The Drones are Coming! The Drones are Coming! The Twilight of the Global Empire?

 

This clip looks like a videogame, but it is not (caution, disturbing images). You are seeing Azeri drones destroying Armenian military units during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is this the harbinger of the collapse of the Global Empire?

 

Many things have been happening in 2020 that will reverberate for many years in the future. While the West is busy with its "great reset," a small war was fought in a region of the world that you probably had never heard about before: the Nagorno-Karabakh. There, the army of Azerbaijan soundly defeated the Armenian army. 

What made this campaign peculiar is that it was the first time in history that a military confrontation was decided by drones. After that the Azeris (the people of Azerbaijan) had gained control of the sky, their drones could pick the Armenian military units one by one and destroy them at ease. There are video clips all over the Web showing vehicles and other installations being destroyed, and people being shredded to pieces and tossed around like ragdolls.

No surprise: the writing was on the rotor blades. Already in 2012, I had started thinking about the consequences of the development of military robots in a chapter that I wrote for Jorgen Randers' "2052" book. I returned to the subject in 2019, noting how cheap drones would change the rules of war because they could be managed by small organizations, possibly by private military contractors. 

We don't know exactly who managed the drones used by the Azerbaijan forces, but we know that they were made in Turkey, not a major player in the world's power game. Azerbaijan, then, could afford to deploy a number of drones sufficient to overwhelm the Armenian forces even though it is a small country with a GDP of just about 44 billion dollars per year. If Bill Gates, alone, had decided to fight Azerbaijan, he could won the war just using his private financial assets, estimated at more than $100B. 

Surely, the Azeri could never dream to be able to afford even a single carrier strike group of the kind that the Western empire deploys: each group costs about 30 billion dollars and the US has 9 of them. We don't know if the Azeri drones would be able to defeat an American carrier group. But we may be reasonably sure that, in terms of kills/cost, drones greatly outperform aircraft carriers. 

So, we know that drones can fight wars and win them. And now what? Are drones going to make all other weapon systems obsolete, just like tanks did to horses? Maybe, but things are not so simple. They never are. 

At the end of the story, war is simply about control, it is not about pulverizing people to atoms. You may want to use weapons to attain control over others, but that means you have to control the weapons you use. And not all weapons are easy to control. During the 20th century, we saw the development of new weapon systems that were incredibly powerful, but difficult to control. Chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, all have a high kills/cost ratio, so much that they are called "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). But they are difficult to aim at specific targets and the very fact that they are so cheap invites retaliation even from a weaker opponent. 

For example, chemical weapons were used several times in war, but they were decisive only in one case: during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In that case, the Italians could happily go on gassing the Ethiopians without fear of retaliation since Ethiopia had no air force. It was a different canister of chlorine when Italy decided to go bombing Britain a few years later, in 1940. In that case, the Italians didn't even dream to use chemical weapons, knowing all too well that Britain could have retaliated in kind. 

Drones are cheap enough that, if manufactured in great numbers, they can kill a sufficient number of people that you can define them as weapons of mass destruction. But they look much better than the classic WMDs in terms of control: they can be aimed at very specific targets, even single persons. That's nice (in a certain sense), but things are not so simple. They never are.

Let me state this again: wars are not about pulverizing enemies, they are about controlling them. That brings the question, who controls drones? Behind this question, there is a deeper one: who controls the people who control drones? 

And we are at the core question: the human society is a complex system, and complex systems are never easy to control. The peculiar kind of complex system that we call a "national state" is normally able to reach a condition in which it engages in a common effort, a "war," against another state. But who decides that it is a good idea to go to war? It is rarely (if ever) the result of logic and reason. 

The minds of adult human beings are hard-wired in terms of likes and dislikes and that can hardly be changed except by means of drastic and unreliable actions, torture, electroshock, de-programming, and the like. Instead, it is relatively easy is to trigger aggressive reactions which are pre-programmed inside human brains. It can be done using the technology that we call "propaganda."

We can see propaganda as another kind of WMD: it has a very high kills/cost ratio, but it has control problems, too. It is relatively easy to use it to convince people to hate someone, much more difficult to convince them to stop. That's why most modern wars, dominated by propaganda, are wars of extermination. As usual, control is everything.

