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ewbrownv comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong
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Do (incremental) advances in military technology actually change the number of people who die in wars? They might change which people die, or how rapidly, but it seems to me that groups of people who are determined to fight each other are going to do it regardless of what the "best" weapons currently available happen to be. The Mongols wreaked havoc on a scale surpassing World War I with only 13th century technology, and the Rwandan genocide was mostly carried out with machetes. World War I brought about a horror of poison gas, but bullets and explosions don't make people any less dead than poison gas does.
(Although the World War 1 era gases did have one thing that set them apart from other weapons: nonlethal levels of exposure often left survivors with permanent debilitating injuries. Dead is dead, but different types of weapons can be more or less cruel to those who survive the fighting.)
Good insight.
No, even a brief examination of history makes it clear that the lethality of warfare is almost completely determined by the culture and ideology of the people involved. In some wars the victors try to avoid civilian casualties, while in others they kill all the adult males or even wipe out entire populations. Those fatalities dwarf anything produced in the actual fighting, and they can and have been inflicted with bronze age technology. So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology.
As for the casualty rate of soldiers, that tends to jump up whenever a new type of weapon is introduced and then fall again as tactics change to deal with it. In the long run the dominant factor is again a matter of ideology - an army that tries to minimize casualties can generally do so, while one that sees soldiers as expendable will get them killed in huge numbers regardless of technology.
(BTW, WWI gases are nothing unusual in the crippling injury department - cannons, guns, explosives and edged weapons all have a tendency to litter the battlefield with crippled victims as well. What changed in the 20th century was that better medical meant a larger fraction of crippled soldiers to survive their injuries to return to civilian life.)
"So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology."
This is actually one of the major purposes that Christians have had in doing missionary work - to spread tolerance and reduce violence. I assume it's happened in other religions too. For example, the rules of chivalry in the middle ages were an attempt to moderate the violence and abuses of the warriors.