From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper:
"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."
"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."
To me this is incredibly valid for Silicon Valley engineers these days.
As a roboticist at the beginning of my career working on drones, I decided then and there that I would never make "bombs", a metaphor I used to mean anything that could be weaponized. I realized a lot of the work I was doing was funded by DARPA, and I was very cognizant about my research being used in this way. And like Dr. Kearns suggests, it's not entirely black and white. Would my path planning algorithm be used to more efficiently deliver scientific payloads to the atmosphere, or would it be used to route missiles to maximize casualties? Hard to really say, but I've avoided overtly military applications (even things like BigDog, designed to carry equipment for troops).
Sometimes the distinction is even more insidious. I did work on perpetual flight for drones, and Facebook had a perpetual flight project that had the goal of bringing internet access to remote locations in Africa. Sounds humanitarian, but I also didn't want to be responsible for subjecting poor Africans to what I consider Facebook's panopticon. Or maybe it would have been a net boon for the region? It's really hard to tell a priori, so the best I have managed for myself is just to try and stay in theory, where developments are further removed from direct consequence.
As an engineer, founder, and investor I'll note that there's an ethical mandate for investors as well; when I started drone.vc I committed as a Quaker to not investing in "offensive" technologies.
Separately, RE: bringing internet to new places, there's reasonable evidence to show that introducing broadband lifts GDP[1], so whatever you may think of Facebook, giving people high-speed connectivity to the whole Internet is probably a net positive. Disclaimer: I helped start Facebook's Connectivity Lab but no longer work there.
Please note that there's a sharp distinction between bringing the Internet to new places and bringing "the Internet" aka Facebook's walled garden to new places.
> In 2015, researchers evaluating how Facebook Zero shapes information and communication technologies (ICT) usage in the developing world found that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. 65% of Nigerians, and 61% of Indonesians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet" compared with only 5% in the US
Most people on this site have not trusted FB's intentions with the drone project for good reason. Ever since we collectively realized a three years ago that FB's internet.org was a wolf in sheep's clothing, most people on here have been distrusting of FB.
Had the exact same predicament. Struggled with it morally, until I was exclusively working on offensive technologies ("cleanly isolating and neutralizing targets via unmanned air vehicles, out of line of sight with no gps"). That's when I quit and got some of my morality back by joining a quant firm that makes money off of other people purely for the purpose of making money and nothing else.
Almost any technology can be weaponized. It's not about the particular technology you work on, but who it's being built for and the intended application.
Just because you can't see the destructive nature of a technology does not mean it doesn't have one. Sometimes it's a matter of perspective and context.
When gunpowder was invented the purpose was medicinal, three centuries later we had cannons.
Many things in our world seem positive on the onset, but give it some time and start looking from different angles and you're bound to find some potentially detrimental use.
Granted some inventions like nuclear energy and nitroglycerin, both intended for constructive purposes, have a more obvious destructive potential. An example that better connects with your question is a company such as Monsanto.
Turning sand in to grass - this sounds like a great thing doesn't it?
It's for golf courses - there are amazing golf courses in dubai that required genetically modified burmuda grass in a sandy synthetic fertilized substrate. They take huge leaf blowers and cover football fields worth of sand with it, water the HELL out of it, and pretty soon, beautiful grass in the desert.
Grass in the desert is great for everyone, that wants to golf or make money off golfers.
Getting grass where it isn't sustainable is not benevolent.
Regarding the original statement I was criticizing: Of course one can construct an argument of technology itself not having an ethical bias and the notion that everything can be used as a weapon. Sure, beat someone to death with flowers, go on!
The point I'm trying to make is that I consider this tactic a distraction. Nothing more than look! a three headed monkey behind you!
Reminds me of Frank Herbert's "Dune", where the greening of the desert was viewed as ecological destruction (and more), as it destroyed the habitat of the worms.
I can't find a reference but there was a story about a drummer or bugler or something in an army, and when his side was defeated the opposing prince was about to kill him, and he said "No, I have done you no harm! I never bore weapons against you, I only played my instrument so my friends would be encouraged."
And the prince said "by aiding them you killed my men" and slew the man.
And then the prince also killed the blacksmiths, because they made swords, and the farmers because their crops had fed the army, and cobbler because they made boots that people in the army wore, and the lumberjacks because their trees were used to construct siege engine, and the cattle herders because their oxen had been used to pull the army supply wagons, and the printers because their printing presses had been used to encourage the army, and the weavers because their cloth and clothed the army, and the tailors, because they had sewed clothes for the army, and the dye makers because their dye had colored the flags and uniforms of the army, and the tanners because their leather had been used to make the saddles for the cavalry, and the merchants because their money and taxes and paid for the state to have the army.
And then the people in the next town all got together and said, "Let us all work together and see that this prince is never able to defeat our army."
Here's a thought, what if you can get the same substance to work on the sand part of concrete?? It assumes more research and work, but the argument has a kernel of truth.. I don't sure I agree with using that to not think about the ethics of what you do, but nevertheless.
You can't imagine any way terraforming sand dunes on mass scale might do damage to nearby countries? It would be akin to diverting a river upstream which was an act of war historically.
Ah man, as a former straight leg grunt (meaning no plane, usually no helo or even a truck, we walk _everywhere_) anything that can take weight off is an absolute God send. We aren't blood thirsty but you would be saving a ton of knees, backs, frustration, and pain all around.
Yeah, no doubt that tech will help you. But the line from a robot carrying your guns to a robot wielding your guns is a little too direct for me.to work on personally. It's not that I think you are bloodthirsty. I think the people you work for are.
If all the engineers who have a sense of ethic refuse to work for military projects, it implies that military projects will be performed by less ethical than average people. It is frightening. IMHO, avoiding military projects because of ethic is counterproductive.
Richard Gatling thought his most famous invention would cause wars to be shorter and less brutal. More deaths faster would mean faster surrenders, he thought. He is a weapons inventor who thought he was doing something ethical.
Instead, he made war and death cheaper. He made it more likely. In his lifetime, machine guns were deployed asymmetrically, making it cheaper for colonial empires to kill large numbers of the colonized.
"Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops."
Isn't that what is kinda happening with nuclear weapons though? I would argue we have less armed conflict nowadays exactly for the reasoning in that quote. Dynamite did not really allow for two army corps to mutually annihilate each other in a second, nuclear weapons actually do.
Nuclear weapons didn't stop wars, and they didn't stop major powers from fighting each other. It just moved to proxy wars. Proxy wars have been common for a long time. Maybe they've stopped world wars, but maybe the two World Wars were exceptions and not a guaranteed feature. I don't know how to quantify whether there are greater or fewer armed conflicts between states since the invention of nuclear weapons.
It appears this is repeating trope- these inventors of highly effective killing machines did not consider that the increased rate of killing would be matched by an increase in mobilizing cannon-fodder.
Some genius in the near-future will probably make the same inaccurate prediction about autonomous killerbots, or more likely realistically, cyber-warfare (I hate that term): "Shutting down hospitals, power plants and other critical infrastructure will make wars shorter"
Yes, even if you are completely against something. For example, if you are against GMO and work on this subject, you may give valuable insights (outside of NDA) to other GMO opponents to help their fight to stop GMO. Of course, you risk your job.
Snowden was inside and his actions have an impact on NSA. I hope these kinds of organisations will understand that if they want to avoid similar whistleblowers, they need to have a better management that listen to their "halflings".
That's totally different. He chose to kill the people and did it intentionally out of hate / pride for his country. This thread and the posted link are discussing whether something is immoral or not. He knew it would kill a ton of people and designed it to on purpose. That situation is totally black and white.
Mass intentional killing is wrong, pretty much everyone agrees with that.
> Mass intentional killing is wrong, pretty much everyone agrees with that
Nope.
Bomber Command in WWII and the use of nuclear weapons in WWII are both examples where you will find nuanced, intelligent debate on both sides of the argument of whether "mass, intentional killing" being wrong or not. What you describe as "hate / pride for his country" ... but isn't that the reason most soldiers kill? That you even bother to call this out shows that you know the reasons for killing people need to be taken into account.
I'm not making a statement on whether or not mass killing is wrong here, simply pointing out what seems obvious: it's far from black and white.
> Mass intentional killing is wrong, pretty much everyone agrees with that.
In shooting war, both sides have already ceded that killing people is morally justified.
And now you're in the unenviable position arguing about how much death is too much, and what are the proper ways to kill people in a war setting.
And then you get asked moral dilemmas if killing 100,000 people is okay if it saves 1,000,000 people from dying further. This is the Hiroshima/Nagasaki question in a nutshell.
I don't know that answer, but then I didn't fight a brutal war for four years, watching my friends, family, and countrymen die at the hands of a brutal regime.
Why would the engineers be more burdened with the ethics of their creation over the investors, founders, managements, lawyers, execs, CEOs and government policy makers who all contributed to, promoted and made happen its fabrication by engineers?
For the scope of this audience, I don't think it's necessarily a question of who's more responsible than the other. You're right, all the parties you've mentioned are just as culpable for their role in wrong-doing, even if it's abstracted or removed from implementation. As engineers though, we're in the unique position of being the gate-keeper between ideas, "visions" if you will (in the parlance of our times), and fruition. We're a gatekeeper between reality and the delusional musings afforded to people who aren't the engineers. We can say, "Fuck no, that should literally not exist or be built in any way", and do it loudly to stop the other parties from realizing their abusive vision. Or under dire circumstances, we can sabotage systems that need to be broken if it's too late to stop them from being created.
> investors, founders, managements, lawyers, execs, CEOs and government policy makers
Power, corruption and lies.
Those people often stand to personally (financially) benefit from unethical business decisions. Engineers have to think through all the dirty consequences, and still draw pretty much the same salary.
Ah.. the causality.. the argument can be made that without engineers the creation would never happen, (even if others are still trying to make money without ethics..).
To me, the salient point of that analogy is that the engineer designed execution chambers for Nazis. The engineers who designed the Sherman tank, the Garand rifle, or the Spitfire fighter plane also built weapons, weapons that killed people, but the judgment of history is that those people needed to be killed and thank God for the engineers who made that possible.
So, there are two aspects of that: first, do you trust the people you're designing a weapon for to use it for justifiable purposes, and second, how does the weapon itself influence whether it can be used for just or unjust reasons? Gas chambers, for example, can only be used to kill someone whom you are already able to coerce into entering it; its only use is to murder a helpless prisoner. A Spitfire or Hurricane can shoot down bombers but not necessarily do that much damage on the ground. Orwell had an interesting perspective on this question: "Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak."
I really don't have answers. The stance of, "weapons equals bad, therefore it's wrong to ever help design weapons" is a pacifist notion, and maybe that appeals to you, but if you're not a pacifist, it becomes a complicated question with certain political ramifications.
>incredibly valid for Silicon Valley engineers these days
If one could engineer a solution to save lives, but instead uses his/her talents to build the nth iteration of, say, a food delivery app, does he/she bear any ethical culpability?
Because it seems the bigger challenge for engineers is not avoiding overt evil, but in the opportunity cost of spending their time on work of significantly lesser consequence than their talents might allow.
Yes, yes, we have a responsibility to not defraud people, and to not work on obviously evil projects, and even to speak out if your employer is, say, building a bridge that is not up to the clearly defined, established standards. (which is super different from when you think a bridge will collapse, but can't explain why in a way that other people can understand. This parenthetical part is particularly important, I think.)
But we are free humans, and if we want to waste our lives on trivial things, so long as those trivial things don't hurt others, that's our choice. We are humans, and humans need entertainment, we need play.
Well, that's a narrow view of ethical guidelines in conducting one's work. We all generally agree that people shouldn't be evil.
My question sits above that. Is it enough for a moral society to simply decline to do evil? Or do we have a responsibility beyond that? And if it's the latter, then whose responsibility is it?
Engineers, like most human beings, are free to waste their talent. It wouldn't be nice to demand some kind of moral responsibility from engineers just because they can do more. How they live would be up to them, and free market solution would be far better terms under which they would be convinced to do more.
The suggestion that it might be obvious is central to the question and what makes it interesting (to me).
Because, yes, it would seem obvious.
>It's the difference between negligence and pre-meditation/mens rea.
a) you're using legal definitions when the question is about morality and b) it's not negligence to actively choose one path over another. It's simply making a decision, and I was asking if that decision can be considered a moral one.
Started off as a philosophical question, but seems to have gone a bit literal. Oh well, it happens.
just a reminder: you are writing this over the internet - that one was funded by the pentagon too (darpanet)
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf
Here they say that the design of the internet was very much determined by the military priorities of the project (Telcos had different priorities so they came up with OSI where the link layer is supposed to be reliable, as opposed to DARPANET/IP, where the link layer/IP routing is dumb and the endpoint is smart; this allowed link layer to be pluggable and IP routers to be cheap)
Self driving vehicles were originally funded by DARPA with the idea to use them in combat. Now self driving vehicles are our best hope to significantly reduce road kills. And that will generate a deficit in organ donors. Ethics are complicated.
Well, self driving cars will/might make well over a third of the workforce redundant (the brother of my wife is a driver, that makes it personal for me), I think that this has the potential to create major tensions within society. My point is that innovations have the potential to be applied in different contexts. So what?
You're absolutely right! There's a huge difference. One is a general solution to the general problem of how to move data around in an organized fashion and the other is a specific solution to the specific problem of wanting murderbots.
That said, the approach of some of the commentors here is that the only acceptable approach is to refuse to work on anything that could ever be "weaponized". It's possible that the distinction you've so clearly and correctly pointed to could stand to be more compatible with this stance.
Autonomous murderbots are highly likely to depend on network protocols, among other things.
The point being that "killer drones" are by sole purpose immoral. You can hardly find a humanitarian use for them, while network protocols are pretty much amoral. You can use them for bad, but also for good.
One could say the same of atomic weapons, yet it's likely that nuclear weapons have saved more lives that we can even imagine. The impact of war was accelerating in raw numbers, and increasing in relative numbers, all the way up to WW2. 3-4% of the world's population was killed in WW2. In today's terms that would be ~270 million people. Think about that number for a minute. Let's put it in scales of 9/11s. During 9/11 2,996 people were killed. Our scaled WW2 had 90,120 times more deaths. That number is so absurdly large it's difficult to grasp. So put another way that's a 9/11 scale event every single day for 246 years. The United States, as a nation, was founded 242 years to give that number some scale. Just think about that! If each generation has children at 30 years old then another way of seeing that number would be a 9/11 event each and every day from today until 2 years after your great great great great great great great grandchild is born.
But then came the nuke. Nuclear weapons make traditional war between developed and nuclear capable nations basically impossible. Think about what the Cold War really was, or even what the geopolitical 'disagreements' of today are. Those are World Wars 3 and 4, averted because these wars would be unwinnable by any side. Like Einstein said, 'I'm not sure what World War 3 will be fought with, but the 4th will be fought with sticks and stones!'
Did the people developing nukes understand that they would finally create a weapon that immensely powerful that it would deter open unrestrained war for decades to come? It's possible, but I think that their motivation was something more straight forward - gain military superiority in the present, probably also mixed with a bit of scientific curiosity about the challenge of creating a nuclear bomb.
It's difficult to predict the future. The most awful and aweful weapon created in the history of mankind ended up creating the most unprecedented period of peace for mankind as well. This is also why I vehemently oppose nuclear disarmament. That's how you get WW3 if people actually disarm, though in reality it'd simply likely result in nations obfuscating their nuclear weapon programs and facilities. It's just a molten salt thorium reactor guys, come on - breeders are awesome!
I don't think you understand the scale of these wars between developed nations. You could kill every single person in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc and it wouldn't even begin to compare to the relative death toll that WW2 inflicted. And to be clear it is not because these countries are not heavily populated. Iraq, for instance, would be about the 7th largest country in Europe, nearly 4 times the size of Sweden for instance.
The loss of life when developed nations fight against each other is literally inconceivable in today's times which is why I went out of my way to try to give measurements that can help you grasp it. The entirety of the world's conflicts today is completely and absolutely negligible compared to WW2. And I'm focusing on WW2. The major point here is the WW3 that we have avoided. The reason for that avoidance is almost entirely because of nuclear weapons.
Finally, it's not just peace for the west. There is unprecedented peace throughout the vast majority of the world. The entirety of Africa and the Mideast account for less than 20% of the world's population.
I did not say the death toll would compare. Im not arguing for or against nukes. Im only saying that the world today has not achieved peace for mankind.
The school my friend went to as a child no longer exists because it was bombed (Syria)
Wars are still happening today, just not with nukes. Every nation with nukes knows that it would be suicide to launch one.
Technology is often of dual use - one mans killer drone is another mans life saver. A similar device could be used to get injured people out of harms way, or to deliver aid/medicine/whatever.
reliable and confidential communication is something that decides the outcome of wars. Coordination of the forces is one of the most important factors in military operations.
Nobody said "never make anything for DARPA". The point is just that you have to think through the consequences of your work. Making a network protocol for DARPA is different from making a casualty maximization algorithm for DARPA.
On the networking side of things: interesting that ROcE, infiniband and FC (depending on service class) all have reliability in the link layer, so the telcos did know something about their priorities.
I do not think that this is a simple black and white separation,but rather a dialectical one.
I used to find myself most of the times confused while using technologies whose CEOs, mission I do not agree with. It felt as if I was contradicting myself. But then I realized the dialectical nature of this relationship which is if you want to create something better, improve something it is only natural that you will do so using the existing tools available in your world.
