Why do you think it's more moral/ethical to abstain of supporting military? Maybe you won't do this but be sure that in some other country some similarly talented people will.
If you (and many others) abstain from it on similar basis you and closest people you know may be in danger of being affected by more advanced military equipment other (possibly hostile) armies can get.
Maybe it's just not in people heads that world and homeland safety is not given for free and granted forever.
How much does the chance of missing out on action x to (maybe) defer undesirable outcome y weight against the mere consequences of pursuing action x in the first place?
You tell me and then I'll tell you. It is a question of morality and as such has an infinite number of right and wrong answers.
My turn: when war starts, is it okay to send someone else to die at war to protect your children? Or it better to let your children die, but save soldier lives instead?
That is the essence or morality (at least to me).
Very interesting link, thanks for sharing! :)
I agree, you are not. You are responsible for your own actions. So if you choose a life of non-violence - that is allright and it allways depends on the real situation, so I am not saying you should buy a gun. Because there is also this old proverb "Live by the sword, die by the sword" meaning I guess you also think that the more someone spends energy with something - like preparing to shoot someone for self-defense - the more likely it is, that he will have to do it at some point, so you just completely refuse it. Well, there is some truth to it, but on the other hand - I for example train martial arts since I am young, but I never had to use it for real - even though there were many situations where I was glad, that I could - I never had to back off in critical situations. The knowledge that I could probably beat the aggressor, gave me the confidence to defuse the situtation calmly.
My point is, you should be aware, that there are indeed many bad persons around and if you choose the path of non-violence than you will have to rely on other people to protect you. And even if you never encountered violence, than this will just mean that those protectors (usually police) did allready a good job of keeping the violence away from you.
Presuming the OP is in the US, and in light of the above, it seems perverse to suggest that his refusal to work on military projects is endangering his loved ones.
You can't look at the % of spending / annual cost of the greatest military power without taking into account it's responsibilities around the globe.
Nothing above says you have to agree or disagree with the military, in fact many of us aren't pro on a lot of their actions, but this common retort as posted above, is selective data analysis, which I would hope the intellectuals of HN would be able to separate emotions from facts.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...
https://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense/
There’s no way to recontexualize the numbers such that we are in imminent danger if some software engineers decide they will not work on military contracts. We are absurdly far away from such a scenario.
Now suddenly Silicon Valley thinks it's better than the US military that bore it?
Google is a US company yes, but with so many engineers from all over the world and customers from every corner of the world, who is "them" for a Google employee really?
And before you say so, I know this is how things(power dynamics, etc.) work today. That is exactly why this kind of movement towards a change is good and needed.
Hopefully, if you're choosing to work for a company, you understand that you're at least implicitly adopting those definitions, and that you may find the licensing requirements of your work hastily restructured in an emergency situation.
It is just like the fear of darkness. As long as you avoid the darkness, your fear will escalate.
I acknowledge that the safest condition for me, my loved ones and next generations is not the one which has draconian governments, one-button-away nuclear war and killer drones.
Preemptive lazy answers for lazy replies: Companies only exist to increase stockholder value: Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Improved drone efficiency is better for everyone: hahahaha.
I think that's a mischaracterization that's important to correct in the name of accuracy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project...:
> The polarized debate about Google and the military may leave out some nuances. Better analysis of drone imagery could reduce civilian casualties by improving operators’ ability to find and recognize terrorists.
Also, a lack of "AI"-based image analysis hasn't stopped the US military from carrying out airstrikes with drones, and denying them better analysis tools is unlikely to cause them to reduce their frequency. The US military tries to avoid civilian casualties while still performing its mission, so giving it the tools to do so could arguably prevent civilian noncombatant deaths.
These sorts of arguments come up constantly in these discussions, and are laughable. More efficient targeting just means more strikes. And all of this targeting is extra judicial anyway...
Maybe not the former, but certainly the latter if it meant a reduction in alternatives like carpet bombing, etc.
