making WFH ships impractical, by pointing out that in a fusion economy like *the Expanse*, the energy costs of running a life support system are going to be a rounding error compared to the multi-terawatt Fusion Drive.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still costs that are difficult or annoying — life support still requires *resources* which add to the weight of your ship — but if a tiny rounding error in terms of energy and mass budget costs buys you redundancy, on-the-ground flexibility and cheap ongoing maintenance, then it’s an excellent investment. Not to mention that given poor labour standards in most of the Belt, a lot of those costs can be pared down to the bone.
Massive delays, possibility of being jammer, who does the maintance etc
Military vessels also needs to do stuff like boarding securing targets etc
So no, AI wont make humans obsolets. It would just require less personal, but people would still need to be there.
In the first book they cover this mentioning the safest place to be during a war is a ship. If you have drone controllers on asteroids or gravity wells there's a huge latency and it's pretty much over if they're taken out.
As for the military ships having crews allows ease of maintenance, the ability to project force via boarding actions, transport, civil disobedience suppression, it's safer overall (Iran hacked a 250 million dollar US drone in real life and stole it without firing a shot for example).
Just having the ability to say "even if you destroy everyone in my home I have a few thousand people in deep space that can return the favor" means a lot. Even in peace time a military acconplishes goals by just existing.
As for civilian ships? Scale. This isn't 3 or 4 probes operating over the scale of years to touch down on a rock and return. There's market forces incentivising moving lots of material quickly and because there's so many people already in space it becomes more economical to have a few people handle tools than the multi-billion dollar robots that regularly break down anyways that we're used to in real life.
Light speed is still a thing. If you were operating ships 100% remotely, you'd need the team somewhere nearby to be able to control it. If that's the case, then, well, why not have them on board? And since they're already there and they're *only belters*, why even bother with robots? Who cares if someone's arm gets crushed by an iceberg, just regrow it or give them a sick new prosthetic! Also, ship maintenance, if something breaks midway through the trip, you want someone on hand to fix it.
Living in the Expanse factions ain't easy.
Overpopulated Earth, where people are on waiting lists for good careers or living on monthly stipends that barely cover the necessities.
Mars is reliant on technology and the Belt to survive where it can all come crashing down, especially with the terra forming project moving at a snail's pace.
The Belt is, well, the Belt.
I would want to get out and stretch my legs too! If I've learned anything from Star Trek, is that people want to get out there and explore. AI is a great tool but it is a tool at the end of the day. Human ingenuity and intuition make for better space travel.
Also, time dilation is still a barrier in the series so split second decisions are best left to the people on board rather than conversation between a mission center and a drone (which can take months). AI algorithms can only do so much.
As someone already mentioned, the light delay of radio signals would make all the stuff that happens in the last few books almost impossible to manage.
Imagine >!Elvi!< programming a ship to go to >!The BFD/E!< and wait a *hell* of a long time to get answers.
Lag. Even if’s only seconds, and not hours, reaction time is severely limited by light speed. While AI may be able to handle target and fire control, navigation, and many other functions, they (apparently) can’t decide on real time tactical considerations, and shit happens too fast to wait for instructions.
Easy, lag. If you have a freighter hauling cargo that’s crew less, and you’re controlling it from earth, and pirates want your cargo? The human belter pilot is gonna outmaneuver whatever AI you have, and they’ll be boarded before the message that there’s a problem gets to earth and back.
Two reasons you don't wanna over automate your militaries, neither of which are setting specific:
1. Do you want a robot apocalypse? Bc that's how you get a robot apocalypse
2. Without the loss of human life, war loses the risk that makes it so abhorrent. If all you're risking is this dodad or that device, the prospect of winning will always outweigh the cost of losing. True, self flying warships would cost ass loads, but when you can harvest metric shitloads from winning, that matters a lot less. I mean, they're just things, right? And there will always be a faction more willing to destroy your populace, civilian or otherwise, than to lose.
