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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

I guess that depends on whether you view either profit or war as intrinsically evil.

It's whether one views the intersection of profit and war as intrinsically evil, which for most people is a resounding yes. Humans are already good enough at killing and causing misery for each other without adding additional economic incentives into the mix.

But what if the US military wants to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage as much as possible and wants technology developed to do so?

We don't know that Google will accomplish those goals.

Well I think that's what the Air Force wants to find out.

The obvious way to reach the goal of minimize civilian casualities is to abstain from risky strikes and use smaller yield weapons.

The us military wants technology that justifies them not making more conservative choices, and I don’t see any moral justification for that. Drones are useful for cheaply eliminating risk to one actor, thus allowing more risky behaviour to the side that has them.

But being a cheap risk mitigator is also all they are, they bring no new strategic capability, as evidenced by how easily their use was ramped up and down, so their main effect, the one that could provide some moral justification, is making war cheaper.

Unfortunately I'm not aware that minimization of civilian casualties is a US military objective.

Until I hear that it is, I will assume it is not, since it's much easier to achieve your mission of killing bad guys if you're also willing to kill good guys. You get more rewards for killing more bad guys, not saving more good guys.

Unfortunately that's how militaries and governments work.

Unfortunately I'm not aware that minimization of civilian casualties is a US military objective.

Not to put too fine of a point on it but even a basic search on the topic would yield a ton of official policy doing exactly that.

There is explicit guidance and long history of minimizing civilian casualties as a goal within the DoD, and such guidance is codified in multiple legal documents under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Rules of Engagement and international treaties.

To wit: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/...

This is also taught as a basic tenet in introductory courses for new Military Officers. One example here:

https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B130936...

A large set of such references are to be expected, of course. When a civilized people undertake killing on a large scale, you don't want others to think you act without justification. So you write serious administrative documents claiming your government actions to be justified and your military claims to minimize collateral damage.

But are such claims really true? Does the part of the military chain of command that actually does the killing take those claims to heart, as much as pentagon spokesmen do? Do the superiors of lieutenants and privates hold them to that standard, even when the laws of conduct become unenforceable by collateral victims, as in drone strikes?

In several US wars, such claim were not taken to heart. Vietnam became infamous in US history as lacking a sound casus belli, just as the 2003 Iraq War has. In messy wars like these, one of the principal casualties is often the enforcement of the rules of war, especially when it comes to laws of conduct that are still in the course of being written, such as the proper use of drones or AI.

This lack of enforcement becomes especially fraught when novel weaponry and its use is governed not by the military under its code of conduct, but by the CIA (who now runs most drone snipery), which AFAIK lacks an equivalent martial code of conduct.

Does the part of the military chain of command that actually does the killing take those claims to heart, as much as pentagon spokesmen do?

Again, you can research this for yourself and find out that yes, it's deeply embedded into the culture. This is seen the most clear when military members who break the rules and are reprimanded, discharged or jailed. You can move the poles all you like, but the data exists.

But you’re describing some commercial inventive to go to war, which is very different from selling goods and services to the military.

those 2 things are pretty heavily correlated. guns and ammo, military rations manufacturers, and yes creators of technology that support military operations have a huge economic incentive for war

the more war you create, the larger the military, and get larger their ability to spent on “protection” and “defence”

*edit: which is certainly offset pretty substantially by the hit to the countries GDP, because yknow... war is expensive!

There is no logic to your argument here at all. You’re saying that every company that supplies anything to the military is automatically wielding an unethical influence to create war on false pretences.

I think you can certainly find examples where commercial entities have played a suspicious role in that respect, but to say that simply by supplying goods or services to the military you are war mongering is completely devoid of logic.

He is saying that any company that supplies to a military has an economic incentive to make sure war happens. Seeing as they profit from the size of the military, that's not exactly far-fetched.

He’s making an enormous and baseless jump that any company that supplies the military must also be involved corruption and unethical war mongering. Just because an economic insentive exists, doesn’t mean people will exploit it. That’s just as senseless as saying that I’m probably a drug dealer because there’s an economic insentive for me to be. Aside from the complete lack of logic in this claim, it also doesn’t even make sense, since the military gets a budget every year, regardless of whether there’s a war to fight.

A company has only one feedback point in the long run (people leave or die over that timeframe, so you can only count on the lowest common denominator there) and that is money. If that doesn't tell you something about a company's core motivation, then I'm afraid I can't make clear to you why counting on anything but economic incentives as motivation for a company's actions is naive at best.

You’re argument is that every company _must_ be involved in corruption and law breaking, simply because there is profit to be found in doing so. This isn’t simply naive, it has no basis in reality whatsoever.

I have literally never encountered a large company that doesn't have good tax deals in some country or other. Good in the order of "pays basically no taxes". What do you want to call that? "Just good business"?

> Just because an economic insentive exists, doesn’t mean people will exploit it.

I think that this statement has been proven wrong countless times throughout history.

History has proven that every company in the world will always exploit every possible opportunity to make a profit now matter how corrupt or illegal it is? I don’t think history has proven that at all, and I don’t think you actually believe that.

War will always be evil, it's usually just about whether it is a necessary evil.

I think that’s a very oversimplified opinion. Depending on the alternative, war can certainly be the moral decision. I don’t think you’d find many would who would describe The Unions war on slavery as Evil.

It wasn't a war on Slavery though, as Lincoln only took the extraordinary step of releasing the Emancipation Proclamation late in the war.

That’s a semantic argument. The point is that any of us could come up with an example where the decision to go to war, either offensively or defensively, is clearly not evil.

Yes, it was. South Carolina was the first state to secede; South Carolina cited slavery in their declaration of secession; the war began with secession or immediately following and because of secession. The civil war was fought over slavery.

The Union didn't fight a war on slavery (in fact, it included slave states). The Confederacy fought for slavery, the Union fought for, well, union.

Was IBM's providing of tech to the Nazis to kill Jewish people more effectively neutral or intrinsically evil?

I try to avoid comparisons to the Nazis (even though many more people seem to be doing it these days with Trump in power), but isn't Google basically providing the government the technology to more effectively kill people in the Middle East, too? That's what it is at the end of the day, isn't it?

History will remember Google for this - especially when its technology will be used for some horrifying stuff in the future (and it will be). Right now we haven't even seen its true consequences yet, so it's easy for some to dismiss it as no big deal.

This isn’t a well reasoned position at all. You can’t summarily declare that all wars or actions taken by the military are morally equivalent to an ethnoreligios genocide.

Is there another use for these drones right now? Because all I've seen is pretty close to "ethnoreligious genocide". Many people straightforwardly advocate for it.

Can you really pretend that you're developing "neutral" weapons technology in this climate?

Appealing to mindless outrage is not a rational argument. Please list all of the genocides that the USA’s drone program has participated in.

If anything, it seems this google technology would reduce the number of civilian casualties.

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