In World War II, the military would drop thousands of bombs over a wide area in the hope that a few would land on a German ball bearing factory. Now that they have more precise weapons, they don't need to do that anymore to accomplish similar missions. If the military feels it needs to smash something small, they'll use a big, oversize hammer if they don't have a small one available. They don't give up and go home.
> More efficient targeting just means more strikes.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know how you could reasonably be so certain about that.
> And all of this targeting is extra judicial anyway...
As is de rigueur for military targeting.
Because it's for the US military. They have an unbelievably shitty track record in not hitting civilians. It was shitty under Obama, and it's gotten even shittier under Trump. And the issue isn't the ability to target better; it's that the military simply does not care.
No one is likely to write about "targets hit exactly as planned, no collateral damage" and even if they do as a puff piece for the military we're unlikely to remember that.
In contrast, every single mistargeting is plausibly worldwide news and our brains are wired to remember such things.
To be clear, I don't have any hard data either way. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's true given the asymmetry of typical cognitive bias in evaluating such a claim. The folk version of this is that you "only ever hear about the CIA's mistakes and not of their successes".
Pretty much is when the biggest risk to one side is from sitting on their butts remote piloting drones.
If I could write software that actually helps our military without hurting others, I would be perfectly fine with that. My fear is that you would be given a black box problem that could be used however they see fit.
But, I also wouldn't join the military for the same reasons. I would be more than willing to assist and help, but do not want to be put in a position where I have to take, or contribute, to taking some one else's life. However, for every one person like me or you, there are plenty of people who sign up eagerly to do just that.
Well unfortunately most armys today (and especially your US-Forces) are not really "defensive" armys. Despite they all hypocritely call themself that. They are mostly very offensive conquering ones. Where is the connection again to homeland safety, when you invaded Iraq, Libya, Syria...? It is simply about dominance. So sure you can say, it is for world peace - all accept our empire and we will have peace. But that is not really my definition of peace nor freedom. (and not a working one, with so many other wannabe nuclear empires around)
I was also not in the military because of that. I would defend germany in germany, but not in Afghanistan. But when you join the military or work for them - you can't really choose only for the defense part. This would only be possible if we would have only armys for defending (so in switzerland I probably would have served).
And about real international peace-keeping missions, to protect against genocide etc. - well, that is a different story. UN-Troops are an option, even they got used for dominance and powerplay as well and lost credibility because of it. But when a nations army goes into a different country to fight a war - it is allmost allways about dominance.
Maybe when enough people do it, the U.S. leaders will have a more reasonable approach to foreign policy/invading other countries.
More generally, the irony is that the U.S. military has made a far greater positive contribution to the world than Google. Under the Pax Americana, we have seen the greatest number of people rise out of abject poverty in human history. The stable, liberal world order that has been beneficial to so many people has been bankrolled by the U.S. and backed by the U.S. military.
This world where people in India and Pakistan are using Gchat Facebook to talk to each other instead of waging nuclear war against each other is not the result of Google or Facebook. It's not the result of humans evolving beyond their tendencies towards warfare. It's because the U.S. military has made entire classes of armed conflicts untenable.
They now have a lifetime emperor who is enacting surveillance and citizen "ratings" that make dystopian novels look tame, along with crippling polution, poor living and safety standards, intense competition without any consumer or IP protection, lack of political freedom, and slowing economic growth that needs to absorb the momentum of a billion people lifted out of poverty and expecting the good times to continue without a revolt.
It's unfair to pretend these institutions, their purposes, and their effects stay the same across generations. It is similarly unfair to pretend people's perception shouldn't change across those same generations while the other factors do change.
It's like telling someone writing something critical of the Mexican government that it's ironic because of Mayan contributions to writing. Sure the timescales of the analogy may appear off, but so do the ones of technological advancement lately.
I agree that the US military has made positive contributions to the world, but I don't think it's the main source of the Pax Americana -- strong international bodies (NATO, UN, &c), the tendency for democratic nations (the dominant sort in the 20th century) to avoid wars with each other, and advancements in crop science are all individually more responsible for the relative global stability of the last 30 years.
