
Antiwar Movement Spreads Among Tech Workers - extraterra
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/antiwar-movement-spreads-among-tech-workers/
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chriselles
It’s a shame the article fails to mention the history of Silicon Valley and
the foundation of the tech sector being built almost entirely on Military R&D:

Steve Blank “Secret History of Silicon Valley”
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

Post WWII, 90%+ of R&D was military, a shockingly high number.

Coinciding with the year the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 saw that military R&D
proportion fall to rough parity:

[https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-
effect...](https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect/)

Today, Military R&D has inverted compared to that post WWII, early Cold War
environment making it only about 10% of R&D.

But that raises the problem of duel use commercial technology.

Commercial tech being combined or adapted for military purposes.

Personally, I’m far more concerned with the export of commercial off the shelf
tech modified for mass surveillance and control than I’m worried about kinetic
weapon systems.

Defence/Military money helped found Silicon Valley/Tech.

In-Q-Tel(CIA) has been in the Valley funding startups for 2 decades:
[https://www.iqt.org](https://www.iqt.org)

Hacking 4 Defense at Stanford is a more recent addition that leverages the
increasing reliance of the military on commercial off this shelf
tech(disclosure: I have had some involvement in H4D with their educator’s
course).

What’s OK and what isn’t for modifying commercial off the shelf tech for
Defence/military use?

What are the perceived black/white/grey delineations working in this space?

~~~
ItsMe000001
That is one of my favorite videos.

However, in this context, what do you propose? WWII was a "real war", it was
easy to see you were on the good side and that it was worth fighting. Besides,
that huge ("world") war already was in progress. Right now the situation is
not exactly comparable?

What I see from this is that somebody else - government or whatever - has a
function, and relying on business alone won't work. They won't fund when
returns are uncertain, no crazy ideas, no unlimited "costs don't matter"
funding. What I also find interesting is that that was unlimited debt-based
spending, anyone who had something that looked like an idea got funded to do
whatever it took. And it worked, or is anybody still concerned about the
amount of debt the US took on during WWII? So either we find a way for similar
initiatives in peace times - or we wait for another huge war (or a similarly
bad crisis) to convince the tax payers, but also motivate those doing the
research, to get another round of innovation started with a similar disregard
for debt, cost and plannability?

~~~
chriselles
Good points.

The defence sector simply can’t afford to fund every “good idea”.

Especially every idea, once selected, that leads to multi-decade and multi-
billion(trillion in case of F35) lock in.

My thoughts, and hands on experience with military innovation, is focused on
the bottom end.

Both in terms of “user” rank and budget for prototype capability.

I genuinely applaud those in the civilian tech sector who vote with their feet
on moral/ethical perceptions.

However, it doesn’t hurt to understand history. Both the early generations of
Silicon Valley and tech sector history as well as the last generation(dot.com
bubble).

Money is flowing now, but all bubbles pop.

Especially Saudi oil money(40 years ago it was the soon to be deposed Iranian
Shah’s money propping up Grumman and others).

When money gets tight, moral/ethical protest becomes less affordable.

I put my time where my mouth is and try to teach young serving members of the
military how to innovate themselves(at least an introduction to it), rather
than paying contractors to do it for them.

I can assure you the projects we’ve been working on have all been quite
practical and ethical to work on.

One concept I push is “Its always H-Hour” stolen from my old employer Amazon
“It’s still Day 1”.

Creating a sustainable sense of urgency and bias for action, but with an
emphasis on resource austerity. We don’t have a Manhattan Project budget. We
sometimes borrow things temporarily.

The Indian austere innovation concept of Jugaad comes to mind.

Personally, I think the answer is a mashup of H4D using a StartUp Weekend-like
intro, Jugaad like resource austerity, and a YC like innovation community and
pipeline. And perhaps something on the high end akin to the Israeli Talpiot
Program.

I sincerely hope those ethically opposed to working on defence projects can
continue to afford to do so.

As that will mean the tech sector is still awash with opportunity anD cash
which will help nudge defence towards conducting more internal adaptation of
commercial tech instead of relying on civilian contractors.

I’d certainly prefer we don’t see another peer or near peer level major global
conflict.

But conflict seems eternally intertwined with the human condition. At least
for now.

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Hasz
I don't blame them, some of the stats in this article are astounding.