A great example is Facebook. There are things you might not agree with, you might hate it but if you look closer you will see volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests which are organized only via Facebook. One of such political activities one day could as well change Facebook or the world we live in drastically.
You can apply this to other cases. You might have an anti-capitalist philosophy podcast hosted on Amazon or Spotify or Apple which in essence contradicts the very existence of such companies. But in the end you are using them to deliver your message, cause change etc.
I am curious about what others think about this and how they feel about looking at it from a dialectical point of view as I am continuously thinking about this and still forming my thoughts.
Absolutely. As consequentialist first move, let me suggest that a first order principle for the US military is "Sweat now or bleed later". Better to work your ass off to develop superior tactics, discipline, and technology now than die later.
The best way out of a terrible life for many poor people.
If you didn't do great in school and don't have rich parents to pay for college, the military in the US will look great with its education perks and chance to "see the world".
They believe in their country, what it represents, and are willing to sacrifice their life for it. In the US, it's the Constitution, to which they make an oath to upon joining.
Or they're broke, have their back against the wall, and can get good training and education through the military.
Predatory sign-up practices in low-income neighbourhoods, and a systemic and relentless propaganda campaign starting in nursery school that instils jingoist rhetoric and military worship.
To play devil's advocate, we (USA) have a volunteer military. Even if you think it's a "poverty draft" driven by structural unemployment and dearth of opportunities in left behind cities and rural areas it's still not conscription.
How should the military fill its ranks? Would you rather have a lottery?
> And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber
That's the truth.
Did the engineers of the atomic bomb save millions of lives and usher in an era of unprecedented peace? Or did they slaughter millions of innocents and sow the seeds of humanity's destruction?
It's been 70 years; we've had plenty of time to make up our minds.
Many inventions are not so easily classified as innately good or evil.
I don't think you can ever blame the engineer who designs the weapon, unless it is obviously ethically problematic like, a better iron maiden (as an example, I know it's probably a hoax device).
Merely offering a force projecting capability is not evil.
If you look at world history, the only concrete definition of who has most political power is this: it's the party with the most capability for projecting violence in a given area.
Small close knit groups that live outside of large populations can live independently and do without military force. Once you have a large population with more or less fixed hearth and home the party with most violence projection capability owns them politically.
This dynamic is played in almost ridiculously minuscule scale in the peloponnesian wars of the greek city states of antiquity.
The pathological manifestation of this principle can be viewed, say, in the rise of ISIS and the Somali warlords.
While a modern state is seldom a benevolent actor, at least in the western countries it's the best of known alternatives.
In this framework violence is a key tool of the state, just like good governance, tax collection, etc.
Given that violence is a necessity, in my opinion designing military instruments in itself is not evil. It's not as good as designing new vaccines, so there is some ethical scale in the matter, but I'm damned if I can put it in concrete terms.
To me, that's the question. And people don't realize a lot of who we are and where we are is because our military presence. Atomic bomb anyone?
What gets me now, is how much the US economy and focus is on death and violence. Offensive death and violence. We're bombing people all over the Middle East. And have been for years. Tangentially, I find 'March for our Lives' ironic given the amount of, to me, unjustified, violence and death the US country exports to children and families around the world.
For self-defense only? In an ideal world, yea, invent the meanest things possible. That philosophy still is compatible with a strong military. But then again you have Gulf of Tonkin, etc., so who knows!?
Lately I've been telling myself this whole wargame is a game I'll never be privy to what's actually happening.
Is having killing machines with no human in the loop a good idea? because that's the way this is going. We don't need Skynet to have a dystopian future.
Is it ok to not have them and allow an adversary who does develop them to overwhelm your nation's outdated defenses and less efficient tactics, as Germany did with its tank blitzkriegs and diversion around the Maginot line?
The problem emerges when an actor most become a monster to win, sort of like Mutually Assured Destruction. I think that scifi shorts have the duty and power to show us the paths that certain developments entail. For example:
The reason US is so influential is its the most powerful world's economy and the issuer of world's reserve currency. Having big military is a consequence of that - if you can afford to have big military, you get it. And, also, if you have a big economy, you may need some ways to defend it from all kinds of threats - before they become so serious that they can hurt your economy.
> The reason Rome was so influential was its military. Ditto for the US.
I think people often have that twisted. A lot of the U.S.'s expansion is cultural, not military. That is to say: people liked what they were doing, and became a fan. Think: music, movies, and to some extent, literature, and now you might add software and consumer electronics to that list.
And even when looking at Rome, can you imagine how much harder those repeated annexations would have been if the Roman culture wasn't respected?
I'd say that being capable at least of defending oneself, independently, from most individual powers and believable coalitions, creates a certain amount of stability.
Who can project force like the U.S. military? No one. For the most part it's used to enable people to have more say in how they're governed, modulo certain constraints. That's not to say we do it perfectly but we shouldn't underestimate how positively influential that military power is.
In USSR, before it collapsed, young people dreamt of having jeans (not everybody could get or afford them), listened to Western music and watched Western movies. Not because US army has secretly occupied USSR, but because Western culture was more attractive to them. Not everything is done with the military.
I'm not claiming it is, nor am I arguing that culture isn't also a factor. I'm saying that military presence shouldn't be discounted, as the parent seemed to be doing.
I think you actually have the relationships reversed. Military power paves the way for projecting culture, not the other way around.
Realpolitik is meaningful; and everyone on the left seems to have forgotten about it (I say this as an unabashed progressive liberal).
The US’ prime advantage in the 20th century was the fact that basically the rest of the industrialized world was completely destroyed twice — and then they paid the United States to help them rebuild. It wasn’t until the 70s that the US’ reliance on oil became heavy enough to exploit strategically, but by then we had built an entire post-industrial economy a decade ahead of Europe and two decades ahead of the rest of the world. We helped Japan do the same because they were basically a puppet state and gave us a foothold in Asia to serve as a buffer with Russia.
Does that sound like cultural expansion driving the military, or the military goals driving the cultural expansion?
Yea, but how much cultural influence comes back to the military? Internet? Darpa. Hollywood? CIA pitches/vets certain scripts. Modern art? A CIA weapon during the cold war.
American music and movies, until recently, did not originate in any large part from CIA psy-ops. Popular software products like the ones produced by Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. don't really have much to do with the defense industry, at least beyond military being the first major customers for computers.
Defense spending is a small parasite on an enormous private market for cultural and consumer products, of which the U.S. is and was a major exporter, respectively.
Added:
Defense agencies drive innovation because they have external constraints which force them to try to procure things which haven't yet been invented. It's similar to the way that automobile races are used to drive auto innovation. Necessity is the mother of invention, and necessity is not unique to defense, but defense necessities tend to produce extreme engineering efforts.
The engineers in both cases are not essential to the outcomes. Engineers or craftsmen, or any other workers execute tasks put forth to them by society that gave them birth and education. Any person in the society has some influence, but clearly more influence is the hands of the leaders and organizers.
But, there is power in organizing, or unionizing, for collective bargaining.
This reminds me of the movie "Cube", which is about a sadistic torture chamber built by accident through a network of government sub-contractors who each built some innocuous part of the thing, which was then assembled through layers of opaque bureaucracy. It's a terrible film, but I always thought that premise was hilarious.
> Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too.
Well, given how unimaginative a leap the national socialists took from the national fumigation program to the gas chambers, I doubt there was much more to it than "take bug poison room tech, use it on humans".
There's no such thing as an "engineer" in the real world, and there's almost always somebody more unscrupulous, devout, or patriotic than you who knows or is willing to learn what it takes to finish the job, and school is not going to get in the way.
Added: Engineering is a practice, not an immutable identity. Even if you publicly shame all the "engineers" away from contributing to an effort you disagree with, replacing them is a matter of learning enough of the practice to complete the task. Even if we were just talking about what is in paper books today, it's hard to say that anyone could have control over who is or isn't capable of engineering efforts.
> ... there's almost always somebody more unscrupulous, devout, or patriotic than you who knows or is willing to learn what it takes to finish the job ...
If you believe that doing something is wrong, the idea that someone more unscrupulous will do it if you do not must not be used as an excuse for doing that thing yourself. Giving in to this notion will prove yourself to be the one who is unscrupulous.
> If you believe that doing something is wrong, the idea that someone more unscrupulous will do it if you do not must not be used as an excuse for doing that thing yourself.
By involving yourself, you gain the opportunity to do the right thing (for the given the circumstances). If quitting accomplishes the same thing as sabotage or internal lobbying, then by all means.
I completely support the employees but it is criminal that this NYT article does not mention the extensive roots of Silicon Valley in Pentagon funding. SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.
Just recently in the AI space:
- Siri was spun out of a Pentagon project -- look up SRI International and CALO. Its purpose: a "soldier’s servant".[1]
- Autonomous driving is a direct evolution of Pentagon-funded efforts -- see DARPA Grand Challenge.
And it's not just funding the early research, it's procurement like this too. Military procurement has also supported the development of technologies when the commercial market couldn't.
Again, I support the employees and hate the fact that in order to develop medical lasers we first have to figure out how to shoot down missiles with them. It's hugely inefficient, could spell our doom, and if you think about it, fundamentally undemocratic. (Gives elites more power to direct taxpayer dollars under the rubric of defense.) But this should be a basic part of any story on how Silicon Valley works.
And to think that SV has a large population of supposedly "small government" Libertarian Capitalists... oh, the mental gymnastics in that.
I can really recommend Waldrop's The Dream Machine [1]. It is a pretty detailed description of the different driving forces that let to the Internet, personal computers, AI research etc. Yes, a lot was influenced by the US military and DARPA, starting with RADAR systems and the need for computation in WW2 and continuing with the cold war, the Sputnik shock and increased research spending afterwards. On the other hand, a lot of the folks involved certainly had no militaristic attitude or intentions. A lot of government funding early on sparked an amazing development, the foundations of the things we work with today.
> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.
This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation.
This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded.
We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.
Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley.
It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.
Doesn't the recent (last 10yrs) VC splash do that? Hard to tell numbers since military spending has so many routes, but i'd love to see numbers on the two channels.
No, they are not parallel channels. Generally speaking high tech develops over a multi decade timeframe. Govt agencies like DARPA play a lead role in the earliest phase (often measured in double digit years). VCs pick outputs that have commercial potential and pour money into the sector.
That’s why it’s wrong to just compare the absolute amounts invested — it’s when it’s invested.
"Engineering" as a concept itself has roots in military application. The term "civil engineer" was coined precisely to distinguish the application of engineering techniques outside of the native context of military works.
I bet that number gets a lot bigger if you're willing to consider donations from the defense industry as well. I seem to remember Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's logos displayed on the donors wall in the Huang Engineering Building at Stanford.
Neither Ford nor the Right Brothers were military. Xerox PARC wasn't. Tesla isn't.
Innovation doesn't need defense support, innovation will come anyway. We just choose to allocate much of our resources to the military so that's where it gets spent. Later we can claim it as a win for defense. A happy surprise benefit of trying to kill each other.
All you need is people, time and money. Profit.
Many years ago I choose not to work on a local defense project. I found out that the project had ties to Chinese defense. I'm fine with my choice because I find their leadership somewhat oppressive.
Another time I saw Iranians on the campus. Another awesome opportunity for interesting work that some might not want to get involved in.
I know someone who did work for Mugabe. Hey, cool project. It's easy when you justify it.
Yes, you need time money and profit. Agreed. But if those things go against the military's goals, or you're unable to convince them otherwise, you're in trouble. At a certain scale you need to have the nod of those in power. It's a fact of reality on this earth. I'm not saying it's good or bad.
And I don't know how millions being lifted out of poverty, 10000 miles of high-speed rail in ten years, and so on, in China is necessarily oppressive. Or how the sheer virtue of someone being Iranian makes the project bad. I'm getting a lot of black and white vibes.
Well yeah but good luck proving PARC was a secret defense contractor. We can cherry pick examples of tech or benefits all day. A few good defense ones doesn't mean defense is good.
You can have an oppressive government and still have a lot of good come out of it. China is amazing. Their people still aren't free. In fact you can have a murderous military and still have benefits to humanity emerge. The military is still there to kill people and I'd rather not be part of that.
Projects were chosen as examples of countries that are American rivals, for effect and the benefit of US readers. Fun well-funded Chinese research projects might one day kill you. I would be as unhappy working on a defense project for any country, including my own. the point was "someone on the other side might have the same justifications".
We'd all be better off if the world sent more defense money to other parts of our lives. It's not the defense aspect that makes the projects good or possible, it's that defense has our money. Send the money directly to tech or research, same benefits would emerge.
We can't change our countries' budgets but we can stop idolising the military as funder. Sure DARPA but they hooked up a few universities. Pics of cats and porn (probably not military but good luck proving otherwise) took us the rest of the way.
While you are certainly correct that the military has provided the genesis of various valuable technologies, it doesn't have to continue to be that way. We could choose to expend our limited resources on more meaningful, and socially responsible, outlets. This move by Google employees is to me a welcome tug against the hopelessly chaotic military machine, and a push back against continued military involvement in SV affairs. I'm happy to see individuals taking this position.
I think that's a great idea. And I support it. But something inside me says it's idealistic and not in touch with a baser human nature of something akin to a 'dog-eat-dog' mentality.
Just because the United States has decided in the past that the only way we are allowed to fund tech R&D is through the military budget doesn't mean that it is the only way it could possibly be done.
No one said it's the only way, but it also doesn't mean military funding should be shunned. As long as it's handled responsibly and has well defined limits.
I mean, if you want to go back far enough, many major results in optimization theory and operations research started in one form or another as a project to aid with military logistics. Now those are fundamental tools inside and outside SV.
Because no part of the product was developed during that time. Just the root of the parent company is from that time. For SV it's different. The product itself was funded by the military.
Every ideology oversimplifies the world. Economics are complex and humans can't reason about emergent behavior from societies of other humans very accurately.
However, if you think an ideology is has logical errors and requires mental gymnastics, you likely don't understand it well enough to intelligently criticize it.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It leads to generic flamewars which are basically all the same and therefore off topic here.
> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.
That's true, but not really in the general way you argue. Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. It exists, sure, but it's not driving meaningful revenue for any of the big players. Silicon Valley since the mid 90's has been a consumer thing only.
And even in the genesis of the valley, it was just one serendipitous application (missile guidance systems, which were willing to pay huge sums for early transistors which were literally 100x lighter than vacuum tubes).
> Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era.
This is ridiculously false. SV receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon, the CIA, and a variety of other government agencies annually. Here is just one example:
And that's just direct grants. The bigger role is, DARPA nurtures core tech in its earliest stages when commercial viability is still a decade or more off. The "big players in SV" are picking the fruit and bringing it to market, often for nominal technology transfer fees if any. It's like passing the baton from taxpayers to VCs -- but guess who keeps most of the profit.
You're having a Dr. Evil moment. "Billions of dollars" doesn't go very far in this context. Apple Computer's revenue alone was two orders of magnitude higher than that. Military spending is noise relative to consumer revenue in the valley.
Sorry, you just aren't informed on the matter. Not only does the military, CIA and other agencies pour billions in R&D development to SV, the CIA has run a hedge fund for almost 20 years that has significant ownership in hundreds of SV companies.
Here is a list of 219 tech companies owned in whole or part by the CIA hedge fund (just the ones they let us know about):
The CIA hedge fund and billions in R&D money are in addition to an unknown portion of the "black budget" controlled by various spy agencies, which is over $80 billion dollars this year.
Agreed. Thanks for sharing links. There's also an assumption that military necessarily equals evil. Do you think everyone who works for the NSA is out to curb our civil rights? It's not possible. And in fact, it's what a lot of people who work for the government or military believe in protecting.
There's a debate to be had over the "good" or "evil" that results in government/intelligence/military involvement in tech companies. In order to have a reasoned debate, people have to be aware of the facts. As evidenced in this thread (and elsewhere), many people are unaware of just how entwined our sprawling government and tax-payer funded quasi-government agencies are with "private" tech companies and others in SV.
>And to think that SV has a large population of supposedly "small government" Libertarian Capitalists
Not only that, but when Youtube and Google block content, censor people, or otherwise prevent free speech, the common rejoinder is "they are private companies, they don't have to abide by the 1st amendment". Any company that is received taxpayer money, whether through direct subsidies, grants, partnerership, or any other avenue, ceases to be a "private company". I believe strongly that if you are truly private, and you operate entirely with your own private funds, and wholly-owned, privately purchased infrastructure, you are free to say and do what you want - silence any voice or opinion that you don't like. But once you receive public funds, in any context, along with that comes with the responsibility to the public. Despite being "the way it works" currently, this system is incredibly corrupt and logically inconsistent. In a world where the Constitution was respected, enforced and held inviolate, a company that received public funds (like Google) would not be allowed to declare themselves a private company with total autonomy on one hand, and grab countless millions in taxpayer money in the other.
Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political?
