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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

1st thought: wow, cool stuff!

2nd thought: too bad it's gonna be military use first. I've often heard the argument being made that military applications (and even war itself) somehow drive innovation. While that may be true to an extent, it always rang hollow to me as an argument. Why should civil life always just get the "crumbs" of science and engineering? Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money and brain time on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide) and then see which of those technologies can be repurposed for the military, not the other way around?

DARPA alone has a bigger budget than NASA, and I just googled "us military research budget" and the numbers for all the arms of the US military are quite staggering, really.

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Innovation doesn't work like that.

I normally think about it like this:

Government research:

Money spent here is the most abstract as it doesn't define a problem before it tries to solve it but rather looks for things we don't understand yet.

Military research:

The point of this research is maintaining power which means researching whatever might give you the upper hand. This is why AI is added to the research now. Whoever is furthest have the upper hand. Because getting the upper hand with regards to physical power can be a lot of things, whoever wants to be in power have to invest in a broad spectrum of areas.

Product/market research:

Solving problems perceptually or real, defined by the market itself or creating new markets but often using knowledge from what was created by governments and millitary (or ex. space travel). These are often accidental and byproducts.

Now here is the problem.

Just because you can define a market or a problem doesn't mean you can find a market for it. You have to find the customers who benefit from and who can pay.

If you took the money away from the millitary and gave it to solve "humanities problems" you would run the risk of loosing the monopoly of power because the problems of the humanity is not the same as those of the individual nation states.

> Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money and brain time on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide)

I think this is a quirk of the US political system where military spending is the only public spending that is acceptable to both parties in the duopoly. Hence the only stable source of public funding for research is probably in the military sector.

Disagree.

I think it is the incentive that drives this innovation. The consumer market does not face large scale death if it does not innovate.

ARPA was more innovative than DARPA was, not less.

I'd argue opportunity cost from lack of innovation in medecine and e.g. car safety/car replacements kills more than US military involvements... Car deaths alone are >37K in 2016 in the US alone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Exactly. Military deaths are far exceeded by civilian ones, if only due to scale.

military deaths are historically low because of how much better the american military is than our opponents.

the american military is better because of the technology we have.

The technology we have is because of DARPA spending over the last 80 years.

do you see the flaw in your logic?

There are lots of reasons to spend money on military technology, but absolute reduction in deaths by U.S. citizens is not a compelling one — there are just too many civilians who die in preventable ways as compared to military deaths.

I think it’s kind of a silly comparison, tbh. I’d like to see us spend more money on both civilian and military research. I suspect that the military spends plenty of money on shit that is less impactful in the long term than research, and military research also often advances civilian technology.

My point was meant to be quite narrow.

Would you rather we have wars were America doesn't have a significant advantage?

Maybe like the civil war, where both sides were equal and 750,000 Americans died?

Or WW2, fighting against an arguably better Nazi and Japanese military killed 400,000 Americans?

Or WW1, where the stalemate between both sides led to 120,000 american deaths?

You must be right because all those american deaths are preferable to only 2,000 americans who died in the wars in Afghanistan.

/s obviously

I believe the argument is that the research is supposed to lead to a lower chance of the US or allied citizen deaths by preventing advisaries from attacking. We hope that the expensive nuclear capabilities, for example, are never used. How do we measure the potential loss if we had no such capability?

At least 50,000,000 were killed in WW2 alone. In WW1 around 16,000,000 were killed. That is over 65,000,000 people killed counting only the two biggest conflicts of the 20th century. If another global conflict broke out, the death count could easily be 100,000,000. If the money the US spends on military keeps a world war from happening in the 21st century it will be money well spent.

It's really phenomenal to think about how many people died in WW2. It's literally difficult to even imagine. And your numbers there are a bit off. Estimates tend to start more around 70 million. And I think that's leading to you low ball the potential death toll in future wars. In 1945 the entire world's population was around 2.4 billion. Nearly 3% of the world was killed or died as a result of WW2. The world's population today is 7.6 billion. A war of the same effect would have an expected death toll of around 222 million people. And that's probably substantially lowballing it as we have far greater ways of killing each other now a days, even if we take nukes out of the picture.

Even just back to those 70 million, let's say 73 million as that's where Wiki starts and it seems reasonable. Just imagine that. That's a 9/11 scale of death every single day for 24,366 days. Or a 9/11 scale event every single day for 67 years. That's again difficult to even imagine. And all of that death, with a population 1/3rd of ours today, was compressed into 6 years. Such lessons should never be forgotten, but in a way it's difficult to learn from such things when we really cannot even imagine death and destruction on this scale now a days.

I think you're right but I'd phrase it as the military typically has very specific needs and constraints which helps design and sometimes those needs overlap with civilian life.

That's true. Military spending is the only kind of industrial strategy the US is willing to implement without one of the parties immediately blocking the effort. Pretty sad but it's the state of things.

