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Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

this doesn't answer your question at all, but it's just food for thought: imagine we traveled back in time to the 1960's ... i suppose that people would ask "Serious question, is there anything driving reliable robust nationwide packet-switched data network research besides the defense dept? it always bummed me out that anytime you see something amazing it's inevitably funded by military which can't wait to use it to plan and coordinate military strikes against the soviets and to plan for some ridiculous doomsday nuclear holocaust that might never come" ... without huge amounts of DARPA funding throughout the 60's and 70's for the Internet, we'd all still be pen pals sending snail mail to one another ;)

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Fair enough, but there's nothing overtly weaponizable about communication technology.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled the money is there to advance the field, I just wish it wasn't coming from a bunch of dickheads trying to strap guns to it.

I guess since the conventional wisdoms says pornography is the biggest catalyst for new media adoption, it shouldn't be a surprise that killing people drives the other engineering fields forward.

You can also look at it from a different perspective:

The market is a much harsher master when it comes to fiscal accountability. Stuff doesn't get funded unless it's going to make money. Military spending is a magical well of infinite money with little accountability. You can think up any project you want and get money to do it so long as you say you're going to strap a gun on your robot, or that the decentralized communication network is really to help survive a nuke attack.

I used to work in bioinformatics and money from the typical funding sources was getting tight in the late 90s, early 00s. After 9/11, my department just recast every project as "terrorist bio-defense" and was financially refueled with defense money.

This is supposed to be a positive aspect of defense R&D spending?

"Fair enough, but there's nothing overtly weaponizable about communication technology."

Um, what? DARPA was funding it for a reason. How do you kill someone with a network packet? Quite simply. The packet contains "Hey, sarge, go here and kill those guys." Without modern communication you don't have a modern military.

Fair enough, but there's nothing overtly weaponizable about communication technology.

Reliable and secure communication technology is what enables the military to function. Without it, all the weapons technology in the world wont do you any good. So on a moral level, if you are against war you should actually find working as a researcher on communication technology more reprehensible than working on weapons. On an intuitive level I would guess that the breakdown or compromise of military communication has resulted in a greater loss of life than advances in robotics.

The reason why I'm pointing this out is that the real world isn't as simple as "a bunch of dickheads trying to strap guns to [robots]". You're making a simplification because it's convenient, but that simplification is morally inconsistent with approving of DARPA's work on the Internet. The fact that technology has a dual use is something we all have to deal with as researchers. But I don't think it helps matters by treating the issue as a binary.

"On an intuitive level I would guess that the breakdown or compromise of military communication has resulted in a greater loss of life than advances in robotics."

Up to this point, yes. Not many robots. I suspect the next 300 years will change that ratio hugely. Networks won't kill people...bots with guns will kill people.

It's part of the researcher mindset to rationalise their (enjoyable, paid, 'important') work, otherwise it wouldn't get done. What is the likely result over the long term? Probably not something most researchers are too worried about.

As the great Tom Lehrer put it:

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department," says Werner von Braun.

> I just wish it wasn't coming from a bunch of dickheads trying to strap guns to it.

Dickheads?

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