The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications. In other words, doing your job is personal and, as long as you do it honestly and work hard, you should not be faulted for doing it as requested by your employer. That was always the standard. What then is the new element from which this sort of employee-driven demand arises? Is it morality? In other words, if I help develop A.I. that can be used for all sorts of things, one of which happens to be military-related, is the effort "evil" if the employer for whom I develop it agrees contractually to provide it to the government for a wartime/military use that can kill people? Do I really make a difference for the good if I convince my employer not to do this if all this means is that the company down the street gets the contract and the military gets the same results, albeit from a different vendor? If this is so, then I assume that you as an employee can make no practical difference in making the world better by insisting that your employer forego this particular form of contracting opportunity. If you succeed, your employer misses an opportunity but the evil you see being released into the world still gets released. It just means that you do not personally contribute to the development effort by which it is made possible.
Of course, it might theoretically be possible to persuade all persons working in the field of A.I. to ban further work that directly helps the military. But that would seem a practical impossibility. Many people in all countries believe that military technology of all kinds is proper, legal, and politically supportable for purposes of self-defense or for some other overriding purpose they deem proper. And certainly, there are bad people throughout the world who are eager to use any technology that comes their way for overtly evil purposes such as misuse of an atomic bomb. Unless and until human nature is fundamentally transformed, that will never change.
So, what is the answer in a country such as the United States where people and companies have the freedom to develop A.I. for any lawful purpose and where some inevitably will do so for a military purpose of which you disapprove?
You are then left only with a political solution: use political means to gain control of the government and the military and apply the force of law to ban the military use of which you disapprove.
So this is either a personal act of futility by the Google employees or it is a case by which they cannot separate the personal from the political and thereby insist that their employer sacrifice particular economic opportunities to ensure that your personal actions do not support a political outcome of which you disapprove.
Even then, does this mean that your employer should cease working on A.I. altogether? For, just as cash is fungible, so too is technology. Every improvement you make in A.I. might have an immediate use of x for your employer but, as humans collectively do this for all sorts of improvements, the results are there for the taking in the future for military applications of all kinds. In other words, you cannot put your improvement in a box or control it so as to limit its future uses (at least not in a free society). The computing technology of recent decades undoubtedly has bettered many aspects of life but it has also greatly magnified the lethality and utility of military applications so as to make the world far less safe. And this was inevitable unless a supervening agency were to have used forcible and totalitarian means to suppress such technological development from inception. Since no such supervening agency existed or even can exist in a free society, does this mean that all engineers and technical developers have blood on their hands because, ultimately, things they have done were used for applications of which they disapproved? Of course it does not. Nor would people today working on A.I. be held morally or legally responsible for ultimate downstream uses made of their work of which they would not morally approve today.
But this brings us back full circle. In the long run, you cannot stop such uses (or misuses) made from your technical development work. Nor can you be held responsible for them even though you contributed to them in some remote degree through your work efforts. Why then should it make a difference if your direct work efforts for a company like Google are applied to a military application of which you do not approve but which is legal, politically approved by the governing authorities, and will happen anyway regardless of whether Google is involved?
The puritans of old tried controlling the morality of others by shunning and shaming and doing it to an extreme degree. They failed miserably in their efforts because humanity is what it is and followed its own course without regard to external religious constraints.
This sort of effort by Google employees is obviously different in that it is not religiously driven but does it amount to anything more than a shunning-and-shaming method for trying to impose one's sense of morality on others by signaling that this way lies righteousness and everywhere else lies evil?
If this is what "don't be evil" now means, then Google will need lots of help going forward because every cause under the sun can be used in the same way to shun and shame. We then have management by a corporate board as may be swayed to and fro by any organized protest of the moment.
Whatever this is, and however it might be defensible in "sending a message" or whatever, it is a sure way to put a company at a competitive disadvantage while accomplishing nothing practically. It may further political goals but, if those are the goals, better just to try to advance them directly and not by attempting to shun and shame your employer (and your co-workers who may disagree with you) into submission. The personal need not be political. If it does become that way, a new form of puritanism will hold full sway to the detriment of all.
This argument is not only extremely lazy but positively representative of that large quagmire of social and communicative zeitgeist that Alan Kay calls "the bell curve of normality".
"It's hard to define things, so why bother at all?" ... "Attempting to circumscribe the affects of your work is difficult, so why have a moral stance at all?" ... dancing through loaded assumptions like "duly elected" and "democracy", finally concluding with a tired crescendo of capitalist "competitive disadvantage".
I would merely counter: if we are the future, then we can't all be lazy sods, especially those of us empowering the greatest systems, information and power structures on the planet. Give a damn, it's your moral duty. Intelligent people recognize this.
> In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications.
This is a false history. In the 1960s the U.S. was full of young people questioning whether they should just do as they were told and be a good, dutiful employee.
Since then there has been a massive campaign to roll back what was called “Vietnam syndrome” — the idea that you should consider the morality of your actions and contributions to society, not mere legality. Hence all the passionate Hollywood WWII dramatizations, the Greatest Generation, etc., portraying war as a tough but noble effort in which we must all unquestioningly sacrifice for the greater good — de-emphasizing much of the horrendous atrocities that have been perpetrated by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Iraq, support for murderous dictatorships in Central America, Indonesia, and so on.
Noam Chomsky has written extensively on this. One essay in particular is called The Backroom Boys — a reference to the chemical engineers at Dow who developed napalm within the relative peace and equanimity of a laboratory.
> Whatever this is, and however it might be defensible in "sending a message" or whatever, it is a sure way to put a company at a competitive disadvantage while accomplishing nothing practically… If it does become that way, a new form of puritanism will hold full sway to the detriment of all.
Whatever your opinion of the anti-war activists of the 1960s, puritans they were not.
>there has been a massive campaign to roll back what was called “Vietnam syndrome” — the idea that you should consider the morality of your actions and contributions to society, not mere legality.
Is that what is typically meant by "Vietnam syndrome"?
Also, isn't it a stretch to say Hollywood movies about WWII propagandize the idea one should only consider the legality of one's actions rather than the morality? If anything I would think most films attempt (in a sappy and trite way) to defend the rightness of the Allied cause.
Didn't say that. WWII was a case where legality and morality overlap more conveniently which is why it is a favored topic. Still debatable in many aspects e.g. Nagasaki, firebombing cities, not bombing the concentration camps, etc., but in comparison to say Vietnam, you see the point. You don't see too many films these days celebrating the nobility of unquestioningly doing one's duty to support the righteous fight in Vietnam.
Ok, I understand a little better now. I still think this "legality" line of argument is a bit of a red herring and I'm not sure where the poster you responded to got his ideas about how things were "in earlier days" and what "was always the standard."
I think it's probably fair to say that Vietnam was an eye-opener that shook a lot of people's trust in the wisdom of our society's leadership in general. And that a segment of society nevertheless responded like Kissinger by doubling down and shaming the doubters.
Your discussion of "legality" here is U.S.-centric. Google has offices in Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Turkey, U.A.E., India, and China, to name a few. How would you feel if Google worked on military technology for those countries? Would you point out that it was inevitable that their militaries would seek ways to use A.I.? Would you point out that the Turkish armed forces' activities are permitted under Turkish law? Would you lament the inability of Google employees to separate work from politics?
Google has users in almost all countries, and even our friends in other liberal democracies do not see the U.S. military the same way we do. Perhaps some Google users' family members have even been killed by the U.S. military. This presents a perfectly reasonable business reason (one that has nothing to do with "the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political") for Google to turn down AI drone contracts.
I am from one of the country you listed above and it seems perfectly fine to me that Google comply with existing laws of respective countries even if they are in contradiction to US laws.
FWIW, I am American, and I would absolutely object if Google were building weapons for the Chinese military. I would stop using Microsoft products if it turned out they supplied weapons for the Russian takeover of Crimea. I would delete my Twitter account if they were found to be building special-purpose propaganda tools to aid Turkey's Erdogan. Etc.
Complying with laws in another country is one thing. Working with a military, which necessarily has implications beyond that country's borders, is another. And of course even here there are different degrees. You can build a general-purpose secure email client and sell it to a country's military, or you can design their bombs. Where the line is I'm not sure, but at some point your activity is inherently violent, inherently adversarial to some fraction of people in the world.
I am more conflicted about at least one person I knew committed suicide because IT automation provided by Google eliminated his job. Or in general IT/industrial automation wreaking havoc on my highly populated but poor nation. Now is it just the price of progress as people here would say or should Google employees be held morally responsible for causing destruction of livelihood for many a people.
I bet neither China, nor Russia, nor the US would allow foreign citizens in foreign countries develop any serious military technology for their armies. Even their own citizens would be checked in detail before being allowed to work on it.
If a technology is not under that kind of scrutiny, chances are its military applications are... far-fetched.
Lots of military technology is traded between countries all the time, tanks, planes, guns, boats, missiles, etc. China just bought a bunch of Su35 jet fighters from Russia.
We used to have a moral military, we championed the banning of weapons such as gas, bio, nuclear, mines, etc and we established international institutions and protocols to stop their spread. At some point we turned evil and have been destroying the foundations of international cooperation that we built and are building and spreading new categories of weapons without concern or moral debate. We are the bad guys now.
We are starting to see the shape of the AI driven future and it is not pretty. Autonomous drones and other robots and surveillance patrolling systems establishing strict inescapable authoritarian control.
The elite employees at the global AI leader are best suited to see the coming dangers and are sounding the alarm bells. The outlook is bleak but moral engineers are going to be one line of defense in this fight. And I hope they keep doing it.
The US has never signed the Ottawa treaty, banning the use of land mines. The US do however claim to abide by it, outside of the Korean peninsula. The US never signed the treaty on cluster munitions either, which have many of the same humanitarian issues that mines possess.
>if I help develop A.I. that can be used for all sorts of things, one of which happens to be military-related, is the effort "evil"
There's a famous quote for this:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Of which I believe the meaning is yes, it's evil. It's handing a toddler a loaded gun sort of evil. If you DestroyBaghdad, you've limited the harm your program can do to what is specifically required by the situation. DestroyCity is easily misused in the wrong hands and should be carefully considered by ethical programmers.
Doctors solve this by disallowing unethical members of their profession to legally practice. Programmers should consider becoming an ethical profession, because depending on others in the field to do the right thing and police themselves hasn't been working out.
It's relatively easy to prevent the unlicensed practice of medicine. But anyone can buy a computer and start programming. There's no practical way to require that all programmers adhere to a code of professional ethics.
I completely agree with the loaded-gun metaphor, but doctors are a very different kettle of fish.
Doctors are healers. The Hippocratic oath - "do no harm" - is the logical conclusion of the practice of medicine. Medicine heals, which is the opposite of causing harm. Avoiding harm is the only consistent metric of success, which explains the oath's persistence for millennia.
Can you think of a consistent, concrete set of ethics that would draw unanimous support among programmers?
I think healing has less to do with it than liability. Snake oil salesmen used to be a thing.
What currently sets programmers apart is the lack of liability. Programmers write their own get out of jail free cards. We call them EULAs.
If a doctor screws up and leaves a clamp inside you after surgery, he is sued. If a programmer screws up and leaves a debugging backdoor in a shipped product, nothing.
>Can you think of a consistent, concrete set of ethics that would draw unanimous support among programmers?
I think if programmers can't come to a consensus on that answer, then legislators will do it for them.
If you look around, we're actually witnessing this happening right now. Populist anger has erupted after Equifax, Cambridge Analytica, and Uber. NYT opinion pieces call for changes in liability law around programming.
And it's not just talk. Changes have already started. Section 230 was recently modified to make small changes in liability of web hosts. In response, Craigslist went full nuclear option in protest and dropped their Personals section. Almost nobody noticed, which means in the next round, law makers will be much more bold in applying more liability to the businesses of programmers.
Google's "Do no evil" was the closest thing I think we've witnessed to a Hippocratic oath for programmers. That's long gone now. Now it's all jerk tech, exploit your users for content and then demonetize them with no recourse or redress.
I don't think the west can get any wilder, so the pendulum is going to go against us from here on out. Programmers should be getting ahead of this, but like all dumb humans, we will sit stupidly. We will only react to immediately obvious consequences instead of preparing for the storm on the horizon.
There's a lot to unpack here, but it seems that the gist of it is that things that happen in our society are because humanity is some kind of untamable animal, and that we should all just resign to letting it run wild as it does.
Do you not believe that society is only the sum of its parts? Do you not believe that the mathematics of society can be changed, the more parts of the equation object to letting their talents be used for unscrupulous goals?
I would point you towards any cultural shift in modern society, and how it began—usually, as the imbalance of classes further divides, until one class can't tolerate it any further, and uses what power they have to reset the scales. That is what is happening today, and it isn't a fluke of the short attention span of the beast of humanity. It is a conscious, concerted effort of people in this country who are tired of existing in a system devoid of morals. And to frame it as something like embracing the status quo, or becoming a puritanical society, is simply a false dichotomy.
In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications.
You might want to read some history. E.g. history of the development of nuclear weapons.
>In other words, doing your job is personal and, as long as you do it honestly and work hard, you should not be faulted for doing it as requested by your employer.
This sounds remarkibly similar to the "superior orders" defense given at Nuremberg [1]
(Those who gave it were hung from the neck until dead.)
But I also wonder, if your employer asked you to provide some legal cover for something you found unconscionable -- like maybe draw up incorporation documents for organizing sex tourism to a place where it's both legal and likely to involve slavery -- would you subscribe to the same argument about how you should just do your job and not ask questions, how someone else will do it if you don't, and dutifully provide the legal services?
And if you think that hypothetical scenario is meaningfully different from this one, could you describe how? (I don't mean to try to back you into a rhetorical corner -- I'm genuinely interested in your response.)
> The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications. In other words, doing your job is personal and, as long as you do it honestly and work hard, you should not be faulted for doing it as requested by your employer.
This is basically the "just following orders" defense. Your argument rationalizes doing nothing.
As a moral person I think you basically have two choices: either don't work on things you think can be used for evil or if you do work on those things step up and make sure they are used responsibly.
It can be seen as a message (as you say) to a wider populace that this is all getting in a wrong direction. If government is hiding from its own populace what its doing with drones, who should raise this issue? Why not people working on the drone program (regardless of where exactly). It's much easier for newcommers than incumbents I'd say, so it make sense some Google employees would be ones to protest.
You never know what will be the initial trigger for change, who will be inspired or whatever. Take this guy: http://www.ecns.cn/2018/01-02/286632.shtml Why should some basketball celebrity and his campaign have so much effect?
Don't forget that Google is a multinational corporation, whereas there is no multinational government with political control by the people.
Google supporting American military may have negative effects on Google the corporation, especially considering that the rest of the world is a bigger economy than the US.
> Don't forget that Google is a multinational corporation
Google (and it's parent, Alphabet) is a US corporation, predominantly controlled by a pair of American individuals, with overseas operations and subsidiaries.
It's “multinational” in much the same way that the CIA is.
There are still people living who, in the middle of the last century condemned other people to death for only doing their jobs. Of course, a future AI may decide to simulate our reality and torture you for a subjective eternity if you do not do everything in your power in this reality to bring that AI into existence. You plays your cards and you takes your chances, but in general its simpler if you try to do what you honestly believe is morally right. And if you honestly believe that the right thing to do is pummel our society with shitty advertising then please do your very best.
Thank god, some sense! It was driving me crazy with how many irrational positions that people in this thread are holding without considering their orientation to the product (AI) and their relationship to the employer.
Something I would add is that a lot of people don't understand how fundamental military R&D is to the collective progression of knowledge and technology. Take almost any common technology that we use today (computers, gps, rockets, airplanes, cell phones, radios, the internet, etc) and you will find it came from military R&D and use in war.
Since AI and all its related parts are the new technological hotness, to put it mildly, it only makes sense that Google, one of the companies on the forefront of this technology, would work with the government/military to do research and find ways to apply it with their scope.
Part of the reason so much stuff comes out of military research is simply that the military has such a huge budget it can spend it on R&D.
There are definitely useful dual use technologies. But there's also a lot of military research that is almost strictly for military. Nuclear weapons research goes beyond the stuff needed for power generation, for example. Money that could have went into research in more stable, safer power generation instead went into how to make nukes small enough to be used by infantry on the battlefield
The military helps a lot by being a huge customer for a lot of this tech, but we can also cut out the middle man and just spend on r&d directly in some cases!
By discussing the morality of weapons research in a world where we already have civilization-ending technology ,we can maybe reorient ourselves to spending directly on progress in more cases. Without needing to have a military application to justify it.
This happened in the past with the neutron bomb, perhaps it can happen again with tech that could be used to help solidify a police state
There is no logical connective in your implied argument. Just because A is trying to buy from B does not mean that B should sell things to A, even if A's spending would increase the quality of B's product.
Since we live in a market driven economy, the government (A) will always find a way to buy what they want. So if Google (B) doesn't supply the demand, the customer will just go somewhere else. So it is completely illogical for Goolge to move away. They are an extremely powerful business and are subject to the rules of business.
This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography (and especially as a large part of the latter subject area, invested heavily in fundamental, theoretical research). Not saying that I disagree with the employees' opinion, just that DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research shouldn't be viewed as a necessarily bad thing. Many other major powers have heavily invested in AI across all fronts (including military applications), and it would be stupid for the US to not have one of its' largest strategic assets to not be part of the process.
The classification of cryptography as munitions was an interesting choice. The first amendment may protect domestic encryption capabilities as stated by the wikipedia article. From a legal standpoint, does encryption being classified as munitions also put it into second amendment territory? As information becomes weaponized, it's an interesting thought. The first amendment is arguably more vulnerable these days, so I wonder if perhaps a second amendment argument could be made in support of domestic encryption. It certainly would help with marketing the argument to a certain segment of the population.