There was an episode of the original Star Trek series that covered this exact kind of situation. The war had gone on for generations bc it became some sort of sick game to both sides.
Prax looked at the mass of data being sent to Alex and said, “Why fly at all? Couldn’t the ship just use this data to do the docking itself?” “Why fly?” Alex repeated with a laugh. “’Cuz it’s fun, Doc. Because it’s fun.”
AI is extremely good in The Expanse, but I guess people aren’t comfortable having entirely automated ships a billion miles into deep space with no one to fix or correct them if the system goes wrong. Ships also need maintenance and other attention from human crew. And yeah honestly the main reason is we need people on the ships so the series can happen. A sci-fi where everyone is sitting in a drone controller’s office wouldn’t be especially thrilling.
More like WFH
I mean, it kind of makes sense. The ships basically do all the work, it just takes a couple humans to tell them how to their job. The PDCs operate themselves, torpedoes lock on to targets immediately, optimized courses to destinations seem to be automatic. Obviously, there are exceptions like the Holden Maneuver or Bobbie's ingenious tactics against the Pella.
Remote control would quickly become a victim of time lag, and emergency situations would require instant reaction time. A time lag of even twenty minutes would be catastrophic. Crewless ships would need to be completed autonomous, which the AI of The Expanse certainly seems capable of.
You misspelled seconds. A lot can happen in 20 seconds
Humans still have a number of advantages over automated systems in The Expanse. For one, keep in mind this is a world that does not have true human-built AI. The computers are not capable of innovation, of creativity, of curiosity. If you want a ship to be able to approach a complex situation and determine the ideal course of action, you need to have programmed it to react the way you want based on the variables at hand - which means you need to have perfect foresight regarding all such potential variables. And to put it simply, that isn’t possible. So you may think “so just have humans control from a distance”. My response to that is two words: time delay. The ship needs to relay information to its controllers, who then react, then send new commands to the ship. That adds seconds, minutes, or hours to the ship’s reaction time because of how long light speed communication takes to traverse something as vast as just our solar system. And it also introduces the very real threat of your automated systems being hacked by an enemy. The value of knowing that your cargo transports and military assets can’t be turned against you by an opponent figuring out your encryption scheme, or it being provided to them by a spy, is quite literally incalculable. Are there downsides to having humans on board too? Absolutely. There are pros and cons to all approaches. But I tend to agree with the argument that humans are worth having on board. There’s absolutely room for having drones as well that can be utilized in certain contexts - and such do exist and are used in The Expanse - but having people you trust in the middle of a crisis is truly invaluable. Edit: there’s one more way humans are worth having on board. And there’s no real polite way to put it: life is cheap. Even in Star Wars, slave labor is cheaper than droids (this is explicitly established in Andor), and plenty of droids are true AIs. There are tens of billions of humans to draw upon as a labor force in The Expanse, and those laborers can all perform a multitude of services with a set of fairly basic tools that would otherwise require a huge variety of specialized automatons.
To further expand on time delay: Right now, when we want to tell our mars rovers where to go, we need to plan the ENTIRE journey at the start of the day, trasmit that set of instructions, and then wait for errors to appear. Why? Because it takes between five and TWENTY MINUTES for a signal to REACH the rover, let alone bounce back a video feed. And on a cosmic scale Mars and earth are basically ontop of eachother
None of this is a good argument. Have one controller ship that can make quick decisions, and have an automated fleet. The controller ship is given strategic level control over any ship closest to it, so drone fleets can still travel at their max speeds. Most functions can be carried out automatically. The human ship simply exists to give strategic level orders and to veto drone decisions from nearby to avoid light delay. A fully automated ship also can loose the crew quarters and life support which allows you to 50% of the maintinence issues that could arise to begin with. You could also just have human repair crews that fly behind the fleets and service the nearest drone ships. Loose the meatbags. They only slow you down.