Of course, drones, unlike human brains, can be programmed to do exactly what their users want them to do. But that's a boon and a problem at the same time. If someone can hack into the drone's control system, the drone might well be re-programmed to attack its former owners or, simply, to fly harmlessly toward the horizon. Of course, there are ways to harden drones against this kind of attack, but no defensive system is ever perfect. At the limit, drones could be hard-wired in such a way that they would act in complete autonomy, without anyone being able to affect their behavior once they are activated. It was the way the first drones in history, the German V1s of WW2, worked: once fired, their trajectory couldn't be altered anymore. Their strength was in their stupidity: they had no "brain" whatsoever. But modern drones are supposed to be smart weapons: turning them into dumb ones would bring the same problems of the other WMDs. With this kind of drones, we would return to the "MAD" strategy, mutually assured destruction. No control, no way to win a war.

So, we return to the original point: wars are about controlling humans. Then, how do you control the people who control the drones? Would you be able to use standard propaganda techniques for that purpose? Maybe, but there is a big problem here. Modern propaganda was developed to control large masses of people and to convince them to line up on the battlefield to kill each other for the profit of people who would comfortably stay at home. Drone operators (let's call them "droners") are a different breed. They are specialists who might well decide that they won't be so easily tricked into killing people for the profit of others. It was the point I was making in my post where I compared modern droners to the European condottieri of the Renaissance, the leaders of troops of mercenaries specialized in the use of the newly developed firearms.

Controlling the condottieri was notoriously difficult: they tended to be unruly and easily switch sides. Droners might show the same tendencies. Mercenaries are like professional killers: you can hire one to kill someone you don't like, but there is no guarantee that the intended victim won't be able to pay the killer more than you do. One possible way to control droners might be returning to communication technologies developed during the Middle Ages, when the problem was how to control the most sophisticated weapon of the time: armored knights. For droners, it may be possible to develop something similar to the idea of the noble knight who fights for justice. You may object that there is nothing noble in pressing a button to kill a person, which is the job of droners. But, on the other hand, it was the same for an armored knight when he sliced in half a peasant, his main job. So, could we see in the future something like an epic of "Sir Lancelot and the droners of the round table"? Who knows? It might happen. 

A simpler solution to the drone problem would be to limit or even abolish drones by means of international treaties and straight threats to the smaller players. It was done, with a certain degree of success, with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There are good reasons to do the same with drones: it is very much in the interest of the big powers to avoid that cheap drone technology could spread to smaller states and then challenge the top dogs of the game. So, people seem to be getting the message and there are ongoing efforts in this sense. Abolishing military drones would allow the Western Empire to keep the expensive toys its military like so much, carrier strike groups and others, at least for a while. 

Unfortunately, that would just hasten the speed at which the Empire is rushing toward disintegration. This is the way empires fall: they tend to bankrupt themselves by excessive military expenses. It is a deadly mechanism that sees empires gradually running out of resources while pollution does its damage, too. As a result, Empires become poorer but their leaders don't understand that they should cut down on military expenses. They do exactly the opposite, trying to maintain a military power they can't afford anymore. The result is well known: collapse, often in the rapid form called "Seneca Collapse". 

But, no matter how rapid collapse is, during the twilight phase that precedes it there is a phase of mayhem when the blackberry jam hits the fan. Then, the game of war follows no rules. It happened when economic decline forced the Roman Empire to abandon its expensive heavy infantry units, together with its even more expensive static defense systems: the great walls built along the Empire's borders. The old cumbersome system was replaced with nimble cavalry units, patterned on the Barbarian forces they had once despised. It was a much cheaper army, but the Empire had lost its advantage over its enemies and the result was that it lost control over much of its territory. The result was a period of continuous small scale wars that further hastened the collapse of the Empire.

In our age, the Global Empire may soon become too weak to be able to outlaw drones or any other weapon system -- maybe it is already too weak. So, maybe drones are really coming and they will become the main tool for war, while the mighty carrier groups fall prey to rust. Think of something like the Armenia vs. Azerbaijan war that spreads all over the world (and do watch the clip above to see what it would look like, not good for humans, to say the least).

Bad times for human beings but, as usual, history marches onward and you can't stop it just by hoping things wont' change. And, who knows? Drones might turn out to be smarter than us and decide by themselves whom they want, or don't want, to kill. Pacifist drones?(*) You never know what AI could lead us to! 