"The US is militarily involved in 76 countries."*

"The U.S. spends more on arms and armies than the next seven biggest spenders
combined"

"U.S. and allied airstrikes in Syria and Iraq killed 6,000 civilians"

*7 countries with drone strikes, 15 countries with combat troops (?!), 44 with military bases, and 58 with with counterterroism training programs, 2015-2017

~~~
AndrewKemendo
One of the major problems with statistics like these is that they don't talk
about the context of the relationships here.

Since the 90s, the Executive branch and US Congress has used the Military to
do a lot of non-military stuff, that arguably the State Department or other
non-military organizations should be doing.

There are a lot of reasons for this:

1\. At 600,000+ FTE's, the DoD has the largest number of personnel in the
Federal Government

2\. Military members are trained not just for their specialty, but to do a
wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical tasks that
can be used in non-military capacities.

3\. It's often easier to tack on money for non-military specific functions to
augment military organizations, than it is to create new organizations.

As a result of this, the DoD is constantly asked to do things that are not
directly related to combat in support of international relations,
international logistics, basic services and basic research worldwide.

~~~
Hasz
Absolutely, the military continues to take on a variety of non-military
functions. That being said, it does not detract from the point that the first
use case is for war, and as long as these many other org exist under the DoD
structure, the first case will be for war, always.

~~~
honestlyidk
As bluntly as you want to state that it doesnt become a better of an argument.
What would be your alternative. The above poster seems to have given a pretty
clear reason why we would want the military to take on these tasks (variety of
skill in personel). Do you have a cheaper better way?

This sound like the most efficient thing that the government has done. Its
probably also a good way to instill compassion in our ranks by having them
perform civilian tasks. Instead of everyone just being something they shoot or
dont shoot in these countries.

~~~
Hasz
Rollout the "non-military stuff" and move the "wide variety of administrative,
management, financial and medical tasks" into a proper group like the State
Department or some new group with no final militaristic consideration. Doing
this would take political capital, which is why it's not popular practice.

The issue is that the military takes on so many roles that it becomes our
first choice in dealing with problems, whether they require the military or
not. So we go at problems with the military mindset, then we're surprised when
we find a military solution.

Let's go in for peace, diplomacy and honest-to-god negotiation instead of
imposing our will on countries with air superiority and more guns than people.
Maybe we'd foster a little less resentment in countries we're in if we
stopping occupying their airspace and bombing them 10,000 feet and 400mi away.

~~~
DuskStar
> move the "wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical
> tasks" into a proper group like the State Department or some new group with
> no final militaristic consideration.

These skills aren't distinct from the skills a military needs to function.
Logistics is a huge component of warfare, for example - and would you prefer
that combat medics be civilians? Elsewhere in the thread people are commenting
about dual-use technology - these are all dual-use skills.

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Jach
I don't think it's anti-war per se, just anti-current-US-MIC-activities. Given
an enemy worth fighting, I don't think the sentiment would be that strong. Who
really wants to work on tech focused on bombing brown people far away?

No matter, the budget is vast to train up people in house, plenty of young
people will relish the tech for the tech's sake.

------
smithmayowa
The tech community as a whole has always been anti-war from time immemorial,
but in the past the vast majority of tech funding came from the govt and so
tech companies were always involved in one way and another in building war
machines so as to make money, but in recent times with the vc in tech funding
more tech companies, they no longer really need to build war machines to make
money, I mean the top five tech companies in the world presently are majorly
consumer tech, so tech companies and the workers who make them up can say fuck
you to the government sponsored tech contracts and fuck you to war in general.

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humanrebar
Are companies like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and
General Dynamics not tech companies?

Why do people think DARPA funds those challenges?

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noobermin
Of the two systems they list, there is a nuance and a difference between the
two, one is an _facilitating_ technology which just makes the DoD work better
and another directly helps them kill better. A similar difference is the
difference between someone who say designs bombs vs designs bomb hard armor
that lessens soldier deaths on our sides. It's similar to what anti-war people
have done for years during drafts, which was to volunteer for medical service
as opposed to fighting.

It's a hard decision to make, and an easy thing to say is just if you do
anything for the DoD, you're making it easier for them to kill people and
hence it's wrong. Blanket statements like these however put people like
janitors and paper pushers in the same bucket as those who manufacture arms
that are shipped to Saudi Arabia.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Blanket statements like these however put people like janitors and paper
pushers in the same bucket as those who manufacture arms that are shipped to
Saudi Arabia."_

What's that saying about wars being won more through logistics than through
arms?

If you are working for a startup that merely delivers pizza to the troops,
sure, you can't seriously be put in the same category as a torturer in Abu
Ghraib. But you're still (indirectly) helping the military kill people.

Whether that sort of indirect support weighs heavily on your conscience is
something everyone has to decide for themselves. Personally, I don't want
anything to do with the military or military contractors, even if in an
ostensibly peaceful capacity.