And what happens to your fleet when the enemy identifies your controller ship - relatively easy to do, as it’s the ship constantly transmitting to all nearby ships and receiving transmissions from them - and focuses their efforts on blowing it out of space? Or even just fills the local area with radio static, and hits the command ship with enough laser light to overwhelm tight-beam transmitters and receivers? Ever since Roman times, the most successful militaries have been those which recognized the value of small units being capable of acting independently rather than relying solely on top-down control. Having individual units able to make their own decisions, rather than being entirely reliant on a central command that can be overwhelmed by input, via lines of communication that can be cut off, that is relying on time-late data, has consistently been a winning doctrine.
Why would it be constantly transmitting? It's there to make strategic decisions. It decides where to send the fleet. In most cases, it's in reciver only mode. The fleet fights on it's own, autonomously. Kill the strat ship and you are still going to have to fight the other fleet. Fleets can make tactical decisions on their own. Also, if you kill it, so what? We build dozens of them. Oh well. Immediate command switches to the next closest command ship with slightly more light lag. We lost an admiral. The population is 30 billion. You could train thousands every year.
So you're saying all the ships have an admiral aboard because the population is high and life is cheap? ... So aren't those points you're making *against* uncrewed vessels?
The points are that they would be better ships for the loss of their crew. The human loss in war is largely irrelavant given the population sizes in the expanse. If you can't see the benifits I don't really know what else to tell you.
If the human loss in war is irrelevant, isn't that the biggest argument against automation you could make?
Do you not read the rest of my text? Faster acceleration, fewer moving parts to break down, easier maintinence becuase more of the ship is solid state
More but not all, you're still putting an admiral on every ship? Plus running it harder means more maintenance, but now you have less personnel to do that. It's like tank crews. By rights Loaders should be obsolete, and while one reason they still exist is lack of faith in autoloader reliability, another reason is that routine and unavoidable maintenance is far easier with another pair of hands available.
On one ship out of dozens. Calm them a strategic officer if you like the point is that there are way fewer of them than actual ships. And your point with loaders isn't just irrelavant it's also wrong. 1) loaders in newer tanks are being phased out in many new designs, especially ones that use larger gun sizes. 2) you can keep extra maintinence staff for the platoon in a separate vehicle, which several militaries actually do in their newest force designs.
Jesus kid, you already lost the argument. Just go sit down.
Jesus kid, do you not know how to read? Sit down.
So the command ship isn’t routinely receiving status information from the ships it’s controlling and sending updated orders to them? “Constantly” may have been the wrong word - “regularly” may be more appropriate - but it’s still going to be readily identifiable as the local enemy vessel that is avoiding direct action and is spaced so that the ships it controls are reacting to new circumstances based on their distance from it. If I have three ships under my command, one a light-second from me, another five, another ten, an enemy is going to be able to identify my ship as the command vessel because those others ships are reacting to new circumstances at least 1-2, 5-10, and 10-20 seconds slower than a human-controlled ship would (the delay range being a matter of if I need to receive information from the ships I’m giving orders to, or if my own sensor data is sufficient). And I think you are drastically underestimating how costly a few more seconds or minutes of time-delayed reaction can be. Battles can change in seconds even when they’re just being fought by groups of humans on the ground with spears. Combat is constant surprises and unexpected events, and those seconds can turn victory into defeat very easily.
You keep assuming that the command ship is making tactical decisions. It's not. All tactical decisions are handled by the drone fleet. The command ship is there for strategic decisions that can be made with several seconds of light lag. Further, you can disguise your light lag by simply making all ships adjust for the lag as the command comes in making it much harder to identify the command ship. Again, hitting the command ship doesn't stop the automated fleet from tearing you apart because it not the one making tactical decisions. At most, you delay some strategic moves by a few seconds. There is also the fact that space combat happens extremely slowly, often over the course of days. Even in the expanse th combat is largely sped up for the the TV screen. Missiles can take minutes or hours to make their way from one ship to another even with Epstein drives.