I don't deny that the military had a role (usually financial) in any or all of the above, but I wouldn't call it a causal role: virtually all academic research funding hits the defense world eventually ("food security", "ecological security", &c), especially during the Cold War. That's the result of political contrivances, not any sort of deep connection between the U.S. military and scientific progress.
Finally, I wonder about drawing comparisons between the past U.S. military and current ventures. The Google engineers in question probably wouldn't be designing waterproof radios for fastboats; they'd be training models that "recognize" "terrorists" from afar and systems that pass that information to drones for remote killing. Put another way: the shift away from conventional warfare changes the moral dimensions of working for the military.
NATO and the UN both benefit (and suffer) from the power and presence of the US military, but their proudest moments (the German economic miracle, smallpox eradication, historic decreases in child mortality and malnutrition) all stem from smart policy and liberal principles, not from the looming threat of American tanks.
- At some time between 1945 and 1950 the USSR likely would have moved the Iron Curtain all the way to the Atlantic, and quite possibly to the west coast of Britain or even Ireland. Practically anyone who lived under Communist rule in Central- and Eastern Europe would agree that this would have been a Very Bad Thing.
- In the summer of 1950 the Korean peninsula would most certainly have been reunited under the Kim Il Sung regime — this damned near happened anyway, when the U.S. and ROK forces were nearly pushed into the sea at Pusan — and the South Korean economic miracle would never have occurred, to say nothing of the fact that the North Korean gulag would be that much larger.
- Japan probably would have rearmed, and who knows what that would have led to.
Oh, and absent the freedom of the seas heretofore provided by the United States Navy, the world's economy would look very, very different.
As to "smart policy and liberal principles," those are certainly important. But as President Obama said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, nonviolence wouldn't have stopped Hitler's armies.
Disclosure: I'm biased — I'm both a veteran and the son of a career U.S. military officer.
The DoD sure wants to have a major influence on fundamental research and scientific progress. http://www.defenseinnovationmarketplace.mil/FFRDC_UARC.html
The UARCs are DoD's attempts to have influence into fundamental research and engineering.
Those positive impacts probably are still likely due to political factors like you said, but it isn't for lack of the DoD trying.
You’re begging the question. If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means? When the Roman Empire fell, we call the subsequent period the dark ages. What does that say about whether the Roman Army was good or bad?
I think so. Here's an example: over 3/4ths of released prisoners are re-arrested within five years. Half are re-arrested within a year of release[1]. If my end is substantially reducing the crime rate, I could reasonably claim that mandatory lifelong sentences would achieve that end: recidivism would be eliminated, and there would be a strong disincentive for anybody to commit even minor crimes. But this is clearly a terrible means, both legally and morally: the punishment doesn't fit the crime, and we end up condemning 25% of the prison population to a life in jail because of a statistic.
[1]: https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...
Anyway I've heard it said that the container ship has done more to lift the world standard up, than all the political action of the last 1000 years. By distributing goods to all the corners of the world at a cheap price.
I understand the analogy of Container being an innovative idea. With out calm seas under-written by US Navy, its not so great.
Without US Navy and its 10 carriers, we will be back to 19th century mercantilism and how much fun colonialism which is its off-shoot has been.
Shipping containers have made an impact in the efficiency of shipping, not the existence of shipping.
I understand safe passage.. Safe Passage does not mean that Fifth fleet sits in the Persian Gulf round the fucking clock!
I will not engage in word play, I am not good at it, and it comes from an agenda of being cute or clever.
You are exaggerating the degree to which international shipping depends on the US Navy.
Ehh, kinda, but not really. Less military contractors and more research grants given to academics. The difference is subtle, but an academic institution is a public institution focused on advancing science and teaching it to the public. A corporation or contractor is in it for the profit. Notably, the academics involved were able to publish their work as the TCP/IP standard (and others), and anyone was able to use it.
If it had actually been military contractors we would not have the internet as it is today.
Like... while getting his Ph.D so I'm not wrong about the academic link. Though sure, it was literally built by the military industrial complex, but the original implication that the military somehow has a primacy over an idea that was going to take off one way or another is still absurd.