It depends how you look at it. What was the purpose. Presumably after fighting in the Revolutionary War the goal was not to give people hunting privileges, they had something else in mind. From that point of view, maybe RPGs should be allowed, but so should attack helicopters, surveillance capabilities, private spy satellites, etc.
> IANAL but I’m pretty sure the second amendment only applies to guns; you can’t walk around with an RPG on your shoulder.
Surprisingly perhaps you can buy a military grade flamethrower complete with a napalm package: https://throwflame.com/ it's not even classified as a firearm, and is illegal in only two states I think.
This has always been my way of looking at the 2A. It's clearly intended to give citizens the rights and tools to fight wars, otherwise it wouldn't mention it along with militias. Thus, it does seem logical that it extends to armaments of war, such as knives, firearms, artillery, bombs, etc (perhaps even hacking tools).
I'm a gun owner myself, and I've (long ago) taken the stance that the 2A isn't really compatible with modern life, as the people who originally wrote it could not have anticipated the weapons militaries deploy today. It makes sense in my mind that it is Congress' responsibility to regulate what it reasonable weapons for civilized society.
There's a reason you can't just walk into a Wal-Mart and walk out with a machine gun, or a rocket launcher.
That said, I don't much care for the fact that the requirement to have legal access to machine guns is "be rich enough to buy your way around the law".
Personally, I do think we need a complete re-work of the way we treat weapons to reflect the realities of the modern world.
(1) We have four hundred million weapons in the United States. It is horribly negligent that safe weapon handling is not taught in schools, at multiple levels. Also a good touchpoint to get police interacting positively with the community.
(2) The current background check system should be replaced with a Swiss-style one; e.g., you get a code, valid for say a week or two, that any seller can use to verify that you have passed a background check.
This doesn't create a de-facto registry, so no problem getting gun owners (or the NRA) to go for this one.
(4) A red-flag law that allows immediate family members and healthcare professionals to temporarily bar an individual from purchasing weapons, with safeguards in-place to keep bad actors from abusing the system (e.g., a psychiatrist that just reports all of his patients to the system because he opposes gun ownership).
(5) Removing gun rights only in the case of violent crime. Right now, in most states, misdemeanor assault won't cost you your gun rights, but a felony for tax evasion will. That's ass-backwards.
(6) Machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and the like should be available with a license. You really need to be able to show that you can handle these things safely. Right now, it's just "be rich".
(7) Treat short-barreled rifles and shotguns as normal firearms, and silencers like any other accessory.
(8) Concealed-carry should be the same for police as it is for normal citizens. Same licensing requirements: a one-day course, including a test on safe weapon handling. This also ends gun-free zones: if you have a license, you can carry wherever you want.
(9) Open carry needs to work differently for urban and rural areas. The above permit will allow you to open-carry a pistol in an urban area. Rifles, no. Put it in a case. In the countryside, open carry just makes sense.
(10) Actually prosecute straw sellers. Buy a gun for somebody that can't legally buy one on their own, you permanently lose your gun rights, plus whatever punishment makes sense.
(11) Secure storage requirements. If one of your weapons is stolen and used for a crime, you are legally an accessory if you can not demonstrate that you took reasonable measures to store the weapon securely (e.g., a gun safe or lockable case). This doesn't require police inspections, but provides a strong incentive for personal responsibility.
All of this would enjoy massive support from gun owners, and address a lot of existing problems.
Never really thought about it. But it makes sense to cut a "gap" in the forest using fire, to prevent a fire from crossing the gap. Once burned, something aint gonna burn again...
> What use does a flamethrower have though besides burning buildings, that a normal gun wouldn't?
It can be more effective at clearing bunkers and closed rooms? The military were using these in WWII for trenches, bunkers, clearing brush. My friend's grandpa in US was operating one in the Pacific during WWII.
I just brought it was an example how something potentially more deadly than guns or RPGs is not much regulated and how laws are not very rational sometimes.
I recently purchased the Federalist Papers so I could have a better understanding of "how" to read it, what the context was, and what types of discussions to anticipate having with those who'd like to look at it differently
And what have you learned for those of us who haven’t read the federalist papers?
Also, why do they need to be purchased? Isn’t that information in the public domain? Surely enough time has passed and Alexander Hamilton’s family don’t need to continue to profit from it?
They don't need to be purchased(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1404). Some people still read physical books, though, which generally requires purchasing if they wish to keep the book.
Can’t speak for the parent, but I buy public domain books because it tends to be cheaper than the paper and toner required to print it. And it looks nicer.
IAANAL but I'm pretty sure the second amendment is actually really vague in terms of what it refers to, and has actually been tested in court less often than one might think.
How it's written I personally think you should be able to buy any weapon available on the open market. Or at least any weapon that could realistically be used by an infantryman (as the wording is "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,."
I'd rather have a new amendment then have judges be able to decide what the definition of arms is. Slippery slope. They really could one day decide that 'arms' is only muskets, or even just knives.
Broadly speaking, that's been the holding of the courts since 1939.
U.S. v. Miller loosely established the test (later solidified in 2008's Heller v DC) that weapons commonly used in militia service are inherently deserving of second amendment protections.
Miller, a known mobster who was caught with a sawed off shotgun lost his case because
a) the military testified that they had never used sawed off shotguns, so they were not useful to a military, ergo a militia (which was a lie -- they had used them, and found them useful for trench-clearing)
b) Miller's attorney was not very good, and didn't even challenge that testimony, much less so by totally disproving it -- I offer a little sympathy here as they didn't have Google at the time
Also noteworthy, Miller was actually dead when the decision came down, as he'd been murdered, and because /shrug, the trial kept going, but the defense (for obvious reasons) quit trying. He was sentenced in absentia.
You say solidified, but it was a 5-4 ruling. To determine if handguns could be banned by the city. And an 'arm' that has been used by infantry forces for generations.
Which I find just insane. People say no one wants to take Americans guns rights away, but we were literally one vote from effectively doing so.
Except you can own an RPG in the US... It's an NFA classified destructive device. You can also own cannons, tanks, or attack helicopters if you have the money.
"well-regulated militia," but it's pretty much an open question how much that actually has to do with the right described in the second clause. Gun rights activists tend to down-play that first bit, as it implies a collective perspective that they find conceptually incompatible with unlimited individual gun ownership rights.
That's not necessarily true. The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd amendment only prohibits the federal government from "infringing" on your right to bear arms, and not the states.
> The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd amendment only prohibits the federal government from "infringing" on your right to bear arms, and not the states.
This was true only between 2008 and 2010. In 2010, the Supreme Court clarified that it was incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment.
Yes, it likely does. With English lacking a gender-neutral pronoun, "he" or "him" or "his" historically did not necessarily imply the male sex, depending on context. As "man" can refer to all of humankind, again it's a matter of context.
Yet the actual second amendment seems to avoid the problem as far as I can see.
Edit: And of all the second amendment issues that could be argued, I somehow picked this one.
I wish this was the only surprising bit in the constitution of Alabama. The section outlawing interracial marriage was only removed in 2000, and it still contains a section mandating segregated public schools.
To be fair, militias of the day weren't generally standing militias, and needed to be mustered.
We do have definitions as to what militias are informed to us by writings of the founders, the federalist papers, previous drafts of the second amendment and, failing that, codified by law in 10 US Code § 311. The definition of militia there ("consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard") will likely have been expanded by our recent advances in military equality.
Some context into the mindset and beliefs of the people who penned the original amendment is helpful in this case, but you find very little in support of the level of control that the anti-2A people want.
Gun rights antagonists tend to downplay that bit, as it implies an individual perspective that they find conceptually incompatible with tightly-controlled gun ownership permissions.
They also downplay that in every case of a gun being used in some criminal way, numerous laws and regulations are already being broken. So what difference will more regulations make? The only thing that could possibly give the gun-control people what they really want is total confiscation of all guns, and even if that were somehow possible there would be a civil war over that if it were to be seriously attempted.
> The only thing that could possibly give the gun-control people what they really want is total confiscation of all guns
Strawmen are so unhelpful in reasonable debate.
Not all gun control advocates are either anti-second amendment, nor in favor of eliminating all guns. To say otherwise, creating a false black/white dichotomy in the gun debate, does a massive disservice to both gun advocates and gun control proponents.
Ironically, by making the choice "all guns" or "no guns", gun advocates themselves are forcing the "no guns" option to the center of the debate. As a wave of frustrated anti-gun youth become voters and reasonable political moderates look at options to "protect the children", I really think it's in gun proponents' best interests to provide a better alternative than "do nothing" on one side and "civil war" on the other.
It ceases to be a strawman when it's on a sign held by protestors acting in good faith[1].
At the end of the day, these stances, even the "moderate" ones you mention, are irreconcilable all the way down to first principles. If you are for gun control, you are necessarily for measures that will restrict the right to bear arms as it is recognized today, some more, some less, but restrictions on the right all the same.
Of course some gun control advocates want a "we've come to collect your guns" law. I never said that no one holds extreme positions.
But that does not mean that everyone holds extreme positions, which is what you claimed.
Arguing that the extremes are the only options is a problem.
How productive would health debates be if the only two options presented were veganism and paleo? If the only sex ed options are abstinence or polyamory?
There must be room for compromise, or there is no debate, only argumentation.
The problem is that the "compromise" touted by gun control advocates is entirely one-sided - more restrictions, no concessions. No quid-pro-quo, only further restrictions on the right.
What concessions would gun rights advocates accept in order to allow some restrictions? What's there left to give on this issue that wouldn't undermine any controls.
Say, for example, I wanted gun owners/users to be required to be as responsible as car users, i.e. pass a test, maintain a license and registration for weapons and weapon users, and hold liability insurance to cover damage either intentional or accidental (that would obviously scale with the likelihood and amount of damage the gun can do). What can gun control advocates give that will get that done?
I think part of the reason the gun debate can be one sided from the "control" side is that the US already is quite far to the "rights" side of the spectrum, relative to the rest of the developed world. It can be difficult to see where we could plausibly move further in that direction without causing more of the problems we're (hopefully) all trying to solve: unnecessary bloodshed.
In your example, since we now have a mandatory testing/licensing scheme and insurance, I see no reason why CCW's countrywide shouldn't become shall-issue. There should also be a stipulation that licensing is a thing you grant to people, not individual weapons.
Another example I floated in previous threads is surfacing psychological issues in NICS checks (stuff like certain diseases or involuntary holds) and granting access to that system to everyday people rather than just retailers.
agar said that not all gun control advocates want to repeal the second amendment, not that there aren't any gun control advocates who want to repeal the second amendment.
There's a school of thought that the word "arms" in the Constitution might have referred mainly to sidearms, not to canons, catapults, warships, etc. The theory is that there were other words like "artillery" to describe larger weapons.
>"Justice Scalia also wrote:
“It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service — M-16 rifles and the like — may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.”
I think for a weapon to be 'compliant' with US's second amendment a couple of criteria must be met
a) must be in current wide use in military
b) must be capable of being carried by a single person (which is why tanks and fighter jets will not qualify)
This follows form 'individual' focus of the bill of right.
c) must be capable to aim it at a single person (which is why explosive or RPGs would not qualify).
This follows from the notion that Bill of Right in general, does not condone collateral damage or collateral effect.
As this is Individual's right, and therefore presumes individual's responsibility.
This school only makes sense if you throw out the entire section that mentions a well regulated militia. A militia would be expected to have artillery.
The 2nd amendment doesn't apply to foreigners. Classifying encryption as a munition meant that I have never truthfully answered all the visa waiver questions on entering the US.
Fischer v Massachussetts[1] (and other cases won by the second amendment foundation) holds that resident aliens are counted amongst "the people" for purposes of second amendment protection (and other rights too!)
Then there may be a de facto restriction against the exercise of such a right by such a person, as one needs to have a permanent address to comply with the laws as they are currently interpreted.
does encryption being classified as munitions also put it into second amendment territory?
It doesn't much matter. Even if somebody made the case that "crypto is a form of 'Arms', subject to 2A protection," the 2A doesn't grant an unregulated right to own whatever "arms" one chooses. All the rights granted by the Constitution are subject to reasonable regulation.
So, Congress could simply legislate a restriction on crypto, much as they have done with machine guns, grenades, and nukes.
It could be argued that the 2nd amendment was put in place to ensure a means of the citizenry to overthrow the government (as an absolute check on an unjust government). Unfortunately it's now just a vestige of an older time and the 2nd amendment only serves to protect the rights of gun hobbyists.
The guns that a person are allowed to bear are nowhere near sufficient to take on the US military, and the modern arms such as encryption and freedom from surveillance are not even guaranteed by the 2nd amendment.
>The guns that a person are allowed to bear are nowhere near sufficient to take on the US military,
You're getting into spherical cow[1] territory if you think the US citizenry couldn't defeat the US military.
The US military will not be fighting the US citizenry in a hypothetical clean room, it'll be fighting in America. Who are you going to bomb, who are you going to strafe, when your opposition can quietly fade into the populace that provides your material?
You can do a lot of damage with IEDs, but you can’t overthrow the government with IEDs.
Look at Turkey. The primary tool was encrypted communications and information dissemination. That’s modern power that citizens should have. Right now power comes from information and the preservation of speech and private communications, not a few handguns and rifles (or IEDs).
When the 2nd amendment was written a gun was relatively way more powerful than it is in today’s world. If you had a group of men with guns you were basically on par with the government military.
I believe he's referring to the Taliban's ability to hold off two modern armies (USSR in the 80s, USA in the 00s) with a much more basic arsenal than either super-power brought to bear.
380 million Americans, 2 million members of the military.
Unless the US were to nuke itself, given the geography, a motivated citizenry could easily take on the US military. Not a scenario I want to imagine, but the US military has troubles in Afghanistan and Iraq — imagine that kind of conflict in the US. Just look at rebels in Syria to see this on a smaller scale.
"Well regulated" in it's historical context doesn't mean anything close to what we think of as "regulation" today. The phrase means "functional" or "functioning". E.g. “If a liberal Education has formed in us well-regulated Appetites and worthy Inclinations.”,
or "The equation of time … is the adjustment of the difference of time as shown by a well-regulated clock and a true sun dial.”
Stop quoting that case. That was SCOTUS upholding the right of the government to clamp down on speech that encouraged draft dodging or could even be marginally interpreted as disagreeing with it during wartime.
It ain't Dred Scott dumb, but it's up there in stupidity and retarded law.
Well regulated doesn't mean the feds get to control the details of what the militia can use either. The militia is every able-bodied 18-47 year old. The regulated part implies a command structure which the National Guard provides.
>The regulated part implies a command structure which the National Guard provides.
That's completely wrong. Each of the 1st ten Amendments - The Bill of Rights - enumerates rights of the individual against government power. Its absolutely absurd to argue that the 2nd amendment somehow refers to a government commanded and organized military body and not to the right of citizens to remained armed to prevent the government from getting out of line.
I'm not sure what case you're thinking of, because I didn't explicitly mention one.
Chaplinsky v. NH was in 1942 and had nothing to do with draft dodging.
Since then, the courts have ruled inconsistently on the matter. The only common thread is the courts mostly agree that some restriction on speech is permissible - where that line lays is very much up for debate.
WRT the militia - the government disagrees with your assertion. A random citizen cannot go into the gun store and buy a machine gun, or grenades. Special (and expensive) permitting is required. If you're contention is that these restrictions are unConstitutional, I'm not really sure we should bother debating the point.
Regulated does not imply a command structure, look up the 18th century definition of that word please. Also, to be clear, the National Guard IS the government. The purpose of the 2nd A was to provide a check against the government— it wasn’t a protection for the states — it was a protection for individuals — the Bill of Rights was a declaration of individual liberties not protections for the states. The tenth amendment is an outlier, but even that was part of a coordinated effort to limit the size, scope and power of government.
this itar business had a huge chilling effect on the formative years of internet protocol design. public key was available at the time. here were alot of loud voices in ietf clamoring for strong foundational security. The US position made it highly impractical to use, and may have cost us an effective and ubiquitous security/identity model.
Alternatively, there is an abundance of private sources of funding.
One of the founding principles of American government was the freedom from state surveillance and intrusion into private homes. Nowadays, the federal government of the USA can legally use any technology that is patented, so why should they be allowed to restrict inventors from disclosing or selling IP that inhibits surveillance?
Yes, they made some bad choices, and then they corrected them. They also funded the research that created the field. Things can be morally mixed. On balance though, the US military funding for cryptography has been pretty clearly a good thing.
I hear you, and I want to make a "times change" argument.
This is my perspective, because I read too much scifi: I can conceive of a couple possibilities in 300 years.
1. Humanity is gone or stone-aged. Either because it failed to colonize before being wiped out by disease, because it nuked itself, or because it implemented AI in a way that got itself killed.
2. Humanity has turned peaceful, formed a global community (if not wholly, then at least nearly so regarding scientific resources), and colonized.
I draw such a sharp line because I don't see how the resources to colonize can be mustered without justifying it with an arms race unless peaceful cooperation is established. Without this, I think somebody is going to put a nuke in orbit around Mars and call themselves King/Queen of the inner solar system.
