While there are good intentions here, what happens if China and Russia military get ahead of US military in this technology due to us limiting ourselves
At the same time... there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here. The last 3/4 of a century of US military dominance has been notable for a decrease in military/para-military violence on an order that humanity literally has never seen. It's not zero for sure, it's not always just, we may not always be the good guys, but seriously: if you are a random person anywhere in the world, you are vastly less likely to be killed by someone's bullet than you were pre-WW2. And that's important.
A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though.
The US is the most wildly insane, two-faced and upside-down country in the world right now in terms of military. The commander-in-chief routinely makes nuclear threats, actively hurts his own citizens in times of need, and seeks to decrease military stability by accelerating climate change and isolating his country from the world. The commander-in-chief lies about every single thing in his day-to-day life, as well as his political life; he is mentally unstable and not fit to serve.
The US military is 100% untrustworthy as its direct leader has shown himself to be literally insane.
> there's a real don't-rock-the-boat problem here
The US is the one rocking the boat. It has already happened and it happens daily.
> A world without a dominant US military is a world with fewer US-driven injustices. That doesn't seem like a good bet to be a "better world", though.
I disagree. That seems like a very incredibly great bet, to me. The time of US military leadership is over. That happened the day our Military Commander In Chief stood on his inauguration day and lied about the number of people in front of him.
Perhaps the US will return to a positive leading role one day, but it is not there now and it has not been for years.
All this aside, I do not agree that Google is the right place to develop US Military technology.
Edit: Additionally, the commander-in-chief of the US military also stated point blank that we may not have presidential elections any more in the future. This is not a time to champion US democracy, military might, etc.
- Sure it’s bad now, but the US military is made up of far more than just the president... many of which may be good, rational actors.
- Just because it’s bad now doesn’t mean it won’t get better quickly (there has been a lot of pushback on the president’s agenda)
- The US may still be comparatively better/benevolent than any other dominant superpower
Note that these aren’t necessarily my views (I’d need more time to think and consider). But I think they point out some decent possible counter arguments to OP
That's the thing though: it's not bad now!. Not by any historical standard, at least.
For most of our history and prehistory, right up to the past 70 years, stupid warfare has been the rule. Petty tribal disputes, armed insurrections, ethnic cleansing and suppression and random gang violence were absolutely routine for almost everyone even as recently as our great grandparent's lifetimes. Virtually everyone saw violence like this at some point. Now, in most of the world (no, not all of it, but yes: most), pretty much no one does.
And that's important. What we've been doing is working. Don't rock the boat.
But to clarify, when I said “sure it’s bad now” I meant that in the context of the current military leadership.
Unfortunately I can’t really defend that argument much further given that I don’t necessarily agree with it (it was just speculation on potential counter-arguments).
I'm not the one fear mongering. It is the US government doing all the fear mongering. The "stable genuis" leading the country is the one doing the fear mongering.
Seriously, the US is more insane than North Korea, a country that routinely launches ballistic missiles over countries that are essentially in a state of cold war with it? The United States' military position is more unstable than Venezuela, a county that is imprisoning it's own brass and experiencing large scale desertion[1] to the point that it's speculated that there may be a coup soon? I do not believe a reasonable person make either of these claims.
[1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/...
And yes I would make both of those claims. And I am a reasonable person. If you think that my statements above make me an "unreasonable person" just for my comments of fact and opinion, then you are the one trolling and attempting to invalidate my entire existence as a person.
I stand by my points.
American military intervention is the main reason why the wars stopped. For the last 18 years it’s now peace.
I’m an immigrant here so I did not participated in these wars. But I asked locals who did, “do you think the wars would stop unless Americans intervened?” The answer is usually “no, I think we would be still killing each other to this day.”
Obviously the President is the final authority of the DoD, and the Chain of Command will obey legal orders, but as was made clear with the Transgender conflict between the SECDEF and POTUS it's not as clear cut as the POTUS saying "do as I say" and it just happening.
The Department of Defense isn't an overtly political organization and has a deep philosophy of operating largely the same irrespective of who the CINC is.
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/02/22/mattis-recomm...
Pretending Trump doesn't exist is a really, really bad idea. It's extremely dangerous to the democracy that exists in the USA and the world to pretend that the insane President, self-declared dictator of the country simply does not exist.
Your example is a logical fallacy. Merely because the President's orders via tweet were not enacted does not mean you can simply ignore the current situation.
'I have the absolute right to PARDON myself' he said today. He is not a President, the US military is unstable presently due to his leadership, by definition.
You are spouting unsubstantiated nonsense.
https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-s...
See page 6 for a charge that shows exactly the fact I was citing, though the data as a whole is much broader and worth reading.
So now I'm "substantiated", I guess. You have numbers showing the opposite effect?
I over reacted in the way I perceived how your statement was framed.
Those technologies aren't for defense; every nation in the world throws loads of money to military expenses -including those countries who have zero chances of being ahead of any other- for a single reason: war is a very profitable business. Everything else is propaganda.