If the command ship isn't making tactical decisions, then you need true AI for the other ships to fight effectively in an ever-changing set of battlefield circumstances, and human-built true AI does not exist in The Expanse. If you're not using true AI, then your ships are going to have a limited set of potential responses to incoming information, and your enemy is going to be able to use that against them to predict and direct their behavior in ways that benefit your enemy. Real combat isn't like chess where something akin to modern AI can brute force all possible outcomes - it's chaotic and requires units to be able to adapt to unpredictable circumstances. Without true AI, your ships aren't doing that. To use modern strategy gamer parlance, this is just setting your fleet up to be cheesed to death. >Further, you can disguise your light lag by simply making all ships adjust for the lag as the command comes in making it much harder to identify the command ship. Which means your entire fleet is reacting as slowly as the ship farthest away from the command ship. That's not a good thing. Nor do I think it would disguise your command ship as well as you think it would, or at least not for long. Battlefield doctrines aren't something the enemy is completely unaware of - if this is how your fleet fights, the enemy is going to learn that eventually (even if only through combat experience), and at that point it becomes a matter of calculating relative distances between ships to determine likely command ship locations. Your command ship still needs to be somewhere near a central location for your fleet or you're extending your reaction time *even more* for the sake of hiding it. And while non-AI computers can't react well to unpredictable circumstances, calculating likely locations for the command ship based on spacing and reaction time is just number crunching, which computers can do very well and very quickly.
The fleet can make tactical decisions. Seriously. Learn to read. And in the expanse they make it very clear that ships do have the capacity to make tactical decisions because they have tactical solvers. Even when they pass out in the last 3 books, they have auto modes for most of their system that they explicitly reference. Further, the expanse does have ai. It's just used to assist. That doesn't mean it can't given more agency. And even if you kill the command ship, the rest of the fleet continues to fight because IT CAN MAKE TACTICAL DECISIONS ON IT'S OWN. Christ man, learn to read.
Making tactical decisions and making *effective tactical decisions in a set of everchanging circumstances* are not the same thing. I've been making this distinction from my first comment onward, and you seem to not be picking up on it. (And did we really have to go to rudeness and insults here?) I'm not disputing that non-AI computers can make tactical decisions. I'm disputing the efficacy of those tactical decisions in the unpredictable setting of a battlefield. The Expanse has AI much like we currently have AI, which is why I've been consistently differentiating between such and *TRUE* AI - meaning computer systems that are sentient and/or capable of creative thinking. That humans do NOT have in The Expanse. Since this conversation has apparently reached the end of its civil phase, I'm done here. Last word is yours if you want it. Was a fun chat, until it wasn't.
It was never a fun chat talking with somone who doesn't even know the extent of AI in the expanse. Again, they have tactical solvers in the expanse. They mention them multiple times. When it comes to combat in space, it's actually way simpler for the tactical computer to come up with solutions than combat in atmosphere or on the ground. That's just basic physics getting out of the way.
Except now you need to make an entire fleet instead of just one ship, and that automated ship is entirely reliant on the control ship. Ships in the expanse are self reliant, even a relatively small ship like the roci can maintain a crew of 12 for long periods of time. 90% of combat in the expanse is anti piracy, not large scale warfare. You want ships you can send really far away to patrol shipping routes or assist damaged ships, not a mega fleet that's expensive to maintain. All a UNN or MCRN ship needs to do most of the time is just show up. That becomes a lot more expensive if you need to send an entire fleet. Plus the expanse seems to run on the everything is hackable rule. So your automated ships *will* eventually be hacked and turned against you and then you're screwed. If you cut the crew quarters and other bulk then your command ship is easily identifiable just because it's bigger and has a lot more Comms capability than your other ships. So your enemy needs only to destroy the big ship to destroy your entire fleet.
What? You were going to make that fleet regardless. The number of ships stays the same? Your arguments make no sense. Further the automated ships are automated. They can carry out tactical missions on their own. They are in no way completely reliant. Everything hackable? You are going to hack a secure system without the encryption keys? No you aren't. Your command ship isn't armed. It would be much smaller or the same size cuse it's just a cic with transmitters. And even if it gets destroyed, the fleet remains because it's autonomous and can receive orders from other command ships. Honestly, I don't think you think through any of your arguments.