(*) When we discuss these matters, we often go back to Isaac Asimov and his "three laws of robotics" which, among other things, forbid robots from harming human beings. Implementing these laws with modern AI technologies would be far from easy, as Asimov himself understood very well. Eventually, he arrived to consider the three laws as a moral code for robots that made them superior to human beings as being who could never be evil. Unfortunately, we are far away from such a thing. But, who knows?

Fighting Overpopulation: Ten methods to exterminate most of humankind

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not advocating the extermination of anyone! This post is just an attempt of mine to place myself in the boots of the bad guys who could think of doing such a thing and examine how they could do it. Could these scenarios occur for real? I don't know but, as I say at the beginning of this blog, "always plan for the worst case hypothesis"

You know that there are people whom we call the "powers that be" (PTB) who can do things that we commoners can't even dream of doing. Obviously, they can't miss the fact that for decades the world's best scientists have been speaking about a coming collapse of the global ecosystem, mainly because of climate change. So, would they act on this knowledge? And, if so, how?

Like everybody else, the PTBs think in terms of their personal survival and some of them reacted to the threat by buying desert bunkers and stockpiling food and weapons in there. But what if some of them decided to take a more proactive stance? When the PTB decide that something is to be done, they usually succeed by a combination of propaganda, money, and sheer force. And you don't have to think that they are especially smart. They may well reason in simplified terms: what is the cause of the coming collapse? Those pesky humans, of course. Then, an obvious solution is to get rid of most of them.

The bad guys who plan the extermination of humankind are a classic element of science fiction, but large scale exterminations are a constant of real history. So, what shape could a large scale extermination plan take, nowadays? In the following, I tried to provide an answer. I don't know if I am evil enough for the task and, fortunately, I am not in the position to implement any of these plans. Also, I am sure I am teaching nothing to people who are much more evil than me. But here is what I came up with. The list doesn't include ways to reduce natality, only straight extermination. No "Armageddon Machines" either, I am considering methods that would leave at least someone alive. The methods are classed from the least efficient to the most efficient.


1. Biological warfare. A much-touted weapon that never delivered the promises it made. It is very difficult to attack a healthy population with a pathogen sufficiently lethal to generate a true extermination. The recent Covid-19 epidemic shows the problem: it was highly contagious but not very deadly. Indeed, if it had been much more lethal, it couldn't have diffused so fast. In the end, it caused little damage. At the end of the current cycle, the number of victims will probably be around 2 million, maybe more, but that's hardly a way to exterminate humankind if you consider that every year in the world some 60 million people die and about 140 million are born. Then, there is a worse problem: even if a pathogen with the appropriate lethality and infectivity could be developed, how can the exterminators avoid being exterminated? They may have a secret vaccine, but vaccines are never perfectly efficient and pathogens rapidly mutate, making vaccines useless. Overall evaluation: It just doesn't work.

2. Warfare. Wars can kill a large number of people but they normally stop short of exterminating whole populations. A state or coalition of states may wipe out the military forces of a less powerful coalition, but then the war is over and there is little incentive to keep killing civilians who are more useful as slaves than as cadavers. That's why in history wars are associated at most with a short term drop in population for the losing side. Besides, war is hugely expensive. You may use bullets, bombs, poison gases, or even just machetes, but you still have to manage armies, people, supplies, weapons, etc. All that just exterminate defenseless civilians? It makes little sense. Overall evaluation: too expensive.

3. Mass Poisoning. Food or water poisoning is a time-tested killing method that can be applied at various scales. In the simplest case, you can drop some rat poison in your aunt's coffee to cash in on her inheritance. On a larger scale, you could try to poison the food supply or the water supply of an entire country. The problem is how to do that without the targets reacting to the threat. That may not be difficult with an old aunt, but not so easy with a whole country. One trick could be to use a slow poison that doesn't kill before at least a few years. Indeed, much of what people eat nowadays can be considered as poison: excess sugar, heavy metals, plastic microparticles, carcinogenic chemicals, and more. But most of these systemic poisons are too slow to be useful as mass-extermination weapons since they tend to kill people only after they had a chance to reproduce. Psychoactive drugs may do better, but they also tend to be too slow. For instance, in the case of heroin, perhaps the most powerful drug available today, the number of lost years of life expectancy for average users is around 18. So, if the life expectancy in the US is 79, it means that heroin addicts die at 60 on the average -- not fast enough for meaningful mass extermination. We would need something like the fictional "Vibr" psychoactive drug invented by Antonio Turiel that kills users in five years. Such a drug doesn't exist so far, but it may be possible to create it. If it were cheap enough, it would indeed be a weapon of mass extermination. Overall evaluation: promising but not yet practical.

