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The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

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Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#61

Post by skybrian »

greggarious wrote: post #59
cmndrkeen wrote: post #8

Everyone acts like military research is obviously evil. Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe?

>Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? When in recent memory has the US military risked significant amounts of soldiers to "keep us safe"? If anything, the US military has made me unsafe . The invasion of Iraq was a disaster. Torture and drone warfare have created scores of "terrorists" - people angry that their civilian family members were killed in a war of aggr…

Two problems with this argument. You're blaming the military for decisions made by civilian leadership. And, it's not wrong to do what we can to reduce risk both for soldiers and civilians. Adding more risk wouldn't be an improvement.

Military spending is certainly tremendously wasteful, though.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#62

Post by ianleeclark »

skybrian wrote: post #61
greggarious wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? When in recent memory has the US military risked significant amounts of soldiers to "keep us safe"? If anything, the US military has made me unsafe . The invasion of Iraq was a disaster. Torture and drone warfare have created scores of "terrorists" - people angry that their civilian family members were killed in a war of aggr…

Two problems with this argument. You're blaming the military for decisions made by civilian leadership. And, it's not wrong to do what we can to reduce risk both for soldiers and civilians. Adding more risk wouldn't be an improvement. Military spending is certainly tremendously wasteful, though.

The military is the enforcement of the leadership, so it's valid to criticize them. Just taking orders wasn't an excuse at nuremberg and it shouldn't be today, either.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#63

Post by csydas »

volgo wrote: post #24
grumdan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff. The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia…

Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries). Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired int…

I think this is purposefully muddying the issue - there's a reason that mens rea* is part of law; the state of mind a person has in an action weighs heavily on our judgement of the outcome.

Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are first and foremost data-mining ad agencies that also provide social networking services. The fact that you can also use them to target terrorist is not really a by design item, much like even though you can beat someone to death with a wrench, it's primary function and the design goal behind it is to secure nuts to bolts and screws.

So yes, there is a bit of a difference when Google's tech happens to also be used by the military for image analysis from drones and when Google willingly assists and participates in such projects.

The major concern a lot of people have is that it's a very big switch in market from what they were doing to Project Maven. People who otherwise were maybe concerned, or heck, even satisfied with Google's influence on their lives and happy to participate in reCAPTCHA and pay for Google services now find their work and money being used to pay for something they disagree with.

I do not appreciate the simplification of the outcomes, as no civilized society judges in that way - we consider the motive as well as the outcome, as well as the state of mind of the person who committed the act. Likewise, there's quite a bit of a difference in US Army RnD grabbing an open source project and embedding it into drone guidance systems and Google taking a Government Contract; aside from the willingness of Google in this state, they demonstrate their complicit nature as a company via the contract and the payments; the open source project likely wasn't even aware of it until they read about it in some news article or saw snippets of their code in a Press Release/Demo.

* I realize that this is meant as a method of judging guilt (hence Guilty Mind), but the concept is the same here. The state of one's mind in making an action should be relevant.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#64

Post by colechristensen »

grumdan wrote: post #15
cmndrkeen wrote: post #8

Everyone acts like military research is obviously evil. Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe?

> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff. The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia…

None of that happening has anything to do with technology.

The only reason we know about it is improvements in communications.

Nations having people killed across borders outside of the judicial system isn't a new thing, and it isn't going away. The technology to do it is incidental, and a very minor part of defense R&D output.

Functioning communications enables war crimes just as much as or more than weapons, so why not refuse to work on computer networking research too? (one could make a million such arguments about essentially everything)

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#65

Post by hodgesrm »

albntomat0 wrote: post #58
hodgesrm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who pays taxes to the US federal government contributes to the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Most other weapons have insignificant effects by comparison. We should not underestimate their danger just because they have not recently been used. That's the conundrum Americans should all be thinking about.

Debatable. There's a strong argument that nuclear weapons have prevented direct conflicts between the major powers (mutual assured destruction). Of course, there are a number of situations in which nuclear weapons could end up being used in the future (or very nearly were used in the past), but saying nuclear weapons should be completely dismantled by everyone is not as clearly desirable as you make it seem.

Actually I only said that we should think carefully about this conundrum because it's the really important one. For a variety of reasons most people underestimate the risk of nuclear weapons.

As noted up-thread how you choose to react is a personal issue. At a minimum complacency seems like an unwise response.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#66

Post by v_lisivka »

grumdan wrote: post #60
v_lisivka wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask question first about "immorally" to be sure I understand you correctly? There are few different kind of morality in circulation, so I need to know about what morality we are talking. Liberal morale is used at the West: every person life costs infinity, so we cannot exchange life of a person to save another person or even infinity of persons. However, at war or in military, Liberal morale can't be used, beca…

I didn't have a concrete moral framework in mind, but I was thinking of a few baseline rules that should hold in most sensible systems, such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago), not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries), not starting wars of aggression based on falsifi…

In general, I agree with you that army should not do that. However, enemy rarely tries to help to achieve that, i.e. they are not putting markers "we are soldiers, shoot us" at their positions. So goal of typical army is to minimize loses, not to avoid them completely, because risk is non-zero for every shot.