Where your analysis is incomplete is that military might is not the only reason that people will avoid fighting. A strong military is a negative incentive ("I might lose or die"), but there are plenty of positive incentives for nations to avoid warfare.
In fact, international relations tend to be dominated by positive incentives, which is why "cheeseburger diplomacy" is such a reliable concept, and open warfare is historically rare, even before Pax Americana.
Google is a much smaller and younger entity than the U.S. military, so you might still be technically right on total quantitative impact. But that's not really a fair way to look at it.
“Cheeseburger diplomacy” is not a reliable concept, either the Obama practice to which the media gave the name or Friedman's McDonald's peace theory, which makes more sense in the context of your comment.
That was just an example, though. My main point is that the peoples and nations of the world, given the opportunity, overwhelmingly prefer to pursue relationships of peaceful mutual benefit, rather than military threat. The purpose of a military is merely to preserve or restore that opportunity.
The notion that trade has a negative correlation with war is a well-accepted concept in international relations, and one of the reasons national governments exert themselves to grow international economic relationships.
It's perfectly coherent to support the overall ends (relative world peace) and oppose the means (extrajudicial drone strikes, invasion of Iraq, etc.)
even on Vietnam war, look at the aftermath of US army giving up - for South Vietnamese: mass concentration camps, shoving inside CONEX boxes, a lot of deaths...
...all of this when the war is over and the communist gov. isn't desperate for anything...
...and US media doesn't cover this because Americans want to think "we lost because we were bad (yay justice!), not because we were stupid/weak/etc"
Of course, US army was too desperate & chose to "shoot/bomb whoever (isn't wearing US army uniforms)" - a combination of stupidity / lack of discipline / common sense
Why do you think it's more moral/ethical to abstain of supporting military?
This is a very old form of the argument you are putting forward, and while I can see how people will take it to inform their morals, it's also easy to see reasonable versions that reject it.
We are talking about morals here, after all. It can be the most rational path for you to work towards improving [in your mind] how things work where you are.
My question was genuine, by the way. I don't have the answers to any of this. I do distrust moral arguments that seem naive or overly simplistic.
It's yours and you have every right to be there, and every right to complain about and protest things you don't like.
Working on missile guidance? Then I can see your point of view... but everything else in some way facilitates or contributes to facilitating such things.
One can rapidly reduce it to "fixing a Linux bug... facilitates the military industrial complex". You might wish to not work on things that directly are used by the military, but the vast majority of technology is indirectly used because the military and their supporting companies, processes, logistics is so broad that it's almost everything.
At which point can you say your work truly does not facilitate or contribute?
But would you refuse to work on Office if you worked at MS?
http://theweek.com/articles/673091/general-mattis-save-milit...
[Genuine question: New here, is this style of post too Reddit for HN?]
So something like linking an article about PPT overuse in the military w/ a quip is much better than just a quip at PPT's expense. (Given that some people might not be aware of the reported overuse of PowerPoint in the US military)
The dividing line varies from person to person, of course. I think most would agree that improving a guidance algorithm for missile targeting is directly supporting the military. Fixing a kernel bug is not directly supporting the military. I'm a pacifist and I would go by my definition of direct support.
The concept is called “Conscientious objection to military taxation”
Here's the deal: Yes, some people are not as fortunate. That does not matter one iota in this conversation. Just because others have it worse does not in any way, shape, or form mean that we shouldn't continue fighting for better. You complaining about this is nothing more than you advocating a race to the bottom.
This seems like a reasonable way to draw a line. Obviously things get questionable as they might work for a company that has a contract with a company that has a military contract. How can they be sure that their work won't be used as a part of that contract?
But as a start I think this framework isn't so bad. Probably better than something I would be able to come up with on the spot
Problematic here is that I might not be aware of all my moral limits until I encounter a situation they might be relevant to.
But there are several references by Plato that are relevant to the interpretation that I implied (to know yourself = to know your moral standpoint) mentioned in the Wikipedia article:
(Plato's Phaedrus dialogue) Socrates says, "But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things."
