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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

#621

Post by grosswait »

tedd4u wrote: post #102
6thbit wrote: post #22

> Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations. > we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition i…

What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

The term war fighter is distinct from service member. War fighter means mission critical and typically in a theater, while a service member might be someone sitting behind a desk in a less critical role. Similar to having mission critical production systems and supporting production systems.

When you perform your business impact analysis, these will bubble up in different ways, requiring some differences to the playbooks.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#622

Post by gzread »

esafak wrote: post #210
metalcrow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tech companies were these? I was younger in 2007 but i feel like i would remember if companies were openly refusing to participate in war.

Such protests are commonplace at Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-...

Yes, and the participating employers are quickly fired.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#623

Post by dotancohen »

the_af wrote: post #607
dotancohen wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral. This is the right answer. When war becomes inevitable, we are forced to choose between morality and survival. I pass no judgement on those who choose survival.

> When war becomes inevitable, we are forced to choose between morality and survival. The kind of modern wars we're discussing now are often not about survival. Often, the initiator of the war wants dominance rather than survival. This completely changes the equation. I do pass judgement on those who would wage war to ensure their dominance and access to resources.

Yes, agreed 100%. Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent. The smaller states in the areas are under constant threat.

However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#624

Post by gzread »

WalterBright wrote: post #482
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…

> classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war I don't want to be stuck with horses when the enemy is invading with tanks.

How well do horses fare against tanks - anyone know? Tanks are really big and bulky and I'm sure (well-trained) horses could literally run circles around them, which wouldn't do any good because how would you get through the armor.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#625

Post by dotancohen »

YZF wrote: post #409
dotancohen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> afraid to recognize Taiwan's independence. Does Taiwan claim independence? I thought that both the government in Beijing and the government in Taipei both claim that all of China is united, and that they are the legitimate government of that united entity.

You're arguing semantics. The west refuses to recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and refuses to recognize it as an independent country. Whatever they claim, the west (and most of the world) due to Chinese leverage/power refuses to recognize. Taiwan meets all the criteria for being a state. It controls land, population, it has a military, it has a government, currency, passports etc. etc. It's a de…

It's not semantics if Taiwan itself does not claim independence.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#626

Post by foobar_______ »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #598
Rohunyyy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See in your case with the military you can directly say, hey my code will be used to bomb other people possibly. But in today's times it isn't (I am sure even then) so cut and dry. I worked in AdTech industry (like 60% of the bay area techies). So the ad tech I write gets shown to millions/billions. What about ads influencing elections and then politicians waging wars? Anti-vax ads which influence people and then kil…

The option is to quit your job and go get a different one. It amazes me that people choose to work at Meta etc. I mean, it’s good for them, but they are choosing a bit more money whilst harming the rest of society. That’s a really bold move, to say that you just don’t care about other people.

Agreed. You can quit. That is always an option. "Gotta pay the bills" is definitely valid for some small subset of the us population but that certainly doesn't apply to software engineers in a hub like the bay or seattle. These people delude themselves into thinking they "must" have their ridiculous Meta pay to pay for their $2.5M house and their current lifestyle. Golden handcuffs and turn the blind eye to what they are doing.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#627

Post by gzread »

astura wrote: post #533
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…

This is really, really , really bad revisionist history boarding on fanfiction - The U.S. military directly built the entire foundation of the modern tech industry. There's a reason that the Internet started out as ARPANET (ARPA [now DARPA] being a DoD agency).

What else did they build?

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#628

Post by brazzy »

cousin_it wrote: post #503
singron wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of like the opposite of this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fisher_(academic)#Preven... > Fisher [...] suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes in a volunteer. If the President of the United States wanted to activate nuclear weapons, he would be required to kill the volunteer to retrieve the codes. >> [...] The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the P…

That's so idealistic. We should know by now the reality of power and what kind of people end up in power. Anyone who could climb all the way to the top would kill the volunteer without a second thought, and then go smile on TV.

You're confusing lazy cynicism with realism. Patrick Bateman is a fictional character. The vast, vast majority of people, including even most soldiers, and definitely pretty much all businesspeople, no matter how unscrupulous, do not have the capacity to violently murder a person they know and harbor no ill will towards with their own hands on short notice.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#629

Post by snaking0776 »

godelski wrote: post #478
jadar wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t. I've heard about this from Fox News but I've never experienced it myself, even having grown up in a very blue state. I'm sure this happens somewhere, but I'm unconvinced it is the norm. > Ethics is and always has been applied theology This is trivial to prove false. You even do it! "What do we do?" You've implicitly added "if god exists". You're so…

Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.

Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.

Re: Where things stand with the Department of War

#630

Post by dotancohen »

godelski wrote: post #424
dotancohen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> afraid to recognize Taiwan's independence. Does Taiwan claim independence? I thought that both the government in Beijing and the government in Taipei both claim that all of China is united, and that they are the legitimate government of that united entity.

You literally described independence. You're confusing land with governance.

I'm not. You'll notice that I used the terms correctly.

The government in Taipei claims all of mainland China and The island of Taiwan are united and a single state. As does the government in Beijing.

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