I was thinking about resurrecting one of my older factions--which is vaguely similar to Battletech except with traditional wheeled and tracked armored fighting vehicles being the iconic military hardware that rules the fields of war instead of armored war walkers. From this wording, it probably sounds silly (especially for the internet's many armchair generals, who are probably going on and on about man-portable anti-armor weapons, air support and AT mines right about now).
The faction itself has a strong atomic/diesel punk feel to it, with a dash of post apocalyptic genre thrown into the mix. If I recall the old story line I had for it, humanity inventively rebels against an oppressive machine-worshiping 'hyper cult' that has a very warped take on transhumanism. To them, the baseline human model is inherently inferior to a model that melds flesh with machine, with true ascendance being achieved when Mankind assumes the Cloak of Iron, a descriptive phrase that refers to Mankind's eventual ascension to a fully-robotic species. From a subjective standpoint, neither of the two factions--the rebels or the machine cult---are evil. Both have legitimate causes to fight for and actual reasons for what it is that they do.
I try to make readers really consider who is 'good' and who is 'evil'. I have an acute fondness for grey mortality, if that isn't obvious.
EDIT: This isn't a Mankind vs AI/Machine issue (go away Asimov!). AIso AI, at least in my own setting, do not exist. The closest you'll get to that are brain-uploaded 'clone' programs, which are basically people that have been downloaded into a computer (or something along those lines).
