alt Hacker News> Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war.
We will nuke it long before it gets to that point. We don't nuke other countries because they still contain lots of humans. Any AI that actually becomes autonomous and starts to clear a nation state of cities and humans will immediately receive megatons in nukes.
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'We' will not be players in this situation. Over the space of a few generations the only entities that will have any power will be the feudal corpo-state and the only entity that will have any power within that will be a thin crust of humans who control the central machinery of that corporation.
The rest of us will be irrelevant.
Nukes are not magic wands, they are mostly only worth it for targeting cities and other very dense concentrations of value and production. An enemy state going down this path will probably start out with cities full of humans (and will probably want to "mine" those cities for materials), but its growing robot production will be more broadly distributed (and EMP shielded) and therefore much harder to destroy. And they will of course have their own nukes. I agree it's possible that a global nuclear war, if it starts early enough, ends with no one still having the ability to operate AI. But that's not exactly the most attractive way to shut it all down, is it?