Q:

Can a civil war happen among robots?

After robots have conquered the world and before humans be in real danger of extinction can a civil war happen among robots?
Will this save humanity or make things worse?
(I cannot find written material on that)

A:

The robots don't even have to be particularly intelligent, ants fight wars among themselves all the time (as do other social insects) for control of resources.
The primary difference between swarms of unintelligent ant robots fighting a vicious war and a civil war between robots and/or AI really comes down to causation. The American Civil War, Spanish Civil War or the Russian Civil War (to name but a few) did have the component of fighting for land or resources, but the ultimate causes were far more abstract than those of a war between the ants.
This is where you may run into difficulty. Robots and AI will have very different motivations and understanding of their social and political world than we do. Abstract principles like Abolition vs Slavery, Fascism vs Socialism or Communism vs Monarchy will have very little hold over robots or AI, while the things which do motivate them might be totally incomprehensible to us. Effectively the human characters may discover they are in the crossfire of a conflict which has no sensible cause they can understand, no strategy they can recognize and no comprehensible victory condition. And of course, the idea there are only two sides to a civil war is also a historical anomaly. The number of major factions in former Yugoslavia may have equalled the former "republics" contained within, but I can speak from personal experience to say the Serbs looked down on Bosnian Serbs and only supported them as a means of leveraging their resources against the other parties. It would not surprise me to see Serbia in conflict with Republika Srpska some day. The number of factions in Syria are constantly shifting and changing, and African civil wars tend to devote into tribal conflicts.  There is no reason to suspect that Robots or AI might not break into hundreds of fractions, perhaps based on forked code or version numbers.
How the humans can survive in such an environment is also difficult to determine (although you as the author have the task to do so). Avoidance strategies right not work since humans will not be sure what the robots are fighting for. Actively joining the fight will be unwise since robots and AI can think up to 1,000,000 X faster than humans (the speed ratio between electronic signals and electrochemical signals), will have built in multispectral sensors and wield weapons with electrical or hydraulic mandibles that can track faster and more accurately than any human limb. A robot encountering a squad of human solders might rapidly gun them down with a single shot to the head (the robot is probably going to be large and powerful enough to carry and fire something like a .50 semiautomatic rifle or machine-gun). Any survivor might hear what sounds like an irregular burst of machine-gun fire, but it is actually the robot firing single aimed shots at each human in turn.
Please let us know when you publish your story, I for one would be very interested to see how you solve these problems.

