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Where things stand with the Department of War

anthropic.com

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Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#171

Post by SoftTalker »

moron4hire wrote: post #157
reaperducer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like these stories are apocryphal. They're not. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, everyone has their own coping mechanism.

What? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them . My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough…

Lots of people working on the Manhattan project did not know what they were working on. The core group of physicists did, but not many others.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#172

Post by zmmmmm »

frinxor wrote: post #112
zmmmmm wrote: post #41

> I apologize for the tone of the post What a world we live in now where private companies are apologising for the "tone" of their speech while official representatives of the government daily express blatant lies and misrepresentations without the slightest fear of consequence. It really is incredibly sad that what was one of the most respected countries in the world has descended to this - an utter mockery of a fun…

It’s a business decision.

that just makes it sadder?

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#173

Post by SoftTalker »

ryandrake wrote: post #45
mempko wrote: post #21

Long time ago I worked for a company that I learned was selling it's software to help target people during the Iraq war. I quit because I cannot support building software that kills people. This is a message to people working for that line of business at Anthropic. You don't have to do it, you can quit. If you are helping this insane administration to conduct war on Iran quit. You don't need to have that kind of bloo…

I've also quit a job where the products I was working were meant to be deployed to CBP to hunt down immigrants. It's a nice gesture, but it won't stop these companies. They just hired someone else without an ethical backbone, and continued the project like nothing happened. Tech leadership is rotten to the core, and that can't be fixed by individuals making a stand.

> They just hired someone else without an ethical backbone

Or who simply had a different point of view than you.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#174

Post by K0balt »

dmd wrote: post #137
jiggawatts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure. ... or so she was told. She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.

“someone’s woman”?

lol I am guessing that was an autocorrect error.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#175

Post by endominus »

jrflowers wrote: post #160
bradleyjg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iraq Not in same ballpark. There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one. > Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too. No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture. Especially on the saliency axis.

The biggest protest in world history was in response to the invasion of Iraq. It’s reasonable to call it unpopular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...

Sure, but it's not reasonable to call it as unpopular domestically as the Vietnam War, which had more than 12 times the casualties, spread over a group that on the whole was unwilling to fight and had to be drafted into the conflict, thereby spreading the pain of lost loved ones throughout society rather than concentrating it heavily into the poorer and less politically powerful social and economic classes. As unpopular as the Iraq war was, the American people's distaste didn't really do much to end it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#176

Post by mulmen »

randerson wrote: post #88
jmward01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.

Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…

Doesn’t this just lower the bar on going to war? Putting real lives on the line makes war a costly last resort.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#177

Post by jghn »

krapp wrote: post #123
jghn wrote: post #84

Could they please start using the correct name? Department of Defense?

The correct name is the Department of War. Calling it the Department of Defense implies a system of laws, checks and balances which no longer exists.

It is the DoD u tip congress says otherwise

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#178

Post by gcanyon »

ryandrake wrote: post #40
hglaser wrote: post #18

It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…

> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. (spoiler alert) Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius ? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far…

"Why do you wear that toy on your head?" "Because if I wear it anywhere else it chafes"

"A laser is a beam of coherent light." "Does that mean it talks?"

"Your stutter has improved." "I've been giving myself shock treatment." "Up the voltage."

"In the immortal words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?'"

"Is there anything I can do for you? Or...more to the point... to you?"

"Can you drive a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?" "...not right now." "A girl's got to have her standards."

"What are you looking at? You're laborers, you're supposed to be laboring! That's what you get for not having an education!"

-- I'm sure I could remember more if I thought about it for a bit. That movie made quite an impression on young me.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#179

Post by K0balt »

rockskon wrote: post #120
ArchieScrivener wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Values relating to mistrust of the military (as per the context of the post I responded to) as well as values relating to ownership of the tech you bought and of personal privacy. Get off your high horse and stop talking down to a person you don't know. Take your anger out on someone else.

Yeah, it wasn’t some kind of ethical utopia, but it sure as hell has gotten a lot less ethical in real terms. When you start Making things operate in ways that people dislike or are deceived by, it’s a very slippery slope, because everything from there all the way through eating babies is just a matter of degree.

Trite as it may seem, don’t be evil is actually a very, very strong statement, as is do no harm. 70 percent of tech market cap these days is a a million tiny harms, a warm pool of diluted evil.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#180

Post by bad_haircut72 »

qsera wrote: post #136
senadir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If the country wage wars for bad reasons, that is another problem that probably should be fixed elsewhere, or you should leave that country and be somewhere who government you can fully get behind. > defending your country I am afraid that this does not always have to be an incoming attack. What if some country has a resource that your country badly needs, without which your people will suffer badly and imagine the s…

What if your family didnt like bread, what of they liked - cigarettes? And instead of giving it away, you just sold it at a price that was practically giving it away?
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