~~~
noobermin
I mean by paying your taxes you also fund the Pentagon. By publishing research
that others can read including military engineer s, you're helping the
Pentagon. By supporting things like Veteran Affairs, your easing the pain of
those in the military by making it clear to them they'll receive some
compensation once they make it out.

And even then, by living in the US, you benefit somewhat from the military
defending our borders and being a ward against threats of invasion. I am
against most military spending because that ends up inflating contractor
salaries, as is our constantly meddling in other countries including other
democracies, but so many turn this into a blanket opposition to the idea of
the military full stop, which doesn't make sense in our world today,
especially when everyone in this country essentially thrives due to it.

------
Jonnax
This is a pretty interesting shift.

Is it a general trend such as it happening in Engineering, and/or sciences or
is it localised to just tech?

Perhaps the younger generation is more anti war?

Thoughts?

~~~
ALittleLight
I think this shift is a result of the immorality of American warfare over
recent decades.

If the last war we had participated in was WWII and the cold war then who
would object to advancing our weaponry in case we had to fight a terrible war
again? Conversely, if we are routinely killing civilians in pointless decades
long engagements in the Middle East, supporting both sides of civil wars in
foreign lands, selling weapon systems to brutal monarchies, etc it's easier to
see why people have doubts about participating.

~~~
freewilly1040
The Cold War produced plenty of immoral conflicts. Is it seriously arguable
that Viet Nam was a genocide? Justifiable wars since WWII are the exception.

~~~
azernik
Genocide: "Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life,
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group."

The Vietnam War was immoral in many ways, but it was not a genocide. Throwing
that term around willy-nilly cheapens it. Please don't.

~~~
freewilly1040
The use of Agent Orange fits your pasted description quite well, as does the
My Lai massacre and similar atrocities now anonymous to history.

~~~
azernik
"...committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group..."

A massacre is not genocide, neither is irresponsible environmental damage. It
needs to have a specific intent and exist in a context that (is intended to)
produce such massacres on a large scale.

e.g. German "reprisals" in France after partisan attacks were war crimes, but
not genocide.

------
dev_dull
what do you think our rivals are doing right now? Sitting on their hands
refusing to develop advanced threats?

We _must_ protect our country. Let’s not be naive to the fact that we have
enemies who want to destroy us, or overtake us in power and influence if we’re
weak.

Personally I want the smartest people in the industry working on protecting
our country and developing this tech.

Which do you trust more, a self-flying UAV with deadly cargo developed by
Google or some random government contractor?

~~~
true_tuna
Defend this country from what? The most relevant threats I see to the country
today are erosions of our traditions of civil discourse which is fundamental
to a functioning democracy (e.g we disagree, and through civil discourse we
identify the precise ways we disagree, then we peacefully elect
representatives to represent our points of view without resorting to violence.
If we lose the ability to peacefully disagree or fairly elect our
representatives, we are left with only one option and that leads to the
destruction of our democracy and then our country is gone one way or another)

and secondly the threat of large-scale conflict with an adversary with a
comparable military.

I just don’t see how increasing the efficiency of an already effective drone
program protects against either of those threats. And as to the question of
wanting people at google to work on it... I don’t think this sort of thing is
what people join google to do. People interested in weapon systems probably go
and work for known defense contractors and those companies do reasonably good
work within the confines of their structure.

~~~
dev_dull
We must protect ourselves from threats from without and without. It doesn’t
make one any more or less important than the other.

------
carapace
Computers are war machines. They arguably won WWII, eh? Code-breaking and
modeling physics of nuclear bombs.

And today, of course, WWIII is playing out on the Internet and the screens of
our phones.

In the general case, from first principles, we have the automation of human
intentions. If those intentions are harmonious and ecological, all is
presumably well. If those intentions conflict, however, we have automated war:
drones and IEDs, and eventually Skynet and Terminators, and then just vast
robot wars.

I don't think there's a a stable equilibrium between these two strange
attractors.

(FWIW we have technology for harmonizing human intentions. We just have to use
it.)