Therefore, I think we should be working towards the cultural changes that I believe necessary immediately. This is why I'm a staunch proponent of universal education, universal healthcare, gun control, etc. I think there's no better time than the present to "be in the race together" globally than now. Given climate change, death of bees, super-bacterias, and narcissists with penis-size complexes holding fingers over red buttons, I see a ticking clock.
Avoid (1) by tackling culture, is my theory, and I think that's what these googler employees are here. (I post this very much looking forward to being challenged on all points)
> Either because it failed to colonize before being wiped out by disease, because it nuked itself, or because it implemented AI in a way that got itself killed.
If the probability of a kind of disaster is sufficient to blow up Earth, it is likely that the same kind of disaster will blow up all the handful of colonies we can hope to build. At astronomic scale, the speed of light is quite slow.
I worry that culture doesnt help at the top of leadership.
Once you get to the top of an organization, only a few people need to listen to you. As long as you keep their paychecks and power, they will listen to you.
Dictators dont care if war is unpopular as long as its beneficial.
I think nukes may be obsolete because war is no longer beneficial, but leadership of a company may be 100% set on finding AI by any means necessary.
Can you clarify your second line, "Once you get to the top of an organization, only a few people need to listen to you. As long as you keep their paychecks and power, they will listen to you." Are you saying that everyone has to do what you say because you pay them? If so, I don't think that point applies to this situation - we're talking Google engineers, they shouldn't be hard pressed to pick up their things and find a job elsewhere that aligns better with their values.
I honestly cling to the hope daily that the internet has changed what people's reactions to power will be in the future. It's the one of the few deep things that's changed.
after removing insulting remarks, ataturk's comments looks like this (which i personally agree with):
Globalism == lack of agency, the end of voting and elections.
Universal education == total indoctrination and ideological consistency of the collectivistic variety.
Universal healthcare == the end of individual choice, individual responsibility, all new extensive taxing regimes, the destruction of the individual on many levels.
Gun Control == People control. Then total domination by the state and a monopoly on the use of force. Which, by the way, has never worked out well for any citizen anywhere.
Thank you for taking the time to find and share the points. I'd like to rebuke :
>Globalism == lack of agency, end of voting and elections
If federalism didn't lead to this, why would globalism? What even is globalism? I am skeptical of this because "globalism" seems to be used as a catch-all alt-right bogeyman lately.
>universal education == total indoctrination, ideological consistency
Universal access to education doesn't have to mean homogeneous curriculum. It doesn't have to mean lack of education choices. It doesn't even have to mean requirement to receive education.
Another thing I find curious - the very people I find rejecting education "collectivism" are often people who wouldn't blink before forcing their own "indoctrination" upon others. We fight this fight in Texas far too often - should schools teach facts (evolution), or give "fair credence" to falsehoods (intelligent design) because of religion? Woops, out goes falsehoods as soon as the satanists get involved and also flex their constitutional rights, never mind, we'll take evolution!
>universal healthcare == the end of individual choice
I don't see why this has to be true, it isn't in any of the current implementations of universal healthcare.
>end of individual responsibility
Are you presently responsible for your water being clean? Are you presently responsible for the quality of your roadways? Are you presently responsible for the guarantee that your medication contains advertised active ingredients that do as it says on the label?
>Extensive taxing regimes
Shift military funding, close ultra-rich tax loopholes.
>destruction of the individual
Fail to see how this is true. Unsupported by argument.
>gun control == people control
False equivalence.
>then, total domination by the state and a monopoly on the use of force
Currently working just fine in countries with gun control laws, which, by the way, completely nullifies the false "has never worked out well" absolute you ended with. Furthermore, the USA has right now a monopoly on the use of force. The US and its laws have sovereign control over whether you are allowed to use force or not. You have almost no say in the matter. Furthermore, this isn't 1776. The gap in armament between civilians and a martial state is so large as to be hilarious. Were the need to arise, US combined armed forces could drone strike, Tomahawk, artillery, AC130, or just door to door ground and pound any organized militia to dust. Or, you know, nuke it.
Are you, private US citizen, allowed to build a nuke?
I see this kind of response a lot to "the globalist threat."
What's the end game, for people that believe these things? Endless culture war? A galaxy-spanning human civilization that still has their "I'm an American and you're Chinese" safe little lines? Is there a fear that the "wrong" culture will persist into the future?
Not the author of the dead post, and definitely not a fan of the alt-right, but the term globalism immediately resonated with me when I first heard it:
> What's the end game, for people that believe these things? Endless culture war? A galaxy-spanning human civilization that still has their "I'm an American and you're Chinese" safe little lines?
If we didn't have several superpowers on this planet, but only one unified government instead, what would whistleblowers do? Right now Snowden can fly to Russia, and Chinese dissidents can voice their opinions in the West. In a truly globalized world, there'd be nowhere to run.
We try to maximize competition and avoid monopolies and cartels in our economy. Why should we aim straight for the opposite when it comes to our governments?
The funding come from the DoD because any other appropriate entity is financially starved because the DoD gets so much money. The latest budget provides them:
$700,000,000,000
Or as Obama said in the 2016 State of the Union:
"We spend more on defense than the next 8 nations COMBINED."
Keep in mind, most of that 8 are allies.
I struggle to see why we should be praising a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Naming it 'defense' is already a huge stretch. I realize every country does this but it is as much or more about projecting power all across the globe as it is defense.
> I realize every country does this but it is as much or more about projecting power all across the globe as it is defense.
I disagree that "every country" does this. Many countries in Europe and Asia do not use their defense forces as a tool for attacking other countries and getting involved in regional conflicts that were only affecting people in those countries. And countries that do it are usually just "helping" US-lead invasions of countries (an example would be Australia -- the single reason we were ever in the Vietnam War was because of the US).
(While I may be a biased given that America bombed my home country and engaged in a "peacekeeping mission" when I was a child, for a civil war that had been going on for many years and had nothing at all to do with the US, I never understood how Americans can see invasion of other countries as being anything other than that.)
I meant that they call their armies/airforces/navies 'defense'.
> Many countries in Europe and Asia do not use their defense forces as a tool for attacking other countries and getting involved in regional conflicts that were only affecting people in those countries.
I wished that were true, but almost all deployments of EU troops over the last 4 decades fall into that category. And there have been a lot of those.
> And countries that do it are usually just "helping" US-lead invasions of countries (an example would be Australia -- the single reason we were ever in the Vietnam War was because of the US).
Ditto Iraq, Afghanistan.
> While I may be a biased given that America bombed my home country and engaged in a "peacekeeping mission" when I was a child, for a civil war that had been going on for many years and had nothing at all to do with the US, I never understood how Americans can see invasion of other countries as being anything other than that.
Agreed, they are invasions, and the worst ones are the ones under some kind of pretext.
Spending on its own isn't the only measure. The US is incredibly wasteful with its military spending where other countries with better political systems are more savvy. Plus the US has to invent 80% of the tech in the first place, something that costs 10x what it does to replicate it.
While the US military is wasteful, I don't think you'll find a military that is enormously less wasteful. After all, the largest line item in the DOD budget by far is salaries.
I think we would be fine with a smaller military. Nobody is talking about completely stopping military expenditures. The question is whether it really needs to be as big as it is right now.
Overturning so many regimes in petrol filled countries is a messy business. I think a big chunk of the spending goes to intelligence and misinformation.
Personally I think a big chunk goes to not well thought out missions like Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq. It seems nobody is willing to admit that there is no path to winning or ending things so they just keep going and spending a lot of money and energy. And the defense contractors are certainly happy with this.
Or how about having to deal with the rapidly ascendant Chinese military that is annexing vast territory in Asia right now? There's nothing they respect except for strength, they're not even subtle about that fact.
Or if the US hadn't spent over a trillion dollars defending South Korea from the China, USSR, North Korea axis across decades. South Korea would not exist as we know it today. It'd more likely look like North Korea.
There's an exceptionally strong argument for the US working with regional military allies in Europe and Asia on defense and having a very powerful military to match its $20 trillion economy. Should the spending be more like $450 billion or $730 billion - that's the primary debate.
The Cold War ended in the 90s, not when the Wall came down. Now how would we possibly handle all those T-72s with just M1 Abrams? If anyone still fought conventional wars.
The reason we aren't going to war with Russia is because Russian leaders know that it is impossible to win a war against the current US military.
The reason it's impossible to win a war against the current US military is because the US has spent an obscene amount of money building it for decades.
If the US military were not capable of defending Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics would be under Russian rule today.
Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.
If we spent 1 tenth the amount on our military, we'd still have the power to blow up the entire world X times over.
I just think that if you have the ability to destroy the entire world, then that's a powerful enough military and you don't need anything more for defense.
You actually believe that the US would use nuclear weapons against Russia, ensuring the deaths of 10s of millions of Americans and sparking global nuclear war, if Russia invaded Estonia?
The only thing preventing Eastern Europe from being invaded is the conventional military. The US will never risk it's own existence for another country. The Russians know this.
I suspect conventional war is a thing of the past.
Cyber-warfare is going to be where it's at. You spend years infiltrating adversary networks, backdooring critical systems/infrastructure and exfiltrating intelligence so when the time comes for conflict, you already know what cards they're going to play, where all the pieces are on the map and you can shut it all down with a few commands. Then you start your blitzkrieg unopposed.
It's telling Russia, China and North Korea so heavily encourage cyber-espionage and malware development. Meanwhile in the US, we've got idiots passing laws criminalizing mere infosec research. We're handicapping ourselves against a threat our adversaries are all too eager to employ.
India and Pakistan went to war briefly in 1999 and both of them had nuclear weapons at the time (and still do, I think). I wouldn't rule out the possibility of future wars between them.
>the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography
For the purposes of being better at waging war. I am not disagreeing with your statement, but I think leaving out the reason why is treating the military like it's "NASA with a few guns laying around" and implying that one can work on weapons systems without having any moral culpability for how they are used.
It's perfectly possible to remember every technological invention the military has ever been involved in and still object to participation in military research.
Possible reasons, using Wernher von Braun's rocket development as an example:
- He, or somebody else, would have invented rockets anyway at some point
- That 'some point' would have been much earlier if the money spent on military (research & some of the rest) would instead have been put into rockets in the first place
- even if the two mechanisms abovc were not true: I'd probably be willing to forgo the benefits of the space age if it meant undoing WW2 and the Holocaust
- In most ethical frameworks except utilitarianism, it's strongly discourage to accept some evil for some perceived greater good. Meaning: Even if rockets have saved far more lives than WW2 vanquished, participating in the project is morally dubious at best
Specifically to Google's project:
- This seems to actually invert the usual idea of the military funding basic research that later gets adapted for civilian use. They are building on the fundamental research into AI already done by Google and others, and using it very specifically to kill people. Any advances useful for other purposes would seem to be even more coincidental than usual.
- While "minimising collateral damage" i. e. civilian casualties may seem to be a worthy cause, it cannot be ignored that such advances are likely to result in greater use of the technology. Drones are actually the best example of this effect. Just look at the Obama administration's willingness to expand the use of drone strikes, which was a direct result of the technology appearing to be the lesser evil compared to manned missions on the ground.
You are saying that military R&D is important no matter what they are involved in. This incredibly stupid reasoning can be used to justify the development viruses that can erradicate the human species.
> DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research shouldn't be viewed as a necessarily bad thing.
Let's be spesific: they are using current AI algorithms to track everyone's movements from airborn imagery. It will be used to kill people in drone strikes and for population control.
One thing is acknowledging that if you pour lots of money into getting better at anything (space exploration, waging war, etc) you'll get cool technological advances applicable in other areas.
Another thing is to specifically choose to dedicate resources to one of those areas instead of another area. Why can't google bid on AI projects for better detection of geological landmarks in other planets? (which I'm guessing is a similar endeavor to what the article mentions - and already has ongoing research)
Broken glass fallacy. Just because government and military funded some technology does not mean that technology would not be in an advanced state otherwise. Especially if you consider the countless failures and unnecessary excessive spending that took the resources indirectly from people and inventors. Besides brains that worked for military and government funded projects would perhaps find much better things to work on otherwise.
Military funding is used as a slight of hand. The legislature scares the public, the public hands over money, and then the military is used to invest the money in long term goals to build a future technological society that the private sector is wholly unwilling to do because of short term profit focus.
This also has the benefit of getting war averse liberals to say nice things about the large standing army and bloody foreign interventions of the US empire, most of which have failed to produce anything other than blowback and civil war across the globe.
have you watched "Good Kill" or maybe even are familiar with the work of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung's research on US military drone program at Ramstein airbase? I guess not, because what you're proposing are further crimes against humanity. If the US wants AI/autonomous weapons then they should agree to have their troops held accountable at the The Hague International Court of Justice.
The military also funded advances in airplanes, trucks, and medicine, but that doesn't mean that doctors should have no qualms about working on biological weapons.
Also, many people, including myself, consider drone strikes to be state-sponsored terrorism. Just because some part of the military may be justifiable, does not mean all of it is.
As Carl Jung might say, just because a thing has base origins, it doesn't mean that it has to be a base thing. Google should not shrug and say "from violence we came to violence we will return." I'm moved by the people speaking out, as much as I am disappointed to hear of Mr. Schmidt's involvement with the Pentagon.
They cost a great deal of R&D budget for their role in the development IT technology, and the larger part of development came from non military research, from academia and companies like Bell Labs.
The Google workers urging their CEO to pull out of Pentagon projects are the ones who do not have such short memories as to be distracted from the blatant deceptions and disasters carried out in recent history, with no sign of relenting.
This idea of justifying military buildup by it's beneficial trickle down into civilian technology always struck me as very odd. It seems like an absurdly inefficient and roundabout way of funding R&D. If the government wants to invest in research they should just invest in research.
Whilst agreeing in part, the history of martially-motivated technical development through all of human history is remarkable. I'd argue it's been a vastly greater influence than so-called market motivations.
As an evolutionary selective pressure, war and military necessity are unparalleled.
Re-reading Samuel B. Griffith's translation of The Art of War, I noticed that he mentions, in 1963, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, which had only begun delivering volumes (the work remains in progress). That would include not only metalurgy, but entire volumes devoted to both martial and marine technologies.
Sure, I'll bite. Just falsify it: the Pentagon's killing machines have never brought about world peace, and world peace has never occurred while the Pentagon received killing machines.
You are blatantly embedding a false premise here; that the goal is or should be world peace.
That is an absolutely inane stance to take. How about instead of the obviously unattainable and unrealistic goal of "world peace", we just go for "more peace", or "less violent death" or similar goals. It is very hard to argue that American hegemony has not significantly reduced conflicts around the world. Not all of them, not equitably, and generally in pursuit of economic rather than ideological interests, but there is basically nothing to be gained by opening up the US to actually being threatened by competing powers.
I didn't bring world peace into the thread, but at any rate there's also the saying that "All war represents a failure of diplomacy," which I tend to agree with. I also think "are indifferent toward" should replace "hate" there.
People also seem to forget that the Google self driving car was initially developed by the team that one the DARPA challenge. Government, especially the military have been funding all the risky tech that Google profits from. Even google itself was funded by a government grant. Google's logo has been on the side of rockets launching spy satellites for years. Google Maps was originally a government contractor. Google the company knows who butters their bread.
What the google employees need to do is push for a civilian government research and science funding effort, like ARPA was back in the day. Unfortunately that sort of funding is politically dead, while military funding is always in style.
Idealists on the left would apparently prefer China getting a complete monopoly on military AI and expanding their dictatorship globally instead of being pragmatic.
Reminder, if you work in tech you are collecting blood money because everything we use was initially funded by the military for military application. If you are going to attack Google for this and don't leave the industry you are a hypocrite
> This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, [...]
And what do we have to show for it? Wikipedia is great and Youtube is entertaining, but the rest of the internet is horrible. I say that as a software developer.
Due to the wonderful internet our children now have attention spans far below the time a typical class lesson takes. The smartest brains on Earth are not building spaceships or curing disease, but rather implementing systems to get you to click on ads. Our bodies and habits are being tracked, our opinions manipulated, and our privacy is being handed of willingfully for a chat and photo-sharing platform.
Military tech _often_ has implications far beyond what the original scientists and engineers intended. Sometimes for the best. But as you allude AI to the internet, don't forget how much damage the internet is doing to us even as we enjoy it and profit from it.
While that may be the reality of things, it surely can't be a justification in any way. If anything, I'd be afraid to revert back to those dark times where technological advancements were driven mainly by military needs.
I strongly disagree with this comparison. In the prior, successful cases, the military funded research which was open, while in this case, the direction of information is reversed and the outcome is secret.
Or maybe they remember it perfectly, but don't consider it a valid argument to say, "X supported something you like 40 years ago, therefore X is beyond reproach"?
yes but the weapon systems may be sold or transferred to some countries like Israel/Saudi Arabia eventually.. how would you view their use on protesters or civilians by them or would their be international laws that would prevent such use ?
> Completely agree. If it isn't Google it'll be someone else.
That's an excuse people without any morals often use. It's up to each one of us to do the right thing.
After all: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing” - or I would add that evil also rises when "good men" actually do the evil thing "because otherwise the bad men would do it anyway."
Google likely has the most advanced AI tech in the world right now. That means if that they allow the US government to use it, they will be directly responsible for accelerating the progress of autonomous killer robots or making them real in the first place. After all, I don't see too many other companies with AI that can learn the Go game within days and beat world champions.