4. Climate Weapons. Altering the climate can surely kill a lot of people and that's exactly what the current global warming caused by human emission is geared to do in the coming decades. But this change will be long-lasting: we may not return to the pre-warming conditions before several tens of thousands of years have passed, and perhaps it will never happen. That's not what the PTB want: their objective is to get rid of most of the current population while leaving the planet mostly intact. Can we think of some climate weapon that would leave a habitable planet to the survivors? An interesting possibility is of engineering a "volcanic winter" by spreading large amounts of dust in the atmosphere, blocking the sun and starving people because of the damage to agriculture. In principle, the dust would settle after a few years and the planetary climate would return to what it was before. This scenario could be created by lobbing nukes into active volcanoes. The dust generated in this way should remain in the atmosphere long enough to starve to death most of the human population, while the rich would survive in their well-stocked bunkers. The main problem is how to calibrate the dust injection. If you exaggerate, you may damage the ecosystem so badly that it will need millions of years to recover, and you probably can't survive for so long in a bunker. Conversely, if the eruptions kill "just" a few billion people, the survivors won't be kind to you when they see you emerging unscathed out of your bunker. Overall evaluation: tempting, but too risky. 

5. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It is a very popular concept, but not easy to define. Apart from being used as a propaganda tool to demonize 2nd-rate dictators, what do we mean exactly with "weapons of mass destruction"? The answer seems to be weapons involving a large kills/cost ratio and that can be used on a large scale, the typical example is nuclear weapons. There is little else that could qualify as "WMD," maybe radioactive poisoning substances and powerful electromagnetic pulses could do the job, but both need to be triggered by nuclear explosions so one could as well use the real thing. There is no doubt that a large scale nuclear war would exterminate a lot of people. The problem is that, although these weapons in themselves are not very expensive, the damage they do to infrastructures is gigantic, among other things making large areas uninhabitable for decades or even centuries -- to say nothing about possible disastrous climatic effects. That's not what a rational exterminator would want. Overall evaluation: may work, but it is too destructive.

6. Ethnic/political/ideological cleansing. It seems to be easy to convince people that their neighbors are evil because they speak a different language, their skin color is slightly different, or they tend to eat disgusting stuff. Sometimes, it happens even without the need of a propaganda operation. The result is often the extermination of a minority singled out as "bad," with the majority happily collaborating with the government in the task, or doing the extermination themselves. There have been many historical cases, the most recent one being the extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Remarkably, that extermination was carried out by willing executioners who did the work for free and used weapons that weren't more sophisticated than machetes. So, it is a very cheap method of getting rid of a large number of people. The problem is that, for obvious reasons, a minority cannot normally exterminate a majority. So, in history, the method didn't normally result in an overall reduction of the population of the area where it was applied. Even the Rwandan disaster caused just a small bump in a population curve that later on restarted growing. Overall evaluation: risky and not very effective.

7. Eugenics. Eugenic policies are not normally thought of as ways to exterminate large numbers of people, but that may well be their side effect. Typical methods used involve forced sterilization, but may arrive at the physical elimination of people judged to be a burden to society. In modern times, eugenics in the form of "involuntary euthanasia" was used in practice only in Germany, during the Nazi rule. The number of German citizens eliminated in this way can be estimated as of the order of 100,000, not enough to have an effect on the German population. But, given enough time, the idea of getting rid of the useless people who are just a burden for society could be expanded and used for true mass extermination. Imagine laws that sentence everyone to death after reaching a certain age. So far they have been only described in fiction, such as in the 1978 movie "Logan's run," but fiction has a certain way to trickle into reality. Overall evaluation: a promising method, but not proven. 

8. Slaughterbots. Drones are the most fashionable weapon of our times and the concept of "slaughterbots" has been recently proposed: the idea is to build small and cheap drones that locate human beings and explode near their heads -- or do something equally nasty that kills people. Such small bots could cost no more than a smartphone and we know that more than 10 billion such phones were built since 2007. So, it would be reasonably possible to build billions of slaughterbots in a decade or so and spread them around the world. The poor would be the easiest to target, while the rich would be able to escape by having passwords to stop the bots, or simply hiding in suitable bunkers. Is it farfetched? Not at all: killer drones are being built right now. So far, they are very expensive and the reported number of people killed is in the range of a few thousands, at least officially. But the cost per kill ratio could be greatly reduced, just as it happened for cell phones. And, then, all the options are on the rotors. Overall evaluation: very promising and already in progress. 