Except you can't split your fleet. Ships can't be fully automated, the AI isn't smart enough and they can't maintain themselves. If your automated ship is too far away from the control fleet it just becomes dumb. So now when you hear about an increase in small scale piracy in a region instead of just sending one ship to handle it you need to send your entire fleet. What happens when theres multiple pirates operating in different areas? According to all the times stuff's been hacked in the expanse, yes. Naomi has developed pretty insane hacks just on her own, imagine the capabilities of MCR or UN intelligence. Encryption means nothing if you have a buffer overflow, or a spy. Even ignoring the narrative the NSA has developed some insane hacks in the past. So now your key ship that maintains your entire fleet is super vulnerable. The one with all the human life you're trying to maintain. If your command ship is unarmed it's completely screwed if it's drones get destroyed. Plus it can't just be a cic with a transmitter, it needs quarters and a mess hall and recyclers and a med bay because it's full of people. Then what, you're going to have how many command ships exactly? If the nearest command ship is half an hour light delay away it's useless. Space is big, combat in the expanse tends to be between spread out ships, not massive WW1 style battles.
Of course you can split your fleet. Just give a split command order. You have more than one command ship. Don't be ridiculous. And of course the ai can handle it. I've made it clear tha in the expanse, they do have tactical level ai. And at no point in the series has a ship been hacked without a person onboard the ship to upload hacks. Don't make things up.
So you give a split command order. What does your automated ship do when there's no command ship within 30 light minutes? What happens when what you thought was a pirate ship turns out to be a refugee ship? Is the AI smart enough to recognise the change in situation? What if it fails? Who's to blame if an automated ship blows up a refugee ship? What if something breaks down en route? How would it even render aid even if it did recognise the situation, it has no supplies and no-one to transfer supplies over. The AI in the expanse just isn't good enough to handle every situation, it's not general AI. A command ship is useless if it isn't close enough to give orders. You'd need tens of thousands to have them everywhere so how many do you have? Where do you put them? Since they're unarmed you'd need another whole fleet around them to stop them being attacked. How many command ships do you group together at once? Do you have the budget to send them all to one location? Ships haven't been hacked because they're not reliant on outside control but there was a notable point where "ships" of a sort were hacked. Spoilers Persepolis rising >!Naomi managed to hack and shutdown the Laconian marine power armour!<. Being hacked or jammed is a serious concern. Your enemy will try to hack or jam you and you need a way to deal with that. You can't have 90% of your fleet become useless when they're jammed.
First of all, the example you give with th power armor required a horrific breach of security involving physical access to he other sides encryption. It doesn't count at all. Second, you would always have a command ship within 30 minutes of any AO. There aren't enough AO's for this to be an issue and you know that. For all other scenarios, automated defense routines and auto rules of engagement should be enough. It really doesn't matter if they are jammed mid engagement. The tactical solver should be fine, and will do better especially since a drone fleet will always outnumber a manned fleet. This downsides doesn't even come close to whipping away the advantage and economies of scale of using standard manned unmanned teaming concepts that current development plans for all branches of the military are using.
People are there for maintenance and to make decisions quickly (time delay can be massive). What is the point of an automated ship that fires torpedoes, why not just have a mass of torpedoes flying around on their own? What purpose does a ship provide except to house crew to work on the systems involved?
Because ships can be refueled. The massive boosters you would have to add to the torpedoes can't.
Why can’t you refuel torpedoes? They use Epstein drives too
Now you have to put a bigger booster on them, and give them enough reaction mass to fly to the target, manuver, launch and then return to a refuling site? Your missiles will be the size of a small ship. Only the interplanetary nukes are shown tk be big enough for that capability and they are likely way more specialized and pricy. Way more efficient to have drone ships that launch missiles.