(Plato's Protagoras dialogue) Socrates mentions "the far-famed inscriptions, which are in all men's mouths,--'Know thyself,' and 'Nothing too much'.". Having lauded the maxims, Socrates then spends a great deal of time getting to the bottom of what one of them means, the saying of Pittacus, 'Hard is it to be good.' The irony here is that although the sayings of Delphi bear 'great force,' it is not clear how to live life in accordance with their meanings. Although, the concise and broad nature of the sayings suggests the active partaking in the usage and personal discovery of each maxim; as if the intended nature of the saying lay not in the words but the self-reflection and self-referencing of the person thereof.
Especially with dual-use technology, e.g. open source infrastructure, open accessibility moots some qualms about empowering a specific military at the expense of others.
(On the other hand, in terms of wars not happening and pure global peace and stability, there are arguments for elevating between 1 and 5 powers above others)
Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects? ISTR reading something recently about it being legally questionable to discriminate between who can accept a license, but that was in the context of allowing open source for non-commercial purposes.
Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses, for example, are neither Open Source nor Free Software licenses.
This question is an oxymoron.
Both the definition of open source (by the Open Source Initiative) and the definition of free software (by the Free Software Foundation) explicitly forbid discriminating against any person or a group of people for software to be considered as open source / free software.
If you've taught kindergarten or middle school, you've probably helped raise a soldier.
Yeah ok.
I believe that on HN you perhaps talk to the wrong audience for this argument. If the teacher really had the "hacker spirit" in teaching, the pupils will be too freethinking (as in hacker) to be suitable soldiers.
"If someone's freethinking, they'll think exactly like me"
I claim that my point nevertheless stands. I was explicitly talking about "hacker spirit". If you read up on the hacker ethics
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_ethic&oldi...
you will find many points that will make such a person a really unsuitable soldier, for example "Mistrust authority — promote decentralization", which is at least in my worldview quite the opposite of the life as a soldier, where obedience, chain of command etc. are central.
The same holds for "All information should be free", which is quite in the spirit of Snowden and Assange, but quite the opposite of the values of being a soldier, where military secrets are (for good or bad) of importance.
This is the comment I was shooting at. I don't believe this. Instead I believe something far more terrifying.
"Society manages complexity by the occasional cull of the free thinker"
Lots of smart people can bring a lot of good change to a society and culture, but one needs to be very careful to think the majority of the population in that society will accept those changes, and the faster they occur, the more resentment builds. Suddenly you have politicians and activists pining for the 'good old days'. Suddenly a nice authoritarian figure pops up and tells the masses that he can fix all their problems. There are ample examples in history to see where this leads.
I'm not sure how one enforces such a license. Let's be real, even a successful lawsuit isn't going to remove said software from the military's hands. And to the extent it is honored, it has the negative effect of driving up the cost of developing military software, which of course comes out normal people's pockets.
But it might be an interesting way to take up a principled stance.
The best way to protect Americans would be for our country to get out of expensive, overseas wars and invest that money in healthcare and ending the drug war, things that actually kill Americans in large numbers.
It's basically US stirring trouble all over the world and then saying "look how great we are for defending peace across the globe!".
While we see the US as an ally here - we haven't traditionally been at war with Arab countries and I think a big part of it was the influx of military equipment from the US to Israel and from the USSR (and later Russia) to the surrounding countries. (This is an oversimplification but for brevity - I opted for just the gist of things)
Intervention in Iran and conquering it and installing a puppet government (the Shah) also did more harm than good in retrospect.
I believe that if the US exported more education and equalizers (like more accessible MOOCs, better infrastructure companies to get work there, more remote position etc). It would both be more competitive economically and would contribute more to middle-east stability.
Literally since the founding of the state of Israel the country has been at war with the Arab nations. Could you expand on what you mean by this?
[citations needed]. I've not been aware of any war on US soil.
9/11 was not an act of war. It was the work of a few deranged cultists who got lucky, nothing more and nothing less. Our response was equivalent to reacting to the Branch Davidians by bombing the Vatican.
