811–820 of 1001 posts
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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.
Then why wasn't the US in the war from the beginning? Did it take 2 years to discover that Hitler was bad?
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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, whe…
There is a huge difference between creating a network protocol and designing autonomous killer drones.
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 Pentago…
I've called SV the military's generalized R&D department.
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It's unproductive to cast aside as malevolent the opinions of reasonable people who disagree with you.
It's unproductive to sneeringly cast aside the concerns of Google Employees as starry eyed activism but here we are. Its uncontroversial to state that the US military has committed war crimes and engaged in military campaigns across the world in spite of international law. Google is working the military to expand the capabilities to carry out these attacks and to work on these projects is to either agree ideologicall…
I don't disagree with this. The question I'm trying to figure out -- which powerful nation should we look to for an example on how to do better?
Also, are there are any benefits to the U.S. maintaining hegemony as the top military power that we need to weigh in this analysis?
I definitely am not fully up to speed on the details of this debate, but it does appear fairly complex at first glance.
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There is a huge difference between creating a network protocol and designing autonomous killer drones.
Really? The killer drones couldn't communicate without said network protocols.
Please excuse my manichaeism.
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It starts well before Silicon Valley, Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center. http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html
"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.
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> 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 s…
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 thoug…
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
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.
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 Pentago…
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 a…
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 app…
This sounds remarkibly similar to the "superior orders" defense given at Nuremberg [1]
(Those who gave it were hung from the neck until dead.)
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 ten…
But, there is power in organizing, or unionizing, for collective bargaining.