141–150 of 1001 posts
It seems to me that 1st and 2nd amendment rights are both under particularly intense bombardment these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, honest question, what's worse, helping the military be more accurate in who they attack, or abstaining and perhaps there are more mistakes, and/or collateral damage as they choose the best times/locations to strike that they can find, not the best that could be found. On the one hand, your involvement might help limit "innocent" deaths. On the other, a more effective system might see more use, so more people over…
Research for the military isn't the issue here, it's Google's changing agenda. If the DoD or Raytheon or Weapons Systems Startup LLC hired someone to develop a better system for analyzing drone images, I don't believe that person would be complaining that their work was being used for war -- that's exactly what they signed up for. The problem here is that Google sold their engineers on "Don't Be Evil" and libertarian…
> The problem here is that Google sold their engineers on "Don't Be Evil" and libertarianism and "we're a sweet little tech company that people like" and is now delivering military contracts.
And they specifically dropped that when they changed to Alphabet, so the writing was on the wall for people to see. That said, I still think the immediate jump to military work == shameful is far too broad a brush to paint with. What if a contract was for better field medical kits? That's still going to help any military engagement for one side, but does keeping one side's soldiers in better health so they can kill more the other side make it okay? What about future public uses of the technology?
The world isn't that simple, and people acting like it is just so they have an easy target for their anger doesn't really help anything other than to make that person feel a little better about themselves for a little while.
More and more funding in the military means more funding for specifically defense projects rather than straight up knowledge or public good.
What is the long term affect of this? Perhaps research far more focused on destruction instead of public good. More better drones, less general knowledge or cures for diseases?
It's a sad state of affairs, and workers standing up against military research within their companies is a good first step.
---
One of the first sources I found on this is below, but I've specifically heard about it being vexing from AI researchers, as many don't want to directly support military applications, but don't have much of an opportunities for funding otherwise.
https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-...
This has been by far one of the most shameful things Google has done. And their excuse that "they're only analyzing images" is a joke. Analyzing the images and "identifying objects" (their words) is probably 95-99% of the job in a drone strike. So if they're trying to make people think that their role is minimal in drone strikes, they're failing hard at that. I also think Eric Schimidt, who until last December was bo…
So is it simply per se shameful to develop technology for the military, or is there a more nuanced moral argument that this sentiment comes from? Or is there something specific to Google's Maven project that makes it shameful, while other types of military commissioned projects might not be?
And then there's the fact that we've killed hundreds of children with it. It's hard not to view everyone involved with the program as guilty of war crimes.
I don't have a problem with our military in a general sense, or even the idea of using drones to keep our pilots out of harm's way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ulti…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still is. It is not necessary for world peace to help the Pentagon to build better killing machines.
Citation needed
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
It's amazing the degree to which people are ignorant of what you've said here and imagine the US was motivated by ideology.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ulti…
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…
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 sh…
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.