> Those technologies aren't for defense;
Have you ever heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Basically the idea is having "credible deterrent" actually prevents the use of the weapons, because the side that makes a "single deadly upfront attack" will lose along with their opponent. The only winning move is not to play.
The problems happen when one side has capabilities the others lack, or when there are options for a "single deadly upfront attack" that aren't suicide.
In short, "offensive" technologies can be defensive.
To me also there's not that much difference between mutual assured destruction and severe damage. Let's say the US has 100 nukes and Russia only 20 (random numbers just to make an example), all of same power, and let's assume that most of them will be neutralized before hitting the targets so that in case of mutual attack Russia would be hit by say 30 nukes and the US by just 4. History 100 years from now would surely regard it as an epic victory for the US, but today anyone ruling over there would have to explain their citizens how on earth they couldn't take a step back and spare millions of lives.
It's probably much simpler than that. The US, Russia, China, North Korea, etc. have zero intentions to go at war with each other, but is in everyone's interest to keep fueling the weapons industry, so they keep playing the plot: citizens are hooked using nationalist arguments to make them supporting their rulers etc. Weapons keep being amassed until the day they become obsolete and can be sold to less rich countries for their smaller wars, new more advanced weapons take their spot and the business continues. It's a win-win scenario for everyone but common people.
The USA would never permit them to be invaded. We'd go to an all out war before we'd let a next-door neighbor fall to another country, and every nation knows this.
> though I hardly believe there aren't others in a civilized world.
Where is this civilized World of which you speak? I, sadly, see that the Globe is on fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
Of course war is a business, no question about that; however the world is a dangerous place, and humans are arguably the most unpredictable mammals alive.
2 Google was claiming they were doing open source work, so China would have access to it anyway
3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software
4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning"
It's not unthinkable, especially if they feel confident that they have a technological advantage that would shield them from detection or in-kind retaliation. They also have somewhat different notions of citizenship/nationality than Western countries, and they have a few diasporas they'd like to control.
> 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software
What makes you so sure of this, or that those people will have the necessary talent? Lower quality software could lead to more collateral deaths.
> 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning"
Contemporary drone-strikes are literally just regular airstrikes: for instance, the weapons the drones use were actually developed for other military aircraft [1] [2] and adapted to drones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition
The only real difference is that there's no pilot in the plane, so less risk he dies in a crash. And I say crash because most of the drone-strikes happened in places where there were few hostile anti-aircraft weapons to actually shoot anything down. Most of the pilot risk would have been from mechanical problems and human error.
We do not deploy F-35s to assassinate people in Pakistan. But we've been deploying drones there since 2004. Note that a key issue here is that the drone strikes aren't even military actions: They're controlled by the CIA.
There is no technical difference with drones, the issue is entirely in how they are used. This is what makes your arguments about the weaponry being the same mostly irrelevant.
The US hasn't been officialy "at war" in a long time. I think the last one was World War II.
> We do not deploy F-35s to assassinate people in Pakistan.
Of course not: F-35s are more expensive to operate and I'm not sure they've even attained the level of readiness to attempt such a mission.
I disagree. I would call operations conducted with military equipment and with the participation of military personnel (e.g. USAF pilots) military operations.
"under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division". Feel free to click in and read what SAD does, these are assassinations, not military actions. Remember that military actions are something a government does officially, and assassinations are something denied and covered up for over a decade.
"The drones are flown by United States Air Force pilots located at an unnamed base in the United States. US Department of Defense armed drones, which also sometimes take part in strikes on terrorist targets, are flown by US Air Force pilots located at Creech Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base."
If you believe that then how you call the military operations in recent years and present?
Also if there is no war then people that are killed are just murders/assassinations this murders makes the scientists not want to get involved
>> The US hasn't been officialy "at war" in a long time. I think the last one was World War II.
> If you believe that then how you call the military operations in recent years and present?
Wars, for the most part.
My point is there's no meaningful difference between dropping a JDAM on a particular target with an F-35 or dropping a JDAM on the same target with a drone.
Either way, you dropped a JDAM on a target. Doing it with a drone doesn't magically make the result worse or different somehow.
Where, exactly did I say that? You're putting words in my mouth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570335
All your comments start out hidden, but I vouched for this one so it's visible.
China is in the process of forcibly taking over an enormous chunk of geography in the south china sea. They have fired on and intimidated their neighbors such as Vietnam and Philippines in connection with this. They continue to undermine and isolate Taiwan. They are a big part of why N Korea has nuclear weapons and ICBMs.
Russia is illegally occupying a big chunk of Ukraine, is involved in shooting down civilian airliners, and assassinating people they don't like with chemical weapons.
At what point would it be advisable to see a trend and try to do something about it?
Or we don't, because autonomous killing machines are a big enough risk to all life they're not worth it. For example, you don't see an arms race to develop nastier strains of the flu or ebola, because that would be stupid for everyone.
Throwaway account (don't want my meager karma to be down voted to oblivion for speaking my mind).
Two oceans, a navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons are the national defense of the United States. The rest is empire-building.
Don't forget "a rifle behind every blade of grass". [1]
Even if the quote is apocryphal, the overall point is valid.