721–730 of 862 posts
Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".
Everytime I hear 'Department of War', it just saddens me. Warfighter is the same. "When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-horses breed on the border." Tao Te Ching chapter 46.
What a sentence that inspires trust in Anthropic. DoW is currently bombing a sovereign country in a blatant act of aggression. It has been complicit in the gaza genocide. There should be zero cooperation.
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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…
"But what is the option?" Don't see money as the only goal? Otherwise it ain't black and white. There are forms of advertisment that are not so bad and there is a need for kill devices since there are lots of other existing kill devices. But this ad technology and this actual war ministry who take pride in revoking all "woke shit" like "rules of engagement" - I would not work for. There is other work, even if it pays…
That’s easy to say when you have money, it kind of sounds like “let them eat cake”
Around 10 years ago, in college, in Calculus class I had a very ambitious classmate, wanted to go to DARPA and work on Robotics. I asked if he was thinking it through solely from technical perspective or considering ethics side as well. Clearly, he didn't understand the question and I directly inquired - what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? His response - that's not my…
> what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? This line of thinking, that creating machines that kill is unethical, will destroy the West. If the US wasn't so good at producing killing machines in WW2, you wouldn't be here to complain about DARPA ethics. Instead of having engineers develop the most advanced machines for killing (i.e. protecting the West) such people go into pr…
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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.
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…
Effective Altruism is a deeply silly, flawed, unserious, superficial way of engaging with the world if this, FTX, and shrimp welfare are the outcome of people putting it in action.
What Anthropic wants is to be able to go back and pontificate and sue a government if they determine that their terms of service have been violated. In order to enforce that, they wanted oversight, access, and to intervene if they felt it was being put to a purpose they disagreed with, namely surveillance or autonomous weapons/killing, etc.
As an AI platform, they can decide if they want the military to be able to use the software. I'm 1000% on board with this. They don't get to sit an Anthropic employee down and say "ok, now you watch these soldiers and make sure they follow the rules, and if they do anything wrong, you hit the big red button that shuts them down." They don't get to program a Claude oversight agent to do that, either. That messes with realtime operations. They don't get to go back and sue "ackshually, we looked at these logs and determined that you violated rule 102.3a in the contract, because one of the terrorists was participating from an IP address determined to reside in the continental US" or whatever.
Anthropic doesn't get to hold the US military accountable. It doesn't get to do oversight. It doesn't get to constrain its scope of operation, through legal threat or active intervention or contracts or otherwise.
Chain of command and rule of law constrain the US military. Congressional oversight and rule of law hold it accountable. A private contractor, no matter how noble or principled, doesn't get extra privileges.
Anthropic playing political games, advocating for unelected and unaccountable power to be granted a private corporation, is what got them designated a supply chain risk, and I can see the argument for it. Depending on how much effort they put in to hassling the government and pushing for their side, it remains to be seen whether the designation sticks.
And in principle, I also see the utility of being extremely heavy handed when slapping down a private company trying to make a power grab like that. Either through ignorance or incredible arrogance and entitlement, a private company and industry needs to learn their place in the grand scheme of things. Anthropic isn't special, their place is right alongside all the rest of we the people; they don't get extra privileges because they feel strongly that they're particularly right or righteous.
OpenAI effectively said "yeah, rule of law, thumbs up, sounds good." and took the $200B on the table. Anthropic was pushing for extra private oversight and accountability, and it doesn't matter if it was surveillance, autonomous weapons, or not eating babies - the particular rule doesn't matter, the precedent being set of private corporations getting a say, at all, beyond legal limits, is the point. No company gets to tell the US military what to do or what not do, or hold them accountable post-hoc, or constrain available options, because if they absolutely need to break a technicality for a good reason, when national security and defense is under consideration, a private company's rules and terms of service is the very last thing in the world that should be important to that discussion.
I'm a Snowden fan and absolutely want the global surveillance apparatus to vanish, and don't want an AI singleton dystopia, and I'm probably waaayyy more liberal and liberty minded than is reasonable, but even I can understand where this line in the sand is, and why it's there. I'd be shocked if Dario lasts the year as CEO, it's clear he's ill equipped for real world, adult decisions.
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It's in a reply chain that's talking about newspeak. You compacted your context way too early.
The reply chain is talking about newspeak but the parent of the comment I was replying to was > DoW is newspeak. Thats not it's name. I understood that comment I was replying to was responding to was replying to the latter part of the comment. Discussions and threads can evolve. They are not static.
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I once saw the word nickel autocorrected incorrectly into something far worse. It was funny given the context (metals, not coins) but I wondered why someone would even have that word in their autocorrect dictionary.
What's in the autocorrect dictionary usually has nothing to do with what you typically write. No reason to wonder (i.e. if the insinuation being that that's a word they'd typically use).
Except if Facebook has auto correct, you can be sure it’s driven by a personal dossier on each of us, correlated by AI with every other person on the planet.
They know you were thinking that word!
The neverending benefits of personalization.
Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".
I continue to be surprised how many people haven't heard term until now, it's been in common use in the US for 20+ years. To me the most Orwellian thing is everyone using the newspeak name for the DoD.