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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Silicon Valley refuses to cooperate with the military if it won't mean that America won't be able to compete with China and Russia strategically in the long term. Those countries presumably have no problems getting their tech industry to cooperate. Russia having an advanced form of AI-weaponry without any form of MAD-doctrine is probably not the best scenario.

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Silicon Valley isn't lacking in government contracting firms, and it's not the only place where talented developers exist... You need to get out of that bubble that SV is the only place with competent developers, you do a disservice to developers everywhere.

The US could counter that by poaching most of the best talent from China and Russia, even more than it already does.

Many promising young researchers from around the world earn their stripes at US universities, and loads of them would be happy to stay and become Americans. Unfortunately, the US immigration system makes that difficult and lots of them get sent home.

The best part about that plan is they don't even have to develop their own AI weapons. They could deny that capability to adversaries just by allowing those workers to take up interesting & lucrative jobs in the American civilian economy.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-31/u-s-shoul...

> Russia having an advanced form of AI-weaponry without any form of MAD-doctrine is probably not the best scenario.

They're a very long way from there, see for example this: http://defence-blog.com/army/combat-tests-syria-brought-ligh... (which also happens to be my latest separate post submission). People tend to over-estimate the technical prowess of the Russians, there's only so much that the military of a country with ~160 million people can do to technically compete against both the US and the EU.

Plus their economy is about 1/15th of the US's and seems to be declining.

On the other hand, North Korea got nukes in a few years, while being two orders of magnitude smaller. If anything, I'd say people tend to underestimate how much (money, effort) a totalitarian state can invest if they think it's needed. Basically - all of it, and then some. Dictatorships can be more efficient in selected categories than democracies, and they often are - it's "in the long run" and "across the board" that they are worse. If you remove all the "checks and balances", you risk having an un-removable psychopath to be a dictator for life; but you also unlock the "full power of the state" to work on a single thing, which - in some circumstances - can give you amazing results.

I find your choice of words here interesting. Why does the US need to “compete” with Russia and China? I don’t want to sound too much like a hippy, but is strenthening our militaries like this really the best long term goal?

China and Russia won’t stop just because America does. It’s best to keep all forces balanced, akin to the nuclear deterrence theory.

However bad you think America is, every other super power is much worse. A few years ago Russia literally conquered a neighboring country just because they wanted to. The engineers who object to these programs are very lucky to live in a country that guarantees them the liberty to do so, but at the end of the day that liberty is protected by the US military.

> but at the end of the day that liberty is protected by the US military.

I think the citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. are quite happy that their liberty is protected. :-(

Sure, I bet Afghanis sit around at night reminiscing of the good old days under the taliban...

However this is completely irrelevant to the point. The question was why do we need to have a superior military to our adversaries, and the answer is because our adversaries are real, and if we care about our liberty we need to take them seriously. To say otherwise is either laughably naive, or is an outright rejection of liberty. Try refusing to work on military contracts in Russia or China and see what that gets you. In China, your career pretty much has a hard ceiling unless you want to join the communist party.

> Sure, I bet Afghanis sit around at night reminiscing of the good old days under the taliban...

Who were strongly financially supported (and thus in some sense "enthroned") by the CIA:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taliban&oldid=846...

"A while later, the U.S. CIA and Saudi Arabic General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funneled funding and equipment through the PakistanI Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen."

You're leaving out why they were given money: to fight back against a Communist coup supported by the Soviet Union.

So? The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight a few years later. The (negative) dividends of US militarization are still being paid.

Because it's an important part of the context and explains why the US funded the Taliban.

You’re also leaving out the part where the Taliban didn’t exist during the time that Afghani forces were receiving US support. If you look at the reason for getting involved in the first place, most people would agree that it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. That said if you look at how they handled the aftermath, most people would agree that part was a fuck up.

Which again is completely irrelevant to the point I’m making.

The US won WII not because our military was super powerful (though that helped), but because most of Germany's technical geniuses defected or deported or were deposed/killed. Chinese in large part flee China when they can. Foreigners aren't knocking down walls to join China.

The value of (relative) freedom made the US powerful. If the US becomes just like the bad parts of China or Russia, who cares of China or Russia come out on top instead of the US? They will have already won the war of ideas.

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