Military research spending is also 'easy' to administer and simpler - have a bunch of siloed off portions investigating any remotely viable approach. Even investigating something that we later know is unfeasible like gyrorocket weapons or walking trucks it is known what it would get and that they have potential to be useful. Tore or less regular generations. Generally what makes it through is accurate, faster, or longer ranged but fundamentally very similar even if it is 'just' laser guided missiles from drones instead of blind dropped fletchettes from biplanes.

Civilian research is 'harder' in that the advances are less qualitative and more abstract. Is researching amphibian biology going to somehow improve medicine? (Axotls may be anywhere from a dead-end to bringing regeneration). The 'boring' solutions are already there and being worked on. Furthermore there rationalizing secrecy becomes far harder and anything that sounds stupid can be attacked for political points regardless of the underlying reality.

The 'treadmill for shrimp' for instance is attacked as an example of waste when it is the exact opposite - using an innovative way to cut expenses as part of examining the impact of water quality on the health and livelihood of species that are an economic lifeblood in many regions.

We have been warring before the dawn of civilization. I think it used to play a role in territorial resource usage/rights, evolutionary selection, population control and asserting your own set of morals.

I wish we all get over war, but realistically, as long as we differentiate between "good" and "bad", there will always be some source of enmity to start wars..

In almost all wars, the "bad" is that one group wants to take something away from another group. Sometimes that thing is their freedom, but even in those cases, there is usually an underlying material issue.

In almost all wars, the "bad" is the group that lost the war. And when it cannot be decided or doesn't matter anymore, those who control the discourse decide who is/was "good".

Taking something away is not good or bad per se. Sometimes both sides see the other part "taking something away" from them (see any rebellion vs central power conflict).

1) For some self-serving definitions of "bad" 2) Then doubly so.

Actually, that's not really the case: warring started at the dawn of civilization. There aren't many clear cases of large scale destruction of human life in prehistoric times. The proliferation of war only happened as sedentism gained popularity. Sedentism is the start of civilization. It also creates economic stratification, which is probably the number one reason for war across nations and inside nations.

Hmmm. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

That sounds like a bit of a tautology given that humanity kept to relatively small bands at that time from logistical constraints.

Also amusingly technologically mutually assured destruction may have started with /fire/ and contributed back in ancient forest Africa. Essentially if there was a rival band to risky to fight and you have mastery of fire setting via a firebreak a contained wildfire would rid a threat and give remaining territory minus what was burnt into immediate uselessness.

> Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money and brain time on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ is why not

Thank you. Mostly for the fish farming thought experiment.

Wow! Thank you so much for that link.

Interesting read so far. The fish farming story is a nice example. For further analysis around the same topic, https://equilibriabook.com is a great read.

>8. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their budget on defense. In the absence of war – a condition which has mostly held for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure, health, education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend enough money on defense risks being invaded by a neighboring country that did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.

>From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos unused.

Funnily enough, we can come full circle and say that many developed nations can survive these days with very little military spending just because America's massive military is enough of a deterrent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana

I try to think in terms of that which is not seen. What are the technologies that would be developed by the same minds, were they not directed toward military projects?

The same is true of the finance sector. How many brilliant minds are toiling away to generate alpha for the investors, when they could be unleashed in other more productive sectors of society?

It's invalid to claim that "X beneficial technology wouldn't have been invented if not for Y war or Z program." Rather, military spending might shift when a technology was demanded by the market. And again, it diverts brilliant minds to one thing, when they could have done something else (that which is not seen) for society.

The other angle is yes, this is awesome tech! But it could not compete in the market, since it is entirely impractical. It only exists because it serves the demands of a program manager at $AGENCY with tax money to spend.

si vis pacem, para bellum

Because then 90% of the calls for $ spent will be "for the children" and other social justice stuff that won't move the needle.

We (US gov) spends several times more on the old vs. the young.

We should be actively increasing funding towards programs that benefit youth.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/spending-on-children-and-...

"too bad it's gonna be military use first"

Wow, I can't believe your comment is what we're discussing. I've seen some version of this on the Internet for 30 years now. I must have answered it a dozen times.

Can we turn this into an Internet FAQ? Basically, it wastes everyone's time. If everyone here agreed with you, would it change anything?

If you think the military spends a lot on research, you should see what they spend on non-research.

https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...

If we could turn all of our military spending into non-military R&D, the future would get here so fast! But alas, ...

Yeah, that most probably reflects my bias. Being in academia myself, I have a hard time thinking of good reasons to work for the military vs virtually any civil application. Also, I don't have 30 years of internet experience, so maybe it'll just take some more time for me to get tired of discussing this :)

Hey, I've got an answer from 6 years ago on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3808787

Notice my observation: "Consider that the US economy is $15 trillion. The US handbag market is bigger than DARPA's budget."

Its because no one feels they can just log in to say "omg that is so amazing and the people who built it are smarter than me".

Instead HN rewards comments that qualify every achievement with an IF, AND or BUT, or even worse: PFFFT.

Dear HN, you have permission to not be the smartest person in the room. Its actually liberating.

To the people at DARPA who built this - amazing! You are much smarter than me.

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