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Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

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Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#311

Post by slg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #282
slg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons. There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a…

> Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism. Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no f…

>Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.

Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#312

Post by votingisntreal »

ForHackernews wrote: post #85
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities. Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.

This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics. This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants. Prev…

> have more in common with retail workers

They did this to automotive.

It was once a respected technology, and being a mechanic or factory worker was a high-paying job.

Now you have Jiffy Lube and some pimply kid in a polo!

Polofication

Has come for many industries...

And if retail was done the same way as it was 20 years ago, some kid in a polo shirt at Office Depot would be making small business websites using ChatGPT with a 1-hour turn-around time. Pay at the register, with your printer paper.

But Idk, I don't actually agree with you...

I think "software engineering" is such a spectrum now, a wide field of its own, that you can have deep research roles, high art, fashion, accounting, and executive-level work that involve it (which may have nothing to do with "consumer web design") that it's hard to make that blanket statement.

For example, the software engineer working on the computer in a Tesla, or the software on the displays in the BART train, or the banking infrastructure for Bank of America, is a lot more like a "real engineer" than the developer putting a marketing site on Vercel, or an iOS game on the App Store (each of which is vastly different work in their own right).

Everything is software now, every engineer is a software engineer now to some degree.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#313

Post by bluegatty »

bigyabai wrote: post #292
abeppu wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question". But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit. And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a cont…

The lines blurred, IMO. Boycotting the 8086 wouldn't hamstring ICBM development. Boycotting the microwave oven wasn't going to prevent radar complexes from being constructed. Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some exten…

Microsoft Apple and Google have not blurred any lines, they are not defence contractors in any way.

They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry.

Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies.

'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military.

It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#314

Post by slg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #291
nradov wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia not nuking Ukraine had nothing to do with ethics or morals. It's more pragmatic than that. Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland. And he knows that use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India. Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. Th…

> Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender. > use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and In…

>Nuking Kyiv and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.

Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.

>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)

Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#316

Post by antonvs »

tessierashpool wrote: post #194
laimewhisps wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see them conflating Zionism and Judaism. 100% of Zionists will reference the Holocaust as one of the justifications for committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think the parent is pointing that out.

I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves. also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.

You want me to preemptively fix your basic reading comprehension and logical inference issues?

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#317

Post by tastyface »

irishcoffee wrote: post #253
tastyface wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches." Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the…

There’s a story in the Christian Bible about David, Old Testament. He was told to fire arrows into the ground. He shot 3. The response he got was something like “you should have shot more, now you’ll only sack 3 cities.” Tell me more about lives, Christianity, and war.

Anyone who knows anything about Christianity knows that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#318

Post by ranger207 »

As others noted, Silicon Valley was formed by the MIC. But there was a period there for a while where defense contracting was uncool so no VCs funded it. Then in the wake of Trump winning in 2016 all of the politically conservative VCs (who generally hadn't been advertising their political views) got to reveal that they loved the military and funded anyone with the vaguest idea of a military-focused product. Meanwhile from the other side, US military procurement has always been obsessed with corporate America, and had long tried to court startups in vain. When finally there were startups for them to throw money at, those startups quickly became massive regardless of if their products were actually worth anything (cf Anduril)

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#319

Post by abeppu »

justin66 wrote: post #303
abeppu wrote: post #119

I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right? I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed wi…

> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

Thanks for pointing that out; I was not aware of it.

At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#320

Post by xyzelement »

slowin wrote: post #8

It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.

A few days ago I recall you taking the position that Israel should not exist and that anyone who disagree is a Zionist (correct definition) that you would not associate with.

The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)

If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that

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