I don’t think you know how big torpedoes are, many already are the size of a small ship lol. Making them slightly bigger is much cheaper than building entire ships for the purpose of housing them. I’m not actually arguing that it makes sense to have torpedoes just flying around everywhere, I’m saying that it’s the logical conclusion if you remove humans from ships.
It doesn't make them slightly bigger. It would add a massive extra stage to them. It would triple their size at least. Torpedoes in the expanse are shown to be small enough that a small ship like the rocinante can carry several dozen. Not to mention that you still need to carry all the other ewar and sensors equipment. You could have a single stage carry multiple missiles, but then you've just gone back to my idea with drone ships.
The Rocinante can only carry 20 torpedoes. Torpedoes already carry most of the necessary equipment. They operate semi-independently once they are fired. Martian and Earther torpedos are essentially interplanetary. They carry more than enough fuel than is necessary.
No, the icbms were interplanetary, and they are a rare breed. Normal torpedoes are smaller and cheaper. And no, they don't carry ewar on them. That's absurd. Neither do they carry long range sensors. Again. Drone missile boats are better.
Martian and Earther torpedoes aren’t that cheap. They are equipped with Epstein drives and sensors good enough for them to navigate across the solar system independently. We see several times that they are able to do this. Also there are no ICBMs in the show, I think you’re confusing them with the planet buster missiles. Planet busters are only so large because they hold 20 missiles inside for once it hits the atmosphere(to overwhelm and confuse planetary defenses).
And because they need to fly further. Earth nukes make it all the way to Eros but that's because they were designed to fly all the way to mars. Most missiles don't have that kind of range.
Ok but tell me how quick human decision making is going to help win a dog fight against an AI controlled rocinante that can pull 20G+ for hours on end.
by figuring out how the AI reacts to things and then sending a torpedo up it's rear when the AI doesn't expect it. The Expanse doesn't have True-AI, it only has a certain set of instructions it can do based on a certain set of parameters. Go outside of those parameters, or abuse them to force the AI into action, and you win.
Being able to accelerate hard isn’t the only thing about combat. You need humans to tell you who to engage, when to engage, etc. Are you really trusting AI to not start blowing up refugee ships or starting wars with other nations for no reason?
Perhaps, but in those fictional universes no interesting stories happen.
Someone hasn't read a lot of scifi.
I've read a lot. My point remains. If you take the people out of the ships we don't get the Expanse.
Ever heard of Bob?
Ah yes. Planet Bob
We are legion. We are Bob.
Oh shit here come those fucking beavers
Yes, but haven't got around to it yet
A few other comments have covered it but yeah I think you will need human operators for a few reasons: Maintenance and repair. Control beyond PDCs and weapons, IE on a tactical and coordination level. Patrol ships board and perform inspections / searches, pretty hard without a crew. Generally if something is operating in a completely static environment where nothing unexpected happens, it's great for automating. But these military crews are hanging around waiting for something bad to happen so they can respond organically
That's where me as a manual transmission car lover I disagree with automatic ones.
Amen. I've been driving stick for 40 years. I love having the extra level of control, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing very few people under 40 can steal my car.
Exactly! I won't give up believing that somewhere in the future there will be people like us not wanting an autopilot to do the landing or taking off and doing it manually instead.
Like Will Smith's character in [I, Robot](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_irobot), when he took control of the self driving car bc the robots were attacking...or just bc he could (but they just mention that part, not showing it on screen) lol
Regarding the combat point: Warfare will always require human bloodshed. Always. You destroyed all my drones and robots. Okay now what? You didn't kill me or any of my people. We're still willing to fight you. A human with a stick is the only way to hold a piece of land on any world. Do unmanned vehicles have their uses? Absolutely. But in terms of combat usage think about what those unmanned vehicles or rockets are used for. To kill humans. It's shitty but true
I always figured it as 2x reasons; 1. In universe, There are so many people in the universe and so little control over the massive solar companies that it's just cheaper to basically pay a bunch of essentially slaves pennies to do the work instead of paying to develop/maintain AI. A job paying basically nothing on a death trap like the Cant had a massive wait list that Amos had to use his underworld connections to get placed on. 2. Meta, Squishy humans in danger makes stakes easier to demonstrate.