9. Famines. Famines are well-known mass killers. Perhaps the most interesting case is the Irish famine of the mid 19th century. The Irish population depended on a monoculture, the potato crop, and when it failed for a few years in a row, half of the population of Ireland was wiped out. Today, the world's crops are much more resilient and agriculture seems to be still able to produce large amounts of food. But the problem, as I described in a previous post, is not food production, it is food supply. The world's food supply is vulnerable to a single factor: the globalized marine transportation system that carries food from producers to consumers and fertilizers and pesticides from the manufacturers to the users. If this system can be disrupted, the likely result will be that several billions of people would die by starvation. Wrecking the transportation system could be obtained by a war or, even more simply, by a downturn in the globalized financial system. In several respects, famine is the perfect extermination weapon. It costs little in comparison to its effects, it kills the poor while sparing the rich, it has long-lasting effects. It may not even need a specific intervention by the PTB, since it may develop by itself. Overall evaluation: Among the most effective methods available. 

10. Propaganda. "Consensus Building" (also known as "propaganda" or "psyops") is a set of technologies that define the structure and the functioning of the Western society. Propaganda seems to be able to convince people of just about anything, so could it be used for depopulating a country? Of course, it is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but it was attempted at least once in history. During the last phases of WW2, the British diffused postcards in Germany, supposedly issued by the German government, with detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (coded H1321 and H.1380). Nobody can say if the several thousand German civilians who committed suicide before the arrival of the allied troops did that as an effect of the British pro-suicide propaganda, surely it was an interesting attempt. But propaganda can be used in different and more creative ways. Typically, people can be convinced to do something that's contrary to their own interest if they are sufficiently scared that not doing that would lead to worse consequences. So, propaganda could convince most people in the US that a universal health care system is bad for them because it would be "communism". Then, propaganda can be used to convince people to eat unhealthy food, use health-damaging medicaments, refuse life-saving cures, and more. All that is being done right now, but the scare tactics can be stepped up with more rapid results. For instance, some people were so scared of the coronavirus epidemic that they thought it was a good idea to drink bleach to fight it. This effect was probably not expected, but ways to obtain it on a much larger scale could surely be developed. Overall evaluation: Still to be studied, but shows great promise. 
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And here we stand. After this exercise, I thought I would feel shocked just because of having thought of these ideas. But, really, I wasn't. What you discover by thinking the unthinkable is that nothing is too evil that it wasn't thought at some time in history, and sometimes put into practice. Also, I am not really worried that I could inspire someone into being more evil than they already are. So, I leave this text here as an exercise. Hopefully, none of these methods will ever be used, but the future always surprises you.





A comment from Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning-Druger

And I see, Mr. Bardi, that as usual, you are stupid enough to reveal the plans of your friends and acolytes. The people who are engaged in these extermination plans are not those you call the "PTB" but the greenies who have been engaged in that task since the idea was proposed for the first time by the evil group of which you are part, the Club of Rome. Fortunately, their predictions turned out to be all wrong and they were discovered and prevented from carrying out their plans. Now we know that there are no limits to growth and your evil ideas will keep being thwarted and it is good that it will be so. 

KD

Leader Assassination in the Age of Drones: A Suggestion for an Invulnerable President

Captain Birds Eye and his fish sticks. He is a reassuring, fatherly, positive presence. Why don't we elect him as president? The advantage is that he can't be assassinated since he doesn't exist. 

Long ago, leaders used to fight on the frontline with their troops. Everything changed with the invention of firearms, when the leaders discovered that they were magnets for enemy fire and they had to distance themselves from the frontline. Napoleon used to stay at a safe distance from the battlefield, although close enough that he could see what was going on. More than a century later, during WW2, Adolf Hitler spent most of his time secluded in his bunker in Berlin. In 2003, Saddam Hussein barely managed to survive the American bombing by moving frequently and hiding in bunkers.