> such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago)

It looks like error (one bomb hit territory near to hospital), not a precise strike. In contrasts, Russians (I will Russian-Ukraine war as example, because I know it better) are shooting civilians pretty often. I had Uber-drive with driver which served in Augustinian during USSR invasion. He told me that in Augustinian they completely destroyed nearest civilian village with all habitats when one of them was killed during mission. AFAIK, Russian army is not changed much since then.

> not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries)

Completely agreed. We(Ukraine) are victims of hybrid war too.

> not starting wars of aggression based on falsified intelligence (Iraq, Vietnam)

Intelligence was not falsified in case of Iraq: chemical weapons are just moved to Syria few months prior to invasion.

Not sure about Vietnam, but I know a bit about war in Vietnam from USSR side, and it not good. Not interested much in the topic.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#67

Post by albntomat0 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #65
albntomat0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debatable. There's a strong argument that nuclear weapons have prevented direct conflicts between the major powers (mutual assured destruction). Of course, there are a number of situations in which nuclear weapons could end up being used in the future (or very nearly were used in the past), but saying nuclear weapons should be completely dismantled by everyone is not as clearly desirable as you make it seem.

Actually I only said that we should think carefully about this conundrum because it's the really important one. For a variety of reasons most people underestimate the risk of nuclear weapons. As noted up-thread how you choose to react is a personal issue. At a minimum complacency seems like an unwise response.

Ahh ok, I misread your message. My mistake.

I've spent a good amount of time looking into the issue (for a number of reasons), and it seems to me that nuclear policy, on the level of an individual US citizen, is highly complex, especially if one concludes, as I have, that keeping nuclear weapons on some scale is the best option.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#68

Post by noirknight »

volgo wrote: post #24
grumdan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff. The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia…

Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries). Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired int…

GPS and other precision guidance systems do help to save civilian casualties by allowing militaries to use smaller and fewer explosives. The designers of GPS have probably saved more lives than any doctors. I want to live in a world without human violence but creating a world like that doesn’t involve banning technology, it requires political action.

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#69

Post by albntomat0 »

ianleeclark wrote: post #62
skybrian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two problems with this argument. You're blaming the military for decisions made by civilian leadership. And, it's not wrong to do what we can to reduce risk both for soldiers and civilians. Adding more risk wouldn't be an improvement. Military spending is certainly tremendously wasteful, though.

The military is the enforcement of the leadership, so it's valid to criticize them. Just taking orders wasn't an excuse at nuremberg and it shouldn't be today, either.

At what point should the military refuse the orders of civilian leadership? A tactical level order to shoot civilians (or similar, non-cliche situation) should be disobeyed.

However, is it the military's responsible to disobey the decisions of a duly elected civilian government, such as the Iraq War resolution[0]? Civilian control of the military exists for a reason, and allowing/requiring the military to go against it would have wide ranging consequences. There are definitely unique cases to be explored, but credit/blame need to be assigned to the party responsible for the decision.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution

Re: The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

#70

Post by grumdan »

v_lisivka wrote: post #66
grumdan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't have a concrete moral framework in mind, but I was thinking of a few baseline rules that should hold in most sensible systems, such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago), not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries), not starting wars of aggression based on falsifi…

In general, I agree with you that army should not do that. However, enemy rarely tries to help to achieve that, i.e. they are not putting markers "we are soldiers, shoot us" at their positions. So goal of typical army is to minimize loses, not to avoid them completely, because risk is non-zero for every shot. > such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago) It looks like er…

> In general, I agree with you that army should not do that. However, enemy rarely tries to help to achieve that, i.e. they are not putting markers "we are soldiers, shoot us" at their positions. So goal of typical army is to minimize loses, not to avoid them completely, because risk is non-zero for every shot.

I agree with that. This is why I was only asking for "reasonable effort" to try to avoid this. I realize this is vague, but there are some cases that are a clear violation.

> It looks like error (one bomb hit territory near to hospital), not a precise strike.

In the incident I was referring to (but can't find a link to for some reason right now), it was a sustained attack that didn't even stop for 30 minutes after the US forces were informed that it was in fact a hospital. I'm willing to attribute that to negligence and organizational dysfunction rather than malice, but even then this indicates a lack of concern for civilians and medical infrastructure in the country.

Another case was the bombing of that infant formula factory in the first gulf war that was, as far as I remember, also claimed to be a chemical weapons site, even though the administration knew this not to be the case at the time. I don't remember many details on this though.

EDIT: Okay, seems I was mistaken about this, they didn't know this to be false, but seemingly had no strong evidence to support their claims either. Here are some other examples of US strikes on civilian targets based on very flimsy evidence though, along with details on that original hospital case I brought up:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43079.htm

> Intelligence was not falsified in case of Iraq: chemical weapons are just moved to Syria few months prior to invasion.

This is the first time I've heard this claim. Most Western media reported that there was no intelligence to support the WMD claim at the time. e.g:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/09/usa.iraq2

> Not sure about Vietnam, but I know a bit about war in Vietnam from USSR side, and it not good. Not interested much in the topic.

In this case the administration lied about the reasons for the war to the general public (this was revealed by the Pentagon Papers).

I know very little about the war in Ukraine, so I'll take your word for it. My main argument was that the US military in particular (since this is the one most relevant to Silicon Valley) has a history of this type of behavior that significantly complicates the point of military research to keep us safe.

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