Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#981

Post by qkls »

philwelch wrote: post #977
betolink wrote: post #731

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…

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 tru…

The judgement of history is always that those people needed to be killed, because winners write the history.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#982

Post by philwelch »

qkls wrote: post #981
philwelch wrote: post #977

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tru…

The judgement of history is always that those people needed to be killed, because winners write the history.

Not always, but I figured WWII would be a relatively uncontroversial example.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#983

Post by mistahchris »

> There’s a strong libertarian ethos among tech folks...

This does not ring true in my experience with "tech folks" in recent times. It may have been true at one time, but I think libertarianism in tech has fallen out of vogue.

Also, I take issue with distrusting how government (or any powerful organization) makes use of technology puts someone into the libertarian political philosophy according to this article. A healthy distrust of how powerful groups use technology makes a lot of sense for anyone and is definitely not something exclusive to libertarians.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#984

Post by reacweb »

ionised wrote: post #944
reacweb wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are not going to change the military from the inside anymore than Snowden could change the NSA from the inside. Thinking you can is naive at best.

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".

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#985

Post by Natsu »

rebuilder wrote: post #771
Natsu wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of a single right that exists inherently. Where does such a right originate? From our own human nature, actually. Think about this for a minute. Would a normal person be willing to believe something because you were forced to? If someone was violently attacked, would they not fight back? By recognizing these aspects of human nature as something fundamentally not controllable by laws, we can instead fo…

If there are natural human rights, what does that mean for, e.g., prisoners? Is the right to personal freedom not a natural right? If it is, can natural rights be taken away? Under what conditions? Or is imprisonment a breach of natural rights, and what does that imply? It's pretty hard to pin down what natural rights are. That a society ought to consider the limits of normal human behaviour I don't dispute, but that…

Obviously they can be, it's just there's a cost to it.

We value our safety from, e.g., rapists more than the rapist's liberty.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#986

Post by spdionis »

supertrope wrote: post #967
kevinmchugh wrote: post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alfred Nobel thought so too with dynamite. "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.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#987

Post by crpatino »

spdionis wrote: post #986
supertrope wrote: post #967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alfred Nobel thought so too with dynamite. "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 did not do that. The fact that several competing countries came up with nuclear weapons roughly at the same time did. The posible results were either MAD or World domination.

Also, it could be argued that what MAD achieved was not to stop wars, but to have nucler powers wage their wars through proxies. It is a grim fate, to kill and die for an stated purpose that's nothing but a smoke screen for other people's interests.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#988

Post by ehsankia »

russdpale wrote: post #878
ehsankia wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the problem is that is cannot be handled responsibly and in well defined limits.

But it has many times in the past.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#989

Post by wu-ikkyu »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #953
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My question was whether it's just as immoral a choice to not use one's potential to help people as it is to use one's talent to overtly harm people. Is the answer to that not obvious? It's the difference between negligence and pre-meditation/mens rea.

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…

>a) you're using legal definitions when the question is about morality

You don't think the legal differences between those two things were based on perceived immorality?

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#990

Post by kevinmchugh »

sangnoir wrote: post #971
supertrope wrote: post #967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alfred Nobel thought so too with dynamite. "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."

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 o…

This is essentially the argument for targetting the Iranian nuclear program with stuxnet.
Post reply on HN