Exactly. China just turned dictatorship, and has already installed AI facial recognition and soon voice recognition software for its police. This could allow China to better manage its Uighyr concentration camps and kidnap freedom fighters in Hong Kong. Along with its ambition to have everything 'Made in China' in 2025, and invade Taiwan, China is looking like a AI enhanced Hitler Germany 2.0.
We need weapons to fight an enemy like this, with help from US technology companies.
I am OK with weapons development. What I don't like is that these weapons get turned into big business selling them to unstable regions and in the case of the NSA the technology gets used against its own citizens.
This depiction of China is blown way out of proportion and it's basically thanks to US propaganda which is used to justify the kinds of military spending and activities it undertakes.
there is no inherent reason that these technologies need to be developed by the military, they could just as well be developed for civilian use when given the funding.
also it is not surprising that these things are invented by the dod when you're spending ~600-700 bilion a year on warfare and intelligence operations.
That last sentence of yours rubs me kinda the wrong way; that is a dangerious premise that could set us back ~30 years when the cold war and the arms race was well and alive, but this time we'd have robots and AI
China is currently heavily funding genetically engineering geniuses and AI. The US can either wake up or sit around and wait to be subjugated via an autonomous drone swarm developed by 250IQ Chinese scientists
Do we really want to test a theory that we can have a repeat of the 1930s when the democracies fell far behind an autocratic regime in the arms race, and again the autocratic regimes will not win? Democracies are in retreat around the world, and I only hope we wake up before it is too late.
The military-industrial complex may have become far bigger and perhaps in some ways a burden, but the world is a dangerous place and becoming more so. In my view, there is a perfectly valid argument that working with the military is the right thing to do.
At the same time if individuals have pacifist leanings and do not want to work for the military, i would hope corporations respect that.
"the world is a dangerous place and becoming more so."
Are you basing this statement on a general feeling or on a specific data-based metric?
The military industrial complex greatly benefits from this common sentiment, but by most all quantitative measurements the world continues growing slowly safer, average lifespans increase, etc. While years-long aberrations exist (e.g. civil wars), the overall trend is very clearly antithetical to your statement.
There’s a balance to strike between the fear monger if news cycle and the Steven Pinker-esque wave of progress.
As Pinker notes, progress is not monotonicly increasing. While it is true that things have gotten better on average across the world, we should be wary of those who do not champion enlightenment ideals, particularly in autocratic China with the apparently life term of Xi Jinpeng. We should be wary that those without our interests at heart don’t overtake us.
> Democracies are in retreat around the world, and I only hope we wake up before it is too late.
What are you advocating? Arming governments with autonomous killer drones in order to "protect democracy"? Because the world is a "dangerous place"? I don't even...
Well "governments" already have nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, drones and what have you. It's not some new concept. You can take it as given that regimes you will never want to live under will be putting their best people in using AI for military purposes.
It's dangerous to imagine one is sitting on some moral high ground by refusing to work for the military. We all owe our freedom to previous generations of scientists and engineers who worked for the military, sometimes inspite of strong ethical concerns.
Nukes are an instrument of last resort, but you don't want to get to the point where that is your only option. And it is possible that technical advances in missile defence may blunt this advantage.
Being able to prevent friendly (and even neutral) countries from being bullied or going over to the dark side is also important because ultimately the best defence against rising autocratic forces is to ensure a broad alliance of friendly, democratic countries who are secure against interference by unfriendly regimes.
If a country like the USA can have its elections manipulated, how vulnerable might smaller democracies be?
India and Pakistan aren't really powerful nations in the nuclear sense that the US and Russia are. I assume the person you are replying means powerful nation as "nation with a lot of nukes", which is pretty much only the US and Russia.
Even if you restrict it to the US and USSR (and later Russia) there have been direct armed conflict, including both being on opposing sides in war (notably, but not exclusively, both Korea and Vietnam during the Soviet period, but also extending into the current war in Syria), though there have been political cover done to limit risk of escalation (e.g., Soviet Air Force flying NK-badged fighters and, initially, prohibiting use of Russian over the radio in Korea; Russian forces on the ground fighting, sometimes directly against US forces, being the “Wagner PMC”—a GRU-backed notionally-private group.) op
The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to.
There's a reason they were all proxy wars and they never escalated into direct conflict on the scale of WWII (or beyond), and that reason is nuclear deterrence.
> The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to.
But they did fight them, including direct conflict with eachother. Which answers the upthread comment “If you have nuclear, why do you need anything else?” which was supported with the claim “Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.”
Nukes don't prevent “any war” from happening between powerful nations, though they do seem to have some utility in restricting the escalation of such conflicts.
(Now, you could argue that unilateral conventional disarmament would leave no choice but to escalate to nuclear war, which would improve deterrence and prevent even small scale conventional, politically-covered attacks, but that argument would be highly speculative.)
Considering that democracy means people choosing their government, the power would need to be in the hands of the people, not the government, to protect democracy. What will the population do if the government goes rogue and imposes autocracy?
Some might say this is the purpose of the second amendment.
Ah yes, the "I have to do evil things because if I didn't, someone else would" argument...
Just think about what you wrote: "our enemies". Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.
Solving "why" also solves the "how", but those who profit from conflict have no interest in the former, as their livelihood depends on the latter.
War is not primarily about hatred. It's about irreconcilable differences, where the calculated risk and cost of war is preferred to losing some perceived national interest. Your sweet sentiment that we should all just act nicely and get along does not survive serious contemplation of the incentive structures that drive nations (or individuals, for that matter), or the thousands of years of human history marked by pervasive warfare.
Philosophically, it is strange to make agreeableness the standard for the behavior of nations. Being good is much more than being nice, and any thoughtful conception of moral goodness will sometimes require actions that upset others.
And finally, you seem to be assuming that my country is the only possible bad actor. But of course, that’s not true. My country could do everything “right”, only for someone else to start a war.
>Why do you (whichever country you are from) have enemies in the first place? What did your country do to make others hate it? A lot of people seem to focus on how to defend against "those who hate us" without spending a passing thought on the why of it.
Are you really arguing that it's Poland's fault for having a country in the same place that Hitler wanted lebensraum?
> What did your country do to make others hate it?
You have a very simplistic view of geopolitics.
What did Poland do to Germany in 1939 to make Germany hate it? What did the Jews do to the Nazis to make them hate them so much?
Wars get started for all kinds of reasons, some predictable, others not. It's a simple matter of survival to equip yourself as best you can to defend yourself.
How is that a strawman? You said "it's a matter of survival" to "defend yourself" and I'm saying that's not really a valid argument for the country in the article.
> Hegemonic stability theory (HST) is a theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon.
Not that I explicitly agree, but there is some theory.
I like your idealism. But there's often not a why. And if there is, it's not necessarily 'what they did' but rather 'what they have', like water or land or whatever.
The graph you are linking to ends in 1998, when Bill Clinton was in power, the US was the sole superpower, the EU was increasing in size, China's GDP was a tenth of what it is now, and i think Boris Yeltsin was running Russia, and most people had not heard of Osama bin laden. I think it is safe to say the world is different now.
Look at the backsliding in Turkey, Phillipines, Burma, Venezuela, Egypt. Look at the regimes which have come to power in Hungary, Poland. And of course Russia itself. China, which at one time seemed to be heading for more moderation has taken a sharply authoritarian turn. I would argue just in the last five years things have turned sharply for the worse.
We can all look at the data. The graph I linked ends in 2003 (like indicated in the graph itself), and jpollock posted the value for 2016, which is 70, so even higher than 2003. In other words, you are telling incorrect things and when called out, instead of giving in to reality, you are doubling down telling even more incorrect things. Not good. And it's quite saddening that in this forum dedicated to rational discourse, your flawed reasoning is being rewarded with so much attention, currently sitting at fifth place among all root comments.
Sorry for being out of the loop - it was night time in India, and i had gone to sleep.
You are right that the title says 2003 - i looked at the scale below which ended at 1998. I was not so much doubling down, but rather talking of a slightly different point that the ones you and jpollock were making. When I said democracies were in retreat, there are two or three different phenomena.
First - the western democracies seem to be internally weaker, and unable to arrive at consensus even for important national priorities. This may be because of the rise of social media echo chambers. In Europe there is a growth of right-wing parties in all countries, even Germany. As an Indian this worries me, because for all their warts, the liberal democracies of US and the European countries are the model of governance I would like to have succeed across the world.
Second - there seems to be no answer to the salami-slicing tactics of the autocratic regimes in Africa and Asia. You have to see the bullying of countries like Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Phillipines, even Vietnam and wonder. As the western democracies look to be in retreat, countries are surrendering their interests to the regional bullies. This will ultimately hurt all democracies in the long run.
Thirdly - there is the increasingly blatant and surprisingly successful interference in open societies from the closed ones. The US election is only the most advertised one. But similar interference has happened in Australia, in UK, in various part of Europe. There are at last signs of response to this - Australia has passed a law against foreign interference, and the Skripal episode has led to (some) concerted effort. But the response still seems much weaker than the provocation.
In summary, by "retreat of democracies" my focus was on their will and ability to stand up to autocratic forces, not a retreat of democracy itself (which i think is what jpollock and your responses were about). That may be why we were talking at cross purposes. I fervently wish i am wrong - and I hope i never try to avoid rational discourse.
The world is currently the least dangerous it's ever been in history, and all data and all trends point that it will be even less dangerous in the future. Sorry but you're simply wrong.
The doomsday clock is a human institution of scientists, though hardly scientific. They see it as their duty to raise alarms. But ask yourself- are we really closer to civilization ending Doomsday than at the height of the Cold War?
I have to disagree with you, all his arguments held back then, there was just less data. He also concedes that the statistical modeling relies on violence afflicting a proportion of the population, rather than absolute numbers - all well and good but an important distinction. Also your point is entirely fallacious anyway in the context of this thread. His book highlights a trend which cannot be disentangled from the historical context which gave rise to it.
I don't understand what you mean by "all his arguments held back then" when a significant portion of the book explicitly shows and discusses data regarding the number of wars fought during 1800 and before, compared to 1900 and early 2000. And the fact that another significant portion of the book deals with data about how much more likely a person is to die from violence in general during that period compared to the more recent period. I'm still convinced you have not read the book, and I suspect that is why your counterargument to it resembles a strawman.
All the trends are longer term, the theory about lessening violence first emerged in the 1700s[1]. WW2 doesn't change Pinker's conclusions, by his own admission. So, it is reasonable to conclude this book could have been written in 1930, and would be no less correct than it is now.
Pacifism isn't viable when some of the biggest countries in the world are run by totalitarian regimes. Objections to participating in the military industrial complex are a luxury of countries verging on global irrelevance. The proclivities of the West to engage in self-flagellation over these issues are well known to and exploited by less liberal regimes. If only it were not so, but I don't know what the alternative is, just as the physicists in the Manhattan project saw no alternative.
Democracies are in retreat because of corruption and failings of its leaders, people are losing faith in the democratic process. Not because their militaries aren't powerful enough.
I heard an interesting view on this. Engineers build technologies like TensorFlow and demos of object recognition, which have obvious applications in drone combat (just stuff your model into the missile targeting system). Yet then when this tech is used for this purpose they're shocked, shocked -- and as long as they're not specifically building the missile targeting systems themselves they feel like their hands are clean?
I'm not even sure what the consequence of this argument is; pretty much anything you build can indirectly contribute to the military industrial complex, even something innocuous like dev infra. But I also don't think that weak "everything is equivalent" argument means you're suddenly absolved of responsibility. One thing I am pretty sure of is that it must feel awful to waste your short time on earth on building tools specifically for killing.
I would suggest that there is a very large difference between designing FOSS software, such as Tensorflow, that can be used for a multitude of applications, and developing for a company or project that is explicitly funded by military purposes. Advancing technology that has secondary applications in warfare is very different from focusing on the military aspect, and is not complicity.
It's nothing more than an attempt for Silicon Valley to pretend that they're a bastion of pure innovation, where all advancements are only for good. It's naive and extremely holier-than-thou.
> trying to connect users with products they might like
It is delusional to suggest that this is the goal of ad-tech. The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves.
Ad-tech, on the other hand, engages in dragnet data mining operations that serve the creative/design teams at ad agencies. The way the ad-tech industry has decided to go about things absolutely is inherently unconscionable. The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades have resulted in leaving nearly all internet users vulnerable to malicious code, privacy loss, and other horrible things.
> some of them just got shot at yesterday
Nice appeal to emotion there. But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.
I do know people who work in ad-tech. However, I don't see why that should matter in the least. Who I know in the ad-tech industry is not pertinent to my argument.
> how awful, insulting, and dangerous ads were before
You seem to be missing the point. Yes, advertisements are awful, insulting to our intelligence, and dangerous psychologically. But that has nothing to do with ad-tech. Your conflation of advertisement production with ad-tech is especially curious, considering your strangely dogmatic defense of this reprehensible industry.
It's even more curious that you didn't reference any of the things I actually brought up in my post about the ad-tech industry. The content of an advertisement is not nearly as important as the means by which people are consuming the content. This is a fundamental premise of Marshall McLuhan, on whose ideas much of the advertising industry has operated for decades now. ("The medium is the message.") The real problem with ad-tech is not the advertising content that it helps propagate, but rather the techniques employed by ad-tech to achieve its goals. Why don't you respond to those problems I raised, rather than ones that are both wholly irrelevant to the discussion and entirely absent from my comment? Ad-tech is what introduced malicious code, unethical privacy breaches, and absurdly non-scientific measurement practices to the advertisement industry as a whole. The ads distributed on yesterday's television and radio broadcasts, and on yesteryear's magazines and newspapers, could never have come close to the destruction today's internet ads achieve - because those older media were not capable of being leveraged as irresponsibly as ad-tech leverages the world wide web.
> However, I don't see why that should matter in the least. Who I know in the ad-tech industry is not pertinent to my argument.
Of course it should. You denied any users X exist, (Ad-Tech who think about the users.)
I was hoping to demonstrate that your sample size of X that you know well enough to judge them so, is too small to be meaningful. I say that because I know many people in Ad-Tech, and almost all of them care very much about users. Since our conclusions are different, I can conclude our samples are different populations, or you're speaking in hyperbole.
You said:
> The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves. ... is inherently unconscionable.
If you know people in Ad-Tech, and you tell them, "You don't care about users, and your business is inherently unconscionable" I'd like to hear what responses you get. Genuinely. Would they agree with you? Or, more likely would they say something like, "At my place, even when I think about the user, it doesn't matter much," which seems much more likely the kind of human response you'd get.
> It's even more curious
You opened with bald-faced hyperbole. I'm trying to get you to admit that your most outrageous claims are based on nothing but lies. Once I do that, maybe I'll dive into the rest of what you said.
My concession to you is that there are awful ways to do ads - exploitative, manipulative, bad for the user. And there are ways to do ads that are not those things. You claim there's no difference - it's all homogeneously bad. That's hyperbole or delusion.
Moreover, none of it is particularly helpful. It's just spite. You don't have any actionable proposals for making the world a better place. You're just making "dead lawyer" jokes.
And I did respond directly, reminding you that ads used to be far worse. You haven't responded to that at all.
As I said yesterday, if someone needs something, they’ll just go out and buy it. Ads are fundamentally about using psychological tricks to make people buy things they don’t need, or even want once the manipulation has worn off
For example, I tried to find a pair of quality underwear that did not have some guys name above the crotch for years. I heard mention of me undies on a podcast, checked it out, and am now a happy customer. ( this is not a paid post )
Yes, it's inherently tasteless and makes the world a worse place. No-one needs or wants the "help" of advertisers providing suggestions about what products they might want to buy.
Yes, even when searching. Of course, impartial help with the search could be beneficial (by definition of "help"). But advertising is by definition not impartial. I do not want my search results to be influenced by those who have a financial incentive to bias my search outcome. That's obvious -- surely you don't either?
> Out of morbid curiosity, do you get that ads fund most of the internet?
Yes. But that does not mean that we want or need advertising, or that it is not tasteless. It might mean that we cannot conceive of or achieve an alternative version of the world without advertising and with the internet.
More generally, I'd say it's important to make a clear distinction between statements of principle, and statements of pragmatic policy.
Oh, I don't think I'm well-informed enough to answer that question properly. Let's suppose by "capitalism" you meant allowing market forces to operate freely. No, I wouldn't say that's entirely tasteless, but yes it has tasteless aspects.
And a principle one is advertising, i.e. standing up and saying "Hey, I suggest you buy this, and here's why" when
(a) you have a financial motivation to encourage the sale
(b) quite obviously, that motivation corrupts your role as the recommender
(c) despite being educated people you make no acknowledgement of that corruption.
Ideally, the best way for consumers to choose between competing products would be for them to read peer-reviewed scientific literature comparing the merits of the products and their suitability for the intended use. That again is basically definitional -- that's what science means.
Now, do you think science should be conducted by people with a financial interest in the conclusions of each paper? No, you don't. And that's why you shouldn't have a hard time accepting that advertising is inherently undesirable.
> As a matter of principle, if you have something and don't need it, and someone else needs it, you should give it to them, right?
Yes.
> I'm just trying to understand your principle and where the boundaries of it are
Owning something which you do not make use of and denying access to others who would make good use of it is not a good thing to do.
> Why are people trying to sell something? Shouldn't they just give it to me?
I'm not arguing against the whole of free market capitalism, just advertising. We can still have a free market without advertising. A bit like how we can and do have democracies while severely restricting political campaign funding.
