71–80 of 295 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? That's not the alternative, though. Drones are used in hundreds of situations where without them, the US simply wouldn't have taken action.
And it's your belief that not taking action would be better?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that. Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.
Only the most dogmatic pacifists in the US still maintain that the US entering WWII was the wrong choice. Yet the US literally incinerated hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians through carpet fire-bombings. Thankfully, we seem to have left the world of total war. Whether nuclear weapons and targeted drone strikes made the world in some broad strokes more peaceful on purpose, well, probably not. Nonetheless, we…
Deaths in armed conflict form a fat-tailed distribution. Extreme events dominate, and the absence of any world wars for several decades is not evidence that humanity has gotten more peaceful if world wars happen roughly every couple hundred years. See Taleb, who is much more clear. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that. Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.
> Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding.
We're in a world where the destructive properties of a modern army are so extreme that combat has evolved/devolved to medieval like small scale/intensity battle. Instead of targeting economic output, social networks of individuals are targeted.
People always seek effective ways to kill their enemies in conflict.
Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is…
Technology has failed over and over to provide an accountable, verifiable, and secure election process.
Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is…
You're certainly correct that the major problem is social, economic, and structural, but I do think there are some technologies that are inherently tricky to justify regardless of the economic structures they arise in. The atomic bomb is one obvious example of a technology that seems to be inherently bad not only for humanity, but for biological life itself. You could argue that the problem of the bomb is more-so a p…
Large, efficient explosives in space is an obvious one. We will need to crack open asteroids to mine them or blow one up so it doesn't collide with something eventually. I hope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people and China to be more oppressive until its workers protested. So he's right about humanity having to solve its problems but he's forgetting that Google, the corporation, is opting to make it harder for humanity to solve its problems by enabling those who do not have humanity's best interest in their heart.
> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that. Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.
Typical apologetics. It actually is quite simple, it all comes down to money like most everything else. The American government let 9/11 happen (there is ample evidence of that, in case you don't know) so that American companies could profiteer off of the ensuing conflict and so that the American government could further its strategic interests in the middle east. It's mostly only moronic Americans who believe that there is any nuance in all of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding.
> No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding. Not a wedding, indeed, an entire town, with possibly dozens of weddings happening at the same time. Plus hospitals, schools, etc. If you had to pick between carpet bombing and smart bombs, which one would you pick? (And consider you don't have a choice, like the trolley problem, you NEED to pick one).
Can I choose to drop the bomb on Americans instead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've carpet bombed other places when they didn't have the alternative of a targeted strike at a wedding.
Really? When and where?
>killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and virtually destroying most of the city.
>The unusually warm weather and good conditions meant that the bombing was highly concentrated around the intended targets and also created a vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air which created a 460 meter high tornado of fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_Wa...
---
17 January 1991 – 23 February 1991
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign
>2,000–3,000 Iraqi civilians killed
>10,000–12,000 killed
>100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs,
>Coalition bombing raids destroyed Iraqi civilian infrastructure. 11 of Iraq's 20 major power stations and 119 substations were totally destroyed, while a further six major power stations were damaged.[18][19] At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations, and many sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges were also destroyed.
---
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
March 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
>The bombing killed between 489 and 528 civilians, and destroyed bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, private businesses, as well as barracks and military installations.
>In 2000, a year after the bombing ended, Group 17 published a survey dealing with damage and economic restoration. The report concluded that direct damage from the bombing totalled $3.8 billion, not including Kosovo, of which only 5% had been repaired at that time
>In 2006, a group of economists from the G17 Plus party estimated the total economic losses resulting from the bombing were about $29.6 billion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? That's not the alternative, though. Drones are used in hundreds of situations where without them, the US simply wouldn't have taken action.
And it's your belief that not taking action would be better?
Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is…
You're certainly correct that the major problem is social, economic, and structural, but I do think there are some technologies that are inherently tricky to justify regardless of the economic structures they arise in. The atomic bomb is one obvious example of a technology that seems to be inherently bad not only for humanity, but for biological life itself. You could argue that the problem of the bomb is more-so a p…
Is it really inherently bad if it's just generating a lot of energy? Couldn't that technology be used to generate electricity?