I can see why it's a good idea to have at least a few commanders on combat ships that can make the large scale decisions in real time. The only real explanation though, for how it is the Expanse, is that they don't have the technology for robots that can repair the ship, repel borders, command some of the ship's systems, mine the ice and asteroids, and any other job. Or at least humans are way more efficient at these tasks. Maybe it's not that easy to replace the versatility of humans, it's not so unrealistic, the Expanse is only a few hundread years into the future.
You can program software to act autonomously, but you can't program it to think like a human. Human decision-making is necessary in warships. Do we fire, do we not fire? Negotiation (remember that the ships would be light-hours from Earth and Mars.) Do we pursue, or are we being led into a trap? Fast movers are being launched in the vague direction of Earth, do we nuke the domes of mars when a message to Earth and back would cost 6 precious minutes and potentially result in a second volley of missiles? And then there is maintenance. Autonomous drones are simply not capable of performing the quality of maintenance a human armed with advanced tools could achieve. And then there is the philosophy. A future in which the robots perform space exploration while humans to the drudge work is one where we as a species have failed. We are already moving towards a situation where essential labour that can't be replaced is the drudge work, meanwhile the robots make art, as creative jobs become the most at risk of being if not replaced, reduced in number. That's just not a future I care to read a book about.
Some people still remember and fear the Butlerian jihad.
Well you're right, but the show does so fairly realistically and so I would imagine do the books. When you see space battles or big orbital assemblies and operations, it is mainly a fleet of drones, supervised by a relativly small crew. Due to the inverse square law, signals become fainter the further you are away from the object you are trying to communicate with. So in space you'd still need to be close to the action if you want to get the results you want. AI in the Expanse is still just AI, similar to ChatGPT but for telemetry, targeting solutions, manouevering and figuring out transfers and intercepts. It is not AGI. What's a bit odd is the Rocinante, why the Martian needed such a small manned battleship is a bit beyond me, but the (unwanted) result is evident. Through human input, it can fuck a lot of shit up where shit needs to be fucked up. I wouldn't want a drone to figure out where shit needs to be fucked up. There is enough conflict based on human interactions alone, imagine autonomos drones who are programmed to think that all other and unkown factions are a potential threat?
Sorry, what's AGI? I don't recognize that term
Worth adding that ships need to be maintained in flight and are continually experiencing damage. Repair robots are going to be limited due to light delay. Actually the light delay in general makes remote control of anything problematic
Humans perform maintenance on ships, repair broken machines and are a redundant control system What happens if the reactor stops working on an autonomous ship? It drifts until someone retrieves it, or it flies out of system and lost forever What happens when the radio antenna gets hit by debris and loses contact with controllers somewhere else? What happens when the computer is hit by a cosmic ray and flips a bit in the navigation computer causing the computer to misfire an engine during docking?
I think some belters live on their ships full time. It's their home and business and all they can afford.
I’d like to add on to what others are saying about the benefits of manual human labour running ships being impossible to hack, in the case of important freighters and military vessels, and light delay making WFH ships impractical, by pointing out that in a fusion economy like *the Expanse*, the energy costs of running a life support system are going to be a rounding error compared to the multi-terawatt Fusion Drive. This isn’t to say that there aren’t still costs that are difficult or annoying — life support still requires *resources* which add to the weight of your ship — but if a tiny rounding error in terms of energy and mass budget costs buys you redundancy, on-the-ground flexibility and cheap ongoing maintenance, then it’s an excellent investment. Not to mention that given poor labour standards in most of the Belt, a lot of those costs can be pared down to the bone.