> And then scientists should determine which products should be made.
> And scientists should determine who is the best at making those goods and services.
> And scientists should decide who doesn't deserve to live or reproduce.
Scientists provide information. They do not enforce anything; they are not an executive branch of government.
"Science" is the word we use for the process of rationally answering questions about the universe. That includes comparing products. And comparing who is best at making goods and services.
If it were the case that there were a subset of people who didn't "deserve" to live or reproduce (for some definition of "deserve") then yes, we would want scientists to be involved in identifying that subset of people. The obvious example is criminal punishment. The USA and other countries decide that some people no longer deserve to live. (Other societies in history have sterilized people). Yes, of course we would want those decisions to be based on science -- science as the provider of information and as the process for arriving at conclusions from data; the legal system and government to actually execute and enforce things.
> ... So... I purposely tried to go too far. At which point do you think I went too far?
You didn't go too far. I think you confused two things: (1) scientists making information available to society, and (2) some group of people enforcing a policy.
So why can't I pay someone to help me spread the word about how good my product is?
> A bit like how we can and do have democracies while severely restricting political campaign funding.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I do not believe any democracy has actually limited political campaign funding. There have been limits, but they have all had loopholes that have made them completely ineffective.
> Scientists provide information. They do not enforce anything
But, it's scientifically proven that if I only do business with science-based companies, that the products and services I get are better and safer. I therefore boycott all other businesses.
Then, scientists absolutely do enforce everything.
> And comparing who is best at making goods and services.
Actually, no, that's economics. And economics say the best solution is the free market. Not a body of decision makers. Because each person measures their own utility. People can provide evidence and opinions. But each person makes their own decisions.
There's no accounting for taste.
Which movie is scientifically proven to be the most enjoyable by people who like Quentin Tarantino movies, but hate Oliver Stone movies?
Oh, scientists hadn't even gotten to review Snatch yet. If only some advertiser enticed me into giving it a try, I would find out that my opinions change over time in unpredictable and unique ways, that no science board could ever predict.
> some people no longer deserve to live. (Other societies in history have sterilized people). Yes, of course we would want those decisions to be based on science
Science is a tool. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Science is not humanistic, any more than Capitalism is. That's why science must be regulated. Otherwise, we'd be cloning people with no brains, so we can harvest their organs. We'd instantly kill everyone with an un-treatable infectious disease, because the good of the many outweigh the good of the few or the one. We'd set up a surveillance state to enforce our laws, because it's scientifically proved to be the best way to enforce laws.
Opinions and ethics are human factors you are not accounting for.
As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military.
After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ultimate sacrifice that my grandparents generation gave to create this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in.
They didn't step up to Stalin and Mao. Hitler was because of alliance with Britain and the Japanese attack, not because of how awful the Nazis regime was. The US for the most part didn't want to get dragged back into another European conflict. Hitler was bad, yes. But what happened in Germany was rooted in the outcome of WW1, which was rooted in all the alliances and what not proceeding it, which was rooting in yet prior conflicts. A lot of which had to do with the colonial powers fighting over how to divide up the world, or because of religious differences.
A pacifist might say Hitler, Stalin and Mao are just symptoms of the deeper problem, which is the willingness of human beings to engage in violent conflicts just because somebody tells them to.
Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.
I'll admit I was modifying what I would have said IRL for this medium. You are absolutely right: one of the most brilliant victories of so-called "neoliberal" capitalism is how it's utterly convinced people that it represents human nature. That it's not ideological. What I meant by my comment was that "saving the world from the evil of global Fascism" was a post-hoc rationalization, not what motivated America to join the war years after it had begun.
I'd like to be clear that I know and love that the soldiers and everyone else who fought fascism did so to defeat fascism: it's very possible that I wouldn't be commenting today had your grandfather not made that decision. That's not what i meant to imply here.
EDIT: To make clear what I meant, re: your comment: the state-building narrative the US has adopted substitutes the righteous struggle of people like your grandfather in order to avoid acknowledging, among many things, the reluctance to participate in world affairs and the frankly brazen pro-Nazi stances of many in the american public and the government at the time.
Well, certainly, the Roosevelt Administration was, but they were (prior to Pearl Harbor) also forced to maintain an outward pretense of neutrality while backing the Allies, because a large part of the rest of the US was also motivated by ideology...to either be sympathetic to the Axis Powers (one large, well-bankrolled faction) or to be opposed to intervention (another large, well-bankrolled faction, that often worked together with the preceding one against any interventionist policy.)
The US was always on the allied side, through funding and supplies. The whole reason the Lusitania was sunk was because the US was sending arms to support the Allied war effort, even if it wasn't officially declared. Even if it wasn't until Pearl Harbor that the US joined the war officially, there is little doubt what side Roosevelt and much of the American people wanted to win.
The US in the early 20th century had a very strong non-interventionist policy, at least vis-a-vis Europe (Latin America was a different story). The general standpoint was "we don't want to get involved with whatever mess is going on in Europe." Note that this strain was so strong that one Congresswoman actually refused to vote for war even after Pearl Harbor.
However, by 1940, it was very clear that the US was going to get dragged in anyways, and it would serve the US interests first to start preparing for war before it starts (note that the draft was instituted over a year before Pearl Harbor). Moreover, the US was neutral only in name: various acts passed more or less saying that the US would give aid to anybody so long as they were British or French. (Originally, it was cash-and-carry, but when Britain exhausted its cash reserves, it became Lend-Lease instead).
A correction to your otherwise correct comment: Lend-Lease was extended to the Soviets as well (and perhaps equally if not much larger than to the Franco-British military).
Lend-lease was the last of the neutrality gimmicks, and was the first one that really applied to the Soviets--mere weeks before the US entered the war proper and lend-lease became the vehicle for general military and logistical aid to all Allies.
It took 2 years for a country that values personal freedoms and international free trade/security to decide that the Axis powers winning the war would be bad for both.
Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.
Well you asked why wasn't the US allied to Germany in the war. Asking that makes it sound like you weren't aware that Germany declared war on the US, because that's a pretty obvious reason for the US not to be allied to Germany.
The US was allied with the "Allies" before the US become formally involved in the war. They were already providing material aid to Britain/France before Pearl Harbor / war declared by Germany. I'm definitely not the one who is "unaware" of the key details in this discussion.
The US provided support to the side they ideologically agreed with -- it wasn't just a case of "Germany randomly declares war on the US".
Of course they did. It wasn't always open warfare nor does it have to be. The simple fact that the United States and her allies had a large capable military fixed a line on the map that held for 50 years until the Soviet block self-destructed. As for Mao, I'm pretty sure that having the US as a buddy kept Taiwan free as well as secured South Korea and provided a lot of security to Japan and the Philippines. The UK did the same for Hong Kong.
It's not correct to say that we have to attack a country/dictator in order to stand up to them.
But they did tho. At least to Stalin. Had they not, all of Europe would now be Soviet Union. This is also why Japan was nuked — to ensure compliance, and create better leverage in negotiations. Otherwise the red army could just continue as far as it wished to go and take over the rest of Europe.
I would strongly argue that the motivation for nukeing Japan was not to give the Soviets an impression but to ensure that American troops didn't have to land on hostile beaches on the Japanese mainland. The decision was mainly made to save American lives by forcing a Japanese surrender
There's a depressingly large number of authors who say that, but the Japanese islands have little in the way of natural resources except farmland and a good climate for growing things.
The whole reason Japan started their program of military expansion in the first place was to guarantee access to natural resource, e.g., petroleum, needed by their industry.
By 1943 Japan was facing chronic shortages of petroleum products, rubber and other essential supplies because of interdiction by the US Navy's "Silent Service" (submarine force). And that was before Japan lost most of her navy, most of her large transport ships (by 1945 Japan was reduced to using mostly small wooden transport ships) the Phillipines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (which while in Japanese hands could be used to operate aircraft to give Japanese shipping some protection from the US Navy).
It is unlikely that Japan could have done much more than feed itself after 1945.
The Emperor was weeks away from capitulating on his own, and Soviets were invading the place already. Nuking Japan was mostly to tell Stalin he can’t win. Japan capitulating sooner was a nice side effect.
Oh, the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin, stop the westward movement of the Soviet advance, saving dozens of countries from communism?
My bad, I totally forgot that the Cold War never happened and that the soldiers of WW2 didn't form a hard border in Berlin that they were not friendly over.
As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.
> saving dozens of countries from communism?
Surely not "dozens", but was there even one? The other Allies essentially handed Poland over to Stalin.
>> the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin
>As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.
I believe GP was referring to a few years later, when the Berlin airlift broke the Soviet blockade of West Berlin - a clear attempt by the Soviet Union to expand their spehere of control to West Berlin and eventually West Germany as a whole.
And yet, had all of the engineers in the US refused to participate in military work, guess who'd be running the world right now just the same? The world actually exists and the choices people make in it have real consequences. Not participating in military technology is an unbelievably childish option. If you are at all serious about the ethics of this, you have to choose to support the entity you trust the most. For me, that's the US. Feel free to make your own choices, though.
That's a fair point but it also treats life as a zero sum game that's played in a steady-state arena where the threat of Tartars over the next hill is ever present. That's a good way to prevent progress and to defend yourself perfectly against the Last War but one would think the last 30 years of terrorism would have shown us the flaw in that.
Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new fighter planes? They don't really keep me safe as a citizen of the US: they don't prevent terrorists and they don't threaten other thermonuclear states. Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.
Please realize that all state militaries are coevolving together and competing in an on-going global tournament for dominance at all times whether there is an official war or not, that a weakness in one area will be weaponized by a competitor (e.g. our military weakness in preventing Russian disinformation leading to a political upset), that we must continually improve, enhance, and expand our capabilities just to maintain our status quo, and that it is essential to perform well in this competitive environment just to be able to buy items from Walmart, get 15% off your car insurance, drink your Starbucks latte, and carry a placard at the local activist rally.
There are indeed warlords just over the hill, and they have names like Entropy and Resource Availability.
People immediately want to paint these truths as only products of fear.
Yes, fear is a large part of it. But it takes courage to fight against that fear and be responsible for the future of your people (whomever they are). Pretending that there is no evil in the world is cowardice.
The Tartars are over the hills. Democracy is in decline. Authoritarianism is on the mega-rise. The state of democracy is bad and looking worse, and if the Brexit/Trump trend of destroying the EU and breaking up the Atlantic Alliance bear just a bit more fruit, you may find that these "Tartars" are a lot closer to you than you once believed.
You call me blind to the future by looking at the past, but quite frankly, you appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning from them.
Democracy was not "won". Liberty for all does not exist.
It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise.
Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")?
You’d probably be interested in the book “How democracies die” by two Harvard political scientists. They walk through the warning signs of a failing democracy and how many others have collapsed - and the answer is actually yes, there are plenty of warning signs that American democracy in particular is in trouble.
Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.
The EU under its unelected President and unaccountable unelected lawmakers (the EU parliament can't propose laws) with a constitution that would be thrown out anywhere else (and never put to the electorate as a whole) is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself never mind the rats deserting the sinking ship.
Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.
And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.
I was born and raised in Normandy, and saw the dire sacrifice a generation had to make. On my way to school, I could see the bullet holes in the walls, the tombstones of nameless soldiers, the bombs and mines we had to defuse in the fields.
What our grandfathers did was noble. What we do now is the business of war. I find it diminishing to compare what they did to what Google does now.
I completely agree with this. Trying to compare WWII to the actions of the modern military is absurd.
How can you possibly compare it with overthrowing governments in South America and the Middle East, Vietnam, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq, and much more - and of coursr the deeply, deeply questionable motives of all of these.
The actions of our ancestors in WWII were borne out of necessity - those of the modern military are driven by money, greed, propaganda and political point-scoring.
>drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq
You are looking at allied actions in WWII through rose colored glasses if you think that's worse.
Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Berlin, Saint-Nazair... the allies engaged in total war.
Civillians are part of the war making capability of a nation, and in WWII all sides considered them to be valid targets.
In Saint-Nazair's case it wasn't even enemy civillians. The German U-boat port was too heavily fortified, so the British wiped out the occupied French town that fed it.
I'd add Nanking, London, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Amsterdam, and Bataan to your list, and that's off the top of my head.
The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.
You made your point: war is dirty. But that was not my claim either.
If we want to defend the necessity and impact of those weapons, they should be taken in the context of modern american and NATO warfare, not in the context of WW2. Normandy 1944 was a very different conflict than Libya 2011 for instance.
The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...
Moreover, the Red Army did the majority of the 'heavy lifting' in Europe during WW2. There are some pretty striking political cartoon from Dr. Seuss about this, depicting the US and Britain traveling in comfort to Germany, while the USSR carries all of their luggage.
Without UK/US, all of Europe would have been in the USSR
It's extremely glib to point out that the Nazi's lost to the Russian winter (let's be frank, Russian weather did more to the Nazi's than Russian soldiers ever could...) without recognizing that:
- Hitler's strategy that lost in Russia was completely predicated on the knowledge of the Western Front. No UK/USA, we may not have had Hitler losing in Russia.
- The USSR would have taken all of Europe had it not been for the USA liberating France and meeting the USSR in Berlin.
Easy to say Russians did the heavy lifting when the truth is that Hitler fucked it all up.
Easy to say that Russians did the work, when the truth is that the reason why France and UK aren't post-communist bloc countries is because of what Americans did.
I'm not trying to be glib. In America the Soviet contribution to killing the Nazis is almost entirely written out of mandatory education so I think it's often relevant in American-heavy discussions to point it out.
Also, I recall hearing a talk about how one of the effects of post-WW2 soviet communism on western/northern europe was the creation of lots of social welfare programs. (Sadly I'm not in a place where I can source this but I could have sworn it was a talk by Michael Parenti.) The reason I bring this up is because I think it's disingenuous to claim that if it hadn't been for Britain and the US that France would today resemble the Balkans or Ukraine. What we typically associate with "post-communist bloc" countries happened far later when the USSR fell apart. It's a big jump to say that places like Britain would have become part of then suffered under Soviet Communism.
In the past, I have actually about the historical education of several people who went to school between 1985-2009 and no one I've met has had any education of history past reconstruction covered in primary & secondary education (outside of Civil Rights-era, which is independently covered).
Even if you are one of the ~1% of APAM students it's spoken about in broad terms and hazy generalities after Teapot Dome (unless you count history of Baseball, which somehow is somewhat inexplicably regarded as a critical component of America history).
I find this interesting because many Americans broadly understand the succession of events leading up to and constituting WWII. On the other hand, the topics that are covered to death are barely recalled: The Revolutionary War? Washington fought that one. Civil War? Harper's Ferry & Manassas? 1812? "The time we fought the Canadians".
Before Stalin died, he believed that a conflict with the US was imminent. There was blatantly a hot war brewing between the US and the USSR along the borders of the West/East divide in Europe.
The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite.
That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.
The USSR's "territorial lust" was aided and abetted by FDR and Churchill and guaranteed by their militaries. They divvied up Europe into spheres of influence at Yalta, and the US and UK were perfectly happy to gift Stalin Eastern Europe to further their own geopolitical objectives.
I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.
Honestly, would you have done things differently, if you were Churchill or FDR?
In the 20th century we had already gone through a war so terrible it was called the war to end all wars, until 20 years later when we made it look small by comparison. The deaths in WW2 accounted for 3% of the entire population of the world. And we hadn't even invented the atomic bomb until the very end.
After WW2 we were on the precipice of the next war potentially eliminating the human race. I can see why we were reluctant to jump into it all over again by "battling evil" and forcing Russia to give back the territory they took from Germany.
Their choice was entirely reasonable. War is rarely the right answer.
It's just kind of silly to portray the American military as "standing up to Stalin" because Americans are taught Stalin equals evil and America equals good and ipso facto America must have stood up to Stalin.
I think the west did a pretty good job of standing up to Stalin as much as they could without actually igniting WW3. The cold war ended without any direct conflict between belligerents after all, and the soviet union fell.
That is, if you take as a constraint that you don't actually want to start an all-out war, the post-WW2 west stood up to Stalin in probably the best way it possibly could have.
Our industry was literally born from the Cold War, yet now everyone wants to pretend it didn't exist. The Cold War was not just rhetoric and flag-waving. Even outside of Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan there was continual military activity and those engaged in it took it as seriously as if the world could end.
For many, the current actions of our military weigh much more heavily than good things it did half a century or more ago. Of course, each person's morality is their own, so you may feel that working in favor of the military is justified by its past actions. For others, they see working for the military as enabling bad present and future actions, and therefore see it as immoral to offer support.
Without defending the morality of the Hitler/Stalin/Mao governments (or of the US government), it's very much worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR and technological research continues to flourish in China. A lot of discoveries in computer science had roughly simultaneous Soviet / US discovery (the Cook-Levin theorem is a good example). There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway.
So if your goal is "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" and not "I should further the goals of a military because the military does good things," it is not at all clear that backing the US military over those of the USSR and China is the right option.
It is also worth remembering that plenty of people the US killed could have had grandchildren who wanted to work in these same fields.
No. The West since 1950 has done FAR MORE scientific research than the USSR did. Soviet scientists did good work and were smart. But the Western Enlightenment model -- open communication, tolerance of dissenting voices, pursuit of truth and rejection of propaganda, and funding for basic science -- was a huge shining scientific success over the past century. Its success dwarfed that of other models. (Today the biggest threat to that model is propaganda - largely from wealthy oligarchs pursuing maximal wealth, both Russian oligarchs and Western oligarchs like the Koches and Murdoch.)
