The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

I am sure "duel" was a typo but too wonderful not to point out

Microsoft is more like old IBM in that regard, which makes sense given how old its cultural foundation is (dating to the 1970s) and its history of working with more conservative old-line enterprise businesses. As are Oracle, Cisco, Intel, etc. All will very happily serve the military industrial complex. You won't find any serious dissent in Redmond.

Does this apply to Iranians doing the same thing for their country?

At best, it's a zero-sum trap. We need to research new weapons because they are researching new weapons because we are researching new weapons.

But personally I don't. I understand why they do it. I understand the cost. I know the pros and the cons. I don't have a hate for people in the military.

I'm not even against weapons, after all I go to the shooting range.

I just don't want to have anything to do with the activity of war and I'm lucky enough to have life currently giving me the freedom to do so.

If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff.

The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia that kills countless civilians in places like Yemen; they might be used to fight wars based on reasons the administration knows to be false; they might be used to gun down civilians by private contractors; the list goes on.

I'd not be opposed to participating in military research if the weapons were actually used "responsibly" (I know that's a somewhat subjective terms, but most of my examples are quite clearly considered immoral by most people).

I don't think the military is evil, or that military research is inherently wrong, or anything like that. I just think Google needs to be honest about it upfront. Let them change their terms and conditions to state "We are an American company serving American national interests and by using our services you consent to your data being used for this purpose". But they are being deeply disingenuous, and that is what is annoying people, not the military aspect per se.

My take on it is that if you contribute in any way to the development of a weapon that is used in morally unjustifiable ways, then you're complicit to murder and manslaughter, and you should be aware of that.

For example, the US is conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan, which are essentially political assassinations. These are condemned by almost any independent expert on international human rights and come with a very high death toll of civilians, including many women and children. In fact, the number of non-combatant civilian victims is routinely higher than the number of targets. Moreover, they are routinely conducted over the territory of another, sovereign country without any international mandate, without any judicial oversight, and without any trial.

If you participate in developing the drones or missiles that used in these strikes, or support them in any other way, then you are making yourself at least partially guilty of murder or manslaughter. From a moral perspective, it barely matters whether you believe or feel that the drone strikes keep your country safe. Extrajudicial killings of political opponents in foreign countries you are not at war with are illegal and immoral even if they have perceived or real positive side effects for your country.

That's just an example to illustrate that it matters a lot for which government you develop weapons and what track record your country has in terms of human rights, military aggressions against other countries or lack thereof, and so on. There's probably less of a problem if you develop weapons for the Swedish army than if you develop weapons for Russia or the US.

It also depends on the types of weapons, of course. Don't tell me it would be fine to develop chemical warfare agents, outlawed types of anti-person land mines, or autonomous killer robots, because they would 'keep your country safe'. Some technologies are just despicable. There's a reason why lasers that blind soldiers on the battlefield are outlawed.

If that’s all that was going on, maybe not. But when armaments and enterprise become intertwined, the idea of safety becomes subservient to economic growth. We are well past the point that any reasonable person would consider “preserving safety” and have been for some time.

When in recent memory has the US military risked significant amounts of soldiers to "keep us safe"?

If anything, the US military has made me unsafe. The invasion of Iraq was a disaster. Torture and drone warfare have created scores of "terrorists" - people angry that their civilian family members were killed in a war of aggression. You can trace a direct path in history from the invasion of Iraq to the rise of ISIS.

Meanwhile, money that could have been spent of social services funded these wars - leading to an economic climate so bleak that voters elected a fascist president in hopes of changing their station in life.

I'm no pacifist, but wars of aggression are not "keeping us safe" in any sense of the phrase.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East