But the life of the leaders is dangerous also in peacetime. 4 US presidents out of a total of 45 have been assassinated while in office. It corresponds to a probability of about 9%. As a comparison, American soldiers in Iraq had just a 0.4% probability to die during the 2003 invasion. Most high-level leaders take extreme precautions nowadays to avoid all risks, rarely appearing in public, if ever.

But, with the arrival of drone technologies, things have changed for the worse for leaders. The recent assassination of Commander Qasem Soleimani in Bagdad is a case in point. Targeting him using a drone was surprisingly easy and it carried almost no risks for the people who had planned the assassination. Drones are inexpensive and accurate weapons: no government in the world has a monopoly on military drone technology. It doesn't even need to be a drone belonging to a specific armed force: it could be bought, hired, or hacked. So, what would happen if a drone were to "take out," say, President Trump while he plays golf in Palm Beach?

The assassination in Bagdad has suddenly made the life of all high-level government officers a nightmare. They are not safe anywhere from rogue drones targeting them. Will they have to spend their life hidden in bunkers? Maybe, but perhaps there is a better way: go into secrecy. Imagine that nobody really knows for sure who is the president of the United States. It is rumored that he might be someone named Donald Trump, but most people think it is highly improbable that such a person could really be the US president. So, what sense would it make to drone him?

Farfetched? Maybe, but think about this: it is the way mafia works. You never know who the real mafia bosses are, although there are rumors about this or that person being one of them. That means they are hard to target. Are governments different from the mafia? I would say not. They are mostly criminal organizations dominated by powerful economic lobbies. So, why not to adopt the strategies that the ancient mafia has honed to near perfection over centuries of struggle?

If governments are shady organizations dedicated to criminal activities, then it makes sense for the high profile bosses to quietly disappear from the public view, just as mafia bosses do. It is already likely that most of our leaders are just front men for powerful forces hiding behind, then why not go one step further and turn them into virtual leaders? Yes, something like Captain Birds Eye, the mascot of fish sticks. Actually, he would make an excellent figure for a president: he looks fatherly, dependable, charismatic, and more. And he would be impossible to assassinate since he doesn't exist. At best, you could assassinate one of the actors playing him, but by using deep-fake technologies you don't even need actors. The president can be completely virtual.

Now, you may think that people will never accept to be ruled by a virtual president. Maybe, but consider that most people, especially in the US, are used to take orders and counsel from a non-existing being. It would take very little to convince them that a virtual president is the best for them. You could even tell them that they can choose their president they like. How about Captain Birds Eye pitted against Ronald McDonald in the next presidential elections?

Eventually, most government officers could become virtual. Maybe it wouldn't be a worse world than the present one, although it might be a little confusing. But it already is, anyway. Don't you have the sensation that you are living in a videogame? Yes, one of these games where a monster appears every time you turn a corner. And now that I think about that, see, I was discussing about virtual leaders created by deep fake technology. So, about Donald Trump. . . .



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The name "Captain Birds Eye" is a registered trademark of Birds Eye, an international brand of frozen food. The use of this term in this post is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by Birds Eye, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products. (and I hope you read Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Breakfast of Champions." (1973). If you didn't, do it, it is worth reading)

Strauss Kahn's downfall: "Peak Males"?

 

To the question "what is best in life?" Conan answers, "crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentation of the women" (from "Conan the Barbarian", 1982). This kind of macho style was probably out of fashion already in Atlantean times; surely it is even more so in our times. So, the downfall of powerful "alpha males," such as Silvio Berlusconi (and, earlier this year, Dominique Strauss Kahn) may be a sign of an ongoing change: this kind of aggressive leaders may be outdated.

Modern political leaders seem to have evolved over the years with the ability of leading people into battle. Have you ever been close to a high level political leader? They beam charisma all around. They are aggressive, self assured and often display a strong sex drive - they may well be serial womanizers, like Berlusconi and Strauss Kahn. But we may not need them any more: the development of robotic warfare may spell their demise. With robots doing the fighting, controllers can sit comfortably in air conditioned rooms and drink coffee while they kill people at the push of a button. It is another kind of warfare: more like pest extermination than the kind of glorious activity that war used to be. The people engaged in this activity don't need to be macho types a la Conan and, for them, being serial womanizers is definitely a disadvantage. For Berlusconi, at least, it was the case, although not the only reason of his downfall.

So, in analogy with the concept of "peak oil" we might think of a peak followed by a decline for the presence of this kind of males at the top levels of governments. Perhaps, we can call it "Peak Males."