The attack was planned by a group that wasn't the internationally recognized leadership of any country, and they hid in a war-torn country whose government was being violently contested. And the Taliban were also not recognized, at least not officially, as the leadership of Afghanistan.
So to call it an act of war is indeed a stretch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
Sure, there will always be people who think this not "real" war. But that's an irrelevant classification detail to the belligerents or the people caught up in the collateral damage.
Fast-forward 20 years to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is funded by his family, and by other rich Saudis, which means the government of Saudi Arabia because all Saudi wealth is owned by the House of Saud.
But they're our allies, so instead, we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers were from either country. To get approval, we lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, which we never found, because they didn't exist.
I'm not really following your war narrative, but I am finding a lot of cronyism and false flags.
My point was limited in scope to the 9/11 attack itself. I think terrorism on that scale can be classified as assymetric warfare.
Warfare predates nation states. Today, most of the world is parceled into nation states. But violent non-state actors never ceased to exist. And therefore we shouldn't limit our definition of warfare only to war between nation states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9/11_Commiss...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/bob-graham-releas...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Matters-Arabia-Failure-A...
FTFY
Pearl Harbor is very much on US soil.
Would love to work on actually protecting American lives but at this point Pentagon in an unaccountable monster that has actually funded terrorist organisations and has made America (and rest of the world) unsafe. Not to mention I find it morally reprehensible that our young kids are dying in distant third world countries like Iraq, Afganistan and Syria and involved in killing thousands little kids and innocent civilians in the name of "protecting American lives".
If you don't want to be a part of it, good for you. But those freedoms didn't come cheap.
Picture this: we're deep in the Cold War era, and Ronny Raygun is the president. The Star Wars initiative is in full swing. Nuclear mishaps and near-misses are still an all-too-frequent occurrence. Nena's red balloons are ready to fly. The President has just gone on the air and promised to "Outlaw Russia," and that "The bombing starts in five minutes." Some officers from the Pentagon approach your company's management and ask them to bid on a project that will involve launching dozens of military satellites equipped with atomic clocks, designed to locate any person, place, or thing on Earth at meter-scale accuracy.
Do you threaten to quit the company, lecture everyone who will listen about the potential for misuse of such dangerous technology... and miss out on the chance to contribute to GPS?
Or, how about a few years earlier, when they ask you to work on a colossal air-defense computer system using technology that hasn't even been invented yet. They want to use computers to vector fighters to intercept approaching Soviet bombers, and to target missiles to kill the ones the fighters miss. It's obvious to anyone not in uniform that the whole idea is insanely stupid, wasteful, and destabilizing. They want to spend $50 billion to develop a system that guarantees one whole 'nine' of uptime, that can be trivially jammed or disrupted, and that will literally be obsolete the day they turn it on since it can't deal with ballistic missiles.
So you tell them, "No, I don't want to work on SAGE. Peace out and fuck off." As it turns out, the system is indeed useless at its stated purpose. The spinoffs, on the other hand, not only revolutionize the entire IT industry, but create it. The next thirty years' worth of progress in computer architecture, memory and storage, networking, display and human interaction, and fault-tolerance is traceable directly to this boondoggle. All of these things would probably have taken decades longer to evolve without military funding and backing. Nobody dies as a result, but a bunch of your coworkers do get to play with a lot of cool toys.
Then there's the whole ARPAnet thing, funded by DoD to survive nuclear holocaust, asteroid strikes, plague, fire, and famine... any threat imaginable by anyone other than telecom-industry lobbyists.
Even the very wise cannot see all ends, and that goes for modern-day hippies too.
Let me know when you find a job where you know your work will never be misused.
Meantime, your comment completely ignores the irony inherent in having been made over a network that was created by people you reflexively refuse to work for.
If you don't want to hire me because of this fact, I am perfectly fine with that. In fact, that is exactly what I and the OP would want. I do not blame you for working on military projects. You are free to do that, and I think no less of you for it. But by the same token, the OP and I are free to not wanting to work on military projects.
If you want to judge people for their personal preferences, that is your choice to make. They might reciprocate, though.