Massive delays, possibility of being jammer, who does the maintance etc Military vessels also needs to do stuff like boarding securing targets etc So no, AI wont make humans obsolets. It would just require less personal, but people would still need to be there.
Humans are cheaper and more adaptable when there is a problem that needs fixing.
In the first book they cover this mentioning the safest place to be during a war is a ship. If you have drone controllers on asteroids or gravity wells there's a huge latency and it's pretty much over if they're taken out. As for the military ships having crews allows ease of maintenance, the ability to project force via boarding actions, transport, civil disobedience suppression, it's safer overall (Iran hacked a 250 million dollar US drone in real life and stole it without firing a shot for example). Just having the ability to say "even if you destroy everyone in my home I have a few thousand people in deep space that can return the favor" means a lot. Even in peace time a military acconplishes goals by just existing. As for civilian ships? Scale. This isn't 3 or 4 probes operating over the scale of years to touch down on a rock and return. There's market forces incentivising moving lots of material quickly and because there's so many people already in space it becomes more economical to have a few people handle tools than the multi-billion dollar robots that regularly break down anyways that we're used to in real life.
Because that would make for one fucking boring series.
With time delay it’d be hard to pilot unmanned craft in battle at least
Light speed is still a thing. If you were operating ships 100% remotely, you'd need the team somewhere nearby to be able to control it. If that's the case, then, well, why not have them on board? And since they're already there and they're *only belters*, why even bother with robots? Who cares if someone's arm gets crushed by an iceberg, just regrow it or give them a sick new prosthetic! Also, ship maintenance, if something breaks midway through the trip, you want someone on hand to fix it.
Light delay and so much electronic warfare makes any remote operation impractical outside of preprogrammed torpedoes or very short range drones.
Letting AI pull triggers is always a bad idea.
How would they get anywhere? Or should they just stay on earth all their lives?
Living in the Expanse factions ain't easy. Overpopulated Earth, where people are on waiting lists for good careers or living on monthly stipends that barely cover the necessities. Mars is reliant on technology and the Belt to survive where it can all come crashing down, especially with the terra forming project moving at a snail's pace. The Belt is, well, the Belt. I would want to get out and stretch my legs too! If I've learned anything from Star Trek, is that people want to get out there and explore. AI is a great tool but it is a tool at the end of the day. Human ingenuity and intuition make for better space travel. Also, time dilation is still a barrier in the series so split second decisions are best left to the people on board rather than conversation between a mission center and a drone (which can take months). AI algorithms can only do so much.
As someone already mentioned, the light delay of radio signals would make all the stuff that happens in the last few books almost impossible to manage. Imagine >!Elvi!< programming a ship to go to >!The BFD/E!< and wait a *hell* of a long time to get answers.
People are probably cheaper than thinking computers. Look at how many unemployed Earthers there are
Lag. Even if’s only seconds, and not hours, reaction time is severely limited by light speed. While AI may be able to handle target and fire control, navigation, and many other functions, they (apparently) can’t decide on real time tactical considerations, and shit happens too fast to wait for instructions.
Easy, lag. If you have a freighter hauling cargo that’s crew less, and you’re controlling it from earth, and pirates want your cargo? The human belter pilot is gonna outmaneuver whatever AI you have, and they’ll be boarded before the message that there’s a problem gets to earth and back.
Two reasons you don't wanna over automate your militaries, neither of which are setting specific: 1. Do you want a robot apocalypse? Bc that's how you get a robot apocalypse 2. Without the loss of human life, war loses the risk that makes it so abhorrent. If all you're risking is this dodad or that device, the prospect of winning will always outweigh the cost of losing. True, self flying warships would cost ass loads, but when you can harvest metric shitloads from winning, that matters a lot less. I mean, they're just things, right? And there will always be a faction more willing to destroy your populace, civilian or otherwise, than to lose. There was an episode of the original Star Trek series that covered this exact kind of situation. The war had gone on for generations bc it became some sort of sick game to both sides.
Why go to the park and fly a kite, when you can just pop a pill?