851–860 of 1001 posts
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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.
please help me understand how a substance that turns sand into soil, developed to green the deserts, can be used as a weapon. To me this argument that "anything can be used in evil ways" is a poor excuse used to distract from the issue.
Maybe if they were more accurate they would kill less people?
You do not need advanced technology to build simple rockets with simple warheads and wreak havoc. These rockets are guided by nothing better than pointing and shooting. We see this in use in various paramilitaries around the world with little concern for civilian casualties: in Gaza, in Syria, in South Lebanon, in Yemen. If the West was similarly limited to such crude munitions then the civilian cost to destroying legitimate military targets would be enormous. Better guided munitions reduce civilian casualties and as such working on making munitions better-guided is indeed ethical.
If you think that not giving generals the tools to better avoid civilian casualties means they will simply not wage war in ways that endanger civilians, well history is pretty clear that this is quite erroneous. Giving generals the tools to wage war more ethically allows them to make decisions with fewer compromises e.g. civilian casualties.
This is not even to mention work on purely defensive munitions, e.g. Iron Dome, which is inherently ethical.
And if your opposition is rooted in a sense of pacifism, please, freedom is not free, it's not just a slogan. Anarchies (i.e. the lack of a sovereign government with a military defending territory) and their power vacuums result in warlords and the end of civil society. And that Malthusian outcome is clearly less ethical than almost any other. That's just human nature. Defense of civil society requires a military. Ideally, that military will act as ethically as possible while achieving its primary goal which is the stability (in face of external threats) necessary for civil society to flourish. There are two ways to make the military ethical: a) give it ethical tools so that it won't be forced to use less ethical means for achieving its raison d'être, b) set ethical policy. As sad that it may be that we have little control over the latter, as engineers we can have control over the former.
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please help me understand how a substance that turns sand into soil, developed to green the deserts, can be used as a weapon. To me this argument that "anything can be used in evil ways" is a poor excuse used to distract from the issue.
You're asking how fertilizer can be weaponized? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
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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…
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 ba…
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.
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…
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.
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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 t…
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 Interne…
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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.
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You want to have that conversation with them? Because some of them are right here. In fact some of them just got shot at yesterday. Is it hyperbole, or do you honestly feel that trying to connect users with products they might like is inherently unconscionable?
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 )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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 Interne…
From a wikipedia section on Free Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#User_experience_re...
> 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