There's a reason to be proud of Western enlightenment values, which are closely connected to Western liberal democracy.
I don't know that the causal link between the West's scientific output and the West's enlightenment values is that clear. It's certainly correlated.
But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.
The politicians today who are cutting NASA's budget, talking about shutting down DoE, etc. aren't simply victims of Koch propaganda or disbelievers in the enlightenment - they just no longer have political cover for publicly funding research to the same extent that it was funded previously. Nobody believes that the US is at a technical disadvantage against the people we're currently at war against. They still have the political cover to fund the military itself, which continues to get large amounts of funding from political parties that generally want to lower taxes, but that base won't let them fund basic research as much as it did in the past.
The US NIH has a $30B budget to do research on cancer and human disease. Most of that is about helping people and has zero connection to the military.
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Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS created by American oligarchs like the Koches. They have created a propaganda machine to push for tax cuts for the rich. And part of the propaganda, pushed by outlets funded or controlled by GOP billionaires, like Fox, Limbaugh, Cato(founded as Koch), Sinclair, Heritage, SPN, Cit U, Jud Watch, Bradley, Searle, etc etc. is that we need to shrink government (so we can cut taxes on the rich.)
One description of that strategy is here [1]
Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts.
>But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.
Are you implying that the USSR spent a smaller percentage of tax revenue on the war effort?
Stalin's favorite scientist was Trofim Lysenko, to whom he gave an enormous amount of power to direct research in the USSR. And Lysenko was pretty ruthless in using that power to suppress science he didn't like, esp with regards to genetics and evolution. He set back Soviet science by decades. And Mao repeated his mistakes: Lysenko's literal bad seeds contributed to the famine of the Great Leap Forward.
> worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR
You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a
political agenda quite different than that of the USSR.
> "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy"
He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.
There was definitely a reference to scientific advancement: "As an engineer ... After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist ... this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in."
That is why I interpreted the "quite nifty Liberty bubble" as referring to the ability to participate in technical / scientific endeavors - the "freedom I have to do this work" - not about liberty in the abstract.
('criley2, if I'm misreading you, please let me know.)
> There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway.
The vast majority of chips produced in Asia come from Taiwan, not the RoC. That’s a big difference, given that this discussion is about the innovation of democratic vs. autocratic governments, and the Taiwanese and Chinese governments are on completely opposite sides of that spectrum.
I’m not saying that Taiwan innovates more than a China because it has a democratic government, but it’s at least worth distinguishing between the two countries.
haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.
I'm sure Soviet times joke that "our microschemes are biggest!" came out of nowhere.. I wonder why all the consumer tech in USSR was so backwards if research was so flourishing :)
Nobody stood up to Stalin and Mao. Cherry picking the good stuff doesn’t make the bad stuff acceptable. Carpet bombing of civilians in German cities for example - an act of zero military value.
The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.
> The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.
The same UN that causes Cholera outbreaks, protects rapists (as long as they wear blue helmets), and steps aside to allow massive genocides to occur on a not-irregular basis ( Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan for starters).
Or are you talking about the UN that funded the Oil for Food program so a bunch of super-elite rich people could get kickbacks from an evil dicatator?
Maybe it's the UN that has stood by for decades while more and more dictators and legitimately horrible people acquire and use WMDs (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on)...
Seriously, how much good has the UN actually done that wasn't backedstopped by a US Super Carrier or two?
The only thing the UN has shown is how utterly weak it is. It's ability to force compliance is limited to those members willingness to do so. It's just another puppet of the superpowers.
I don't think it's useful to refer to a military without also including its leaders. The military that fought against Hitler and Stalin and Mao isn't the same military that invades countries and topples governments under false pretenses.
How so? Eisenhower finished the WW2, and then went on to topple the government of Iran and restore the Shah. Plus he gave bombers and napalm to help the French keep their colonies in Indochina.
I understand this perspective, but I think it oversimplifies the reality of why we (the US) go to war. I am a veteran of the war in Iraq, a conflict that could be reduced to a one-line "defend our way of life" sound bite if you are willing to ignore everything else that happened. I do not want my children to use my involvement in that conflict to remove their responsibility to make hard ethical choices.
One of the bigger issues I have with this that Google is only doing this kind of work for the US military, which for me as a non-US Googler makes me a bit uncomfortable. Because some relatives have been fighting the US military not even that long ago.
your grandfather was probably considered by leadership to be just as disposable as every other low-income male in the population at that time... he's lucky that he didn't die in the trenches. you are, too. war is power and money.
glowing historical illusions of "responsibility" and "valor" don't protect us from nuclear holocaust.
yes your freedom wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drone bombing weddings of goat farmers in yemen (the poorest people in the world). Or maybe if we weren’t setting civilians on fire in laos or cambodia or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Sudan. Where would our freedom be without that?
you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.
World War II wasn't just, either. It's simply that the Allies were less evil than the Axis. The Allies literally included Stalin. The US placed an ethnic minority of its own people in concentration camps despite zero evidence that these people were going to help an enemy country. And so forth.
You would be here. Your job would be the same. In fact, it would be hard to tell the difference. With all due respect, the 'ultimate sacrifices' might have been given, but many believe, including those that survived the horrors of war, that it was never to safeguard you, but rather a feast for those that prey on volatility.
That’s not a safe assumption. The US was awfully busy fighting the Japanese. Had they stayed out of Europe, Hitler would certainly have defeated Britain (leaving Africa unprotected) and likely had the resources spare to defeat the USSR too. From there Hitler could support the Japanese against the US and would have massive resources to do so.
Hitler’s plan really was world domination. He had plans for a rocket-powered trans-Atlantic plane to bomb New York. Not to mention that the Nazis had the V2 and even a jet fighter by the end of the war (but too few resources to build/deploy them). With more resources the Nazis may well have developed their nuclear bomb.
It's not at all certain that Hitler would have defeated Britain if the US had stayed out of Europe.
As far as I know, most historians agree that the US hastened the Allies victory over Germany but the Allies would have (eventually, probably) won anyways.
That these Google engineers support a global surveillance network that stalks and spies on everyone while taking a moral stances against military projects is truly laughable.
Keeping "free" nations safe and prosperous is as fine a goal as any.
FANGs defeat themselves by putting themselves in COL areas that are really high thus reducing their relative compensation to 1/3 or less, even with all that stock. That's pretty easy for govt to beat.
As opposed to the col in the areas the government is in? Don't forget the limits of civil service pay oh and regular sequesters and budget cuts and reductions in the value of DB pensions.
Exactly right. Somehow people keep explaining high salaries of FANG in terms of cities/area in US. Truth is more likely that these companies have immense market cap and profitability and being helmed by first generation liberal entrepreneurs they are happy with sharing benefits.
IBM, Cisco or any other typical IT company pays 120-150K salaries in bay area and not much of profit sharing/ equity.
These smug generalizations, if you did not vote for X, you are racist! If you are not for A, you are for Genocide!
are not going to win you over people that are not already in your camp.
That's fair enough but you have to decide if your cool with that and resign if you have moral beliefs that run counter to your employers
You come across as wanting that sweet sv $ and benefits without having to make any moral choices - if you got to work for CNI company's you know what the deal is.
And before you ask yes I did face that at my first job when I analysed some high speed film from one experiment and though oh I know what that "objct" is and my office mates said yes that's probably REDACTED.
I disagree strongly. Employees are a stakeholder in the company, and if they can band together to enact change on the companies goals for a moral purpose, then that is an option as well.
If their efforts fails, they can choose to resign, or take other actions as employees in history have. It's not the only option, it may be the only option ultimately that succeeds in removing yourself from complicity.
I don't agree with this. Many open source projects have been used for sinister means (not just by governments). But does that make those contributors complicit? Should those contributors be safe-guarding against all possible unintended use cases?
It seems like you're painting all military efforts and funding in evil terms. But these efforts are directed by many different people, each with their own goals and agendas. Some of those efforts are intended for the betterment of humanity, while other efforts are at the detriment of humanity (at least in my opinion).
I worked for several years at a large defense contractor. The majority of our funding came from military contracts. I worked on a project intended to help detect and disarm explosive devices. And I worked next to a team that was trying to rapidly detect infectious diseases. We all thought we were doing work that would benefit society. But virtually any technology can be used for malicious purposes. Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?
> Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways?
Yes. If you choose to work for an entity you help further their work. Militaries are made for war and by contributing to a military, you directly help them commit atrocities. Working for a military is simply war profiteering [1].
> Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil?
Yes, if you voluntarily join an organization knowing they have evil people doing evil things.
> Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?
Yes, with probably the only exception being a defensive war.
By using this "logic" you draw a very blurry line, that wont lead to any decision making, just arguing over who is most evil.
I can now assume that miners and forgery workers are complicit in murder because they harvest and refine the metals that build weapons. And that farmers are complicit because they produce the food that is used in military rations, the wool or cotton that is used to make their uniforms.
You should understand that building basically anything will further the goal of some military over another.
Technology is neutral - who it's used by and how is not.
I don't care what you build, if it has the goal of improving a workflow or automating a process then it will de-facto support one organization over another.
On one hand, I reluctantly appreciate Trump's election because it will force silicon valley to think many times before readily giving up user privacy to the US government. I felt like the attitude was very lax under Obama (despite the Snowden revelations).
On the other hand, this bothers me a bit because it continues to allow people in the valley to maintain a (sorry to use this word) delusion that what they are doing is "moral". If Google stops working with the Pentagon after this petition, people in the valley will pat their backs and enjoy how they are making the world a better place. They will not have any incentive to rethink the sale of user data to advertisers, creating highly addictive mentally harmful products, etc.
Overall, it's good that at least people in the valley are somewhat mindful of their actions and care about society (compared my current industry, finance). I hope they can be successful at a deeper level.
> allow people in the valley to maintain a (sorry to use this word) delusion that what they are doing is "moral"
People refusing to work on military technology isn't "appearing moral". It's just "moral", at least if you consider war to be generally amoral.
People here and elsewhere have been throwing the term "virtue signalling" around a lot in the last year or so. This is a perfect counterexample: Google employees speaking out against military tech are shouldering the risk of appearing disloyal to their employer. If Google were to cut their military ties, they would forgo whatever benefit they previously sought in that relationship.
Do you think the US should stop developing military technology? I doubt it, and I doubt many Google employees do, either. I doubt they would be happy to live in a world where the U.S. has a weaker military than countries like China or Russia. I also doubt they would approve of throwing out our advanced targeting technology in favor of Vietnam-style carpet bombing.
They are uncomfortable with killing people even though a technologically-advanced military is probably a good thing. They are comfortable with tracking and manipulating millions of people even though it's definitely a bad thing. This is squeamishness, not morality.
What you say about "your country" kinda legitimates anyone saying that about "their" country, too. There's plenty of arms dealer selling to all sorts of sides, are there not? And generally speaking, at best soldiers defend against invading soldiers, at worst they are invading or "just" murdering some or a lot of civilians.
Remember when the cold war ended, for a while, but military budgets didn't exactly collapse? Isn't that "funny" how that works, and how we have no problem realizing that in other contexts.
You make war profitable, you will have more war. The details are trickier, sure. Slogans aren't enough. But if you don't even have the will, don't worry about finding a way.
> I doubt they would be happy to live in a world where the U.S. has a weaker military than countries like China or Russia.
Yeah, nevermind the big nations all having their go at weaker nations, and the US wars of aggression, under exactly that pretense. No, it's really that the every last person in that huuuuuge industry -- shoveling tax dollars into gadgets that can be used to defend, to destroy, to enforce resource extraction as well as for domestic control -- wants to look out for you, because you have the same nationality in the passport. It's the children on non-Americans that get labels like "fun-sized terroris", American children have names. Those lines could not ever blur.
Yes, you can't just unilaterally disarm. But you also can't keep hitting others (and yourself) while gearing up even more, at increasing rate, while subverting self-determination of others and intellectual honesty of self at every corner, and then say "it just happens to be a dangerous world, I'm just reacting". The people you're just reacting to say the same thing, and the people who sell you and them that lie laugh all the way to the bank, and should there be need for it, they won't share their bunker with you. They'd sooner share it with Russian and Chinese war profiteers, so to speak.
It's an intellectually dishonest argument, because it actually uses someone's profession of good intentions, accepts them, and then somehow turns it against the speaker.
As used on the internet, it's also useless because it always assumes the speaker doesn't actually act on their believes, and there usually is no way for them to prove their willingness to act on their believes.
It also ignores that even just stating such believes can have an effect. After all, these statements are used to convince others to adopt them.
The best proof of the last point may actually be this protest by Google employees: their conviction was probably formed by reading and hearing about the ethical responsibility of engineers, a topic that is certainly teeming with "virtue signalling" according to the common definition. They might even be the product of Google's own "virtue signalling", i. e. "Do no Evil". Maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin only ever wanted to pay lip service to ethical behaviour. But their employees didn't get the full memo, took them by their word, and are now acting upon it.
In this sense, "virtue signalling" aka "Greenwashing" or "diversity boilerplate" may start as a cynical profit-motivated lie, and end up changing the world for the better.
Yea, I don't think virtue signaling is always wrong, but I think there is wrong virtue signaling.
A lot of the vitriol on the internet is destructive virtue signaling using holier than thou approaches that alienate people close to your position, this causes division, not unity, and is one of the key issues on the Left - i.e. the Left attacking itself over minutiae as the Right marches on.
Sure, and I agree that Google shouldn't stop here. But then again there is a difference, at least in my opinion, between doing something that helps the military in a support role and doing something that actively assists them in killing people. Letting the military use google cloud or google search is different than working on an AI-assisted targeting system for drones. That is where I would draw the line for myself.
>It's just "moral", at least if you consider war to be generally amoral.
The military is also responsible for defense and disaster recovery (national guard). There are many technologies created to be resilient and life-saving by the military (ARPANET). Working with on certain military-funded projects is definitely non black-and-white like you imply.
There are plenty of jobs that are more immoral than working for Google. You don't even have to look outside of the tech field.
I'm sure someone is making a lot of money helping distribute child pornography over the internet. Plenty of tech jobs in human trafficking, too, I would imagine.
Incidentedly, I worked on drones for the Navy and Marines for many years.
My issue is with the hypocracy. Don't claim to be moral and sell this Kool aid. It sounds a lot like religious high priests that I have a viceral reaction to (given where I come from). It could just be my own personal issue with the faux moral sell of the valley.
Just like a criminal might object to being defrauded because they feel it crosses a line.
Everybody is a hypocrite to some extent, you at least seem to be aware of that fact that you are simply a gun for hire which makes it easier to reason about the position of others.
> you at least seem to be aware of that fact that you are simply a gun for hire which makes it easier to reason about the position of others.
That probably is the case. Morality is also very subjective (which, to some, is a matter of belief). Maybe "hypocrisy" is not the right word. Perhaps I was looking for "lack of self awareness". That is kind of what I meant with "delusion".
There are a lot of good, empathetic people in Silicon Valley. More empathetic than probably any other subgroup I have ever encountered. And they have a deep desire to change the world. I have a lot of respect for that.
But they also circle jerk about that all the time (you see this in finance at charity events too). And in that circle jerk, thinking they are improving humanity, they end up cozing up with the federal government, foreign dictators, and even suppressing free thought! And I am not acquitting the Military Industrial Complex of doing a lot of the same things (but at least they are less deluded, having the "American interests" narrative as opposed to "make the world a better place" narrative).
To some extent living in a self-reinforcing bubble will cause people to believe their own bullshit. SV is not unique in this, there are plenty of people who are obviously busy with enriching themselves and their buddies while doing this 'to improve the world'. I don't buy it, and I would prefer it if they were honest about it but then again what does it matter, they're certainly not fooling anybody.
The few that really want to improve the world stand out and don't feel the need to sell themselves as improving the world, they don't need to: it's obvious, their actions speak louder than words.
> but maybe that just means I’m just a no-good warmongering fool, right?
More specifically, a warmongering fool who can't discern a false dichotomy - because your options in life are rarely ever drones vs more lethal drones.
These regions we're using drones in. They could probably use more tools to enable true democratic representation. Isn't that what Google should be doing, given that they "don't do evil"? Building tools to blow people up seems slightly counter intuitive.
Id argue it's not a false dichotomy because drone strikes will go on regardless of what Google does. It's very clear that whatever collateral damage drones currently cause is an acceptable cost to the militaries using them.
"If you don't help make drones more accurate, you're the reason for collateralized murder".
Or, you could like, just stop droning innocent people to death. Not saying we all have to agree, but just that factually speaking - it's within the realm of possibilities. And for that reason it's a false dichotomy.
> "If you don't help make drones more accurate, you're the reason for collateralized murder".
I never stated anything about blame, nor do I think that choosing to not participate makes someone culpable.
> Or, you could like, just stop droning innocent people to death.
I have not "droned" anyone.
> Not saying we all have to agree, but just that factually speaking - it's within the realm of possibilities.
It's possible, sure, but certainly not probable. Drone strikes are increasing, not decreasing. I don't think you're thinking about this very pragmatically.
"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."
"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."
To me this is incredibly valid for Silicon Valley engineers these days.