> According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as Deputy Director and Director of DARPA (1967–1974) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development": > The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
I love me some internet, but would I trade it for the possible annihilation of humankind? I'm being facetious, but only slightly; the fact that we wouldn't end up wiping humanity from the face of the earth was far from evident at the time (and still looms).
You can probably run a calculation on how many lives military tech has saved (GPS, drones, evac helicopters), and it may come out as a net benefit, but I'm not sure you'd be able to convince an Afghani that his family's lives were worth an incremental technology improvement.
I choose to believe that we are capable of taking on large experimental projects without them being connected to aggression.
The MAD equilibrium is very fragile!
Survivability is exactly what it sounds like. It isn't some conspiracy-theory euphemism for the "annihilation of humankind." It's a key component of MAD and is the one and only reason the Soviets didn't destroy the Western world from Cuba. This is well-documented.
An Afghani is a unit of currency and has neither convictions nor family. I wouldn't be so pedantic usually, but since your very point seems to be the alleged dehumanization of such people, it seemed appropriate to point out that maybe we shouldn't refer to people as inanimate objects.
As far as a civilian Afghan family's lives? That's what the DoD is trying to protect. Explain to me why you think more civilians should die, rather than developing better technology to help distinguish them.
The Reuters journalists in the famous "Collateral Murder" video should not have been killed. I suspect you and I are in agreement on that. What I absolutely fail to comprehend is how you seem to think Google et al. have a moral obligation not to help keep that from happening again.
I personally find this line of reasoning quite compelling. It's pretty clear that precision guided bombs, drones, body armor, and other technologies designed to save lives in war have also made war much more politically palatable for the DOD.
Until you can come up with a viable, demonstrably effective non-military approach to eliminating threats like that, we will continue to need a military capability. I speak as a Brit, about the wider 'we'. British troops are operating in Afghanistan right now, some of them are even Muslims. We're standing by the US, yet we have Americans here advocating undermining your own military, putting US and foreign services lives in greater danger, so they can feel a smug sense of moral superiority while sipping their skinny lattes in a nice comfortable office, just like the ones incinerated in New York in 2001.
Wars are horrible messy affairs. Innocent people suffer. It sucks. But advocating pretending threats don't exist and it's not our problem without addressing the actual issues is an utter abrogation of moral responsibility. Western militaries have gone to huge lengths to improve intelligence gathering techniques and achieve more precise targeting, massively reducing civilian casualties and blue-on-blue incidents. Surely supporting such technologies and programmes is worthwhile?
It's not clear that they conspired [0], though I suppose you could call them an accessory after the fact for refusing to extradite bin Laden.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Septemb...
That's not only morally repugnant on its face, it's flatly untrue. Greater collateral damage has rarely if ever prevented war. Past wars with high collateral damage have been longer, costlier, and more frequent than they are today.
Even if your utilitarian analysis were stomachably close to moral (it's not), it would still fail any sort of empirical test.
If the government threw just as much money into civilian research, we'd likely get just as much good, without finding more efficient ways to kill each other.
For instance, Australia has CSIRO [1], which is sort of like DARPA, but without the military bent. They've managed to invent all sorts of cool new stuff.
(I agree though that public civilian R&D funding is woeful)
Do I understand correctly, then, that if we continue throwing that money into military research, we not only gain the same civilian benefits, but also prevent the occurrence wherein someone else finds an efficient way to kill us before we find an efficient way to defend ourselves from it?
It just doesn't work like that. WWII was value destruction at a massive scale. All that industry could have been building industry and we'd have had the 50's and 60's a decade earlier but not just for the US.
While the US is conventionally excluded from great power analysis (the preceding form of superpower analysis) due to its noninvolvement in European affairs, it was unquestionably one of the major economic engines of the world in the era before WWI.
I see the temptation in avoiding military contracts, but "optics" aside, it's not all bad.
that said we probably shouldn't give the armies too many autonomous killer-bots. I mean it would almost definitely drive some cool technologies being developed for eventual civilian use that would be very difficult to fund privately..but also SkyNet..
basically, I agree with everything you just said, but wanted to elaborate a bit further :)
It’s grotesque to me to muse about the cool tech we could get at the expense of other people’s lives.
Military technology doesn't necessarily mean "tech to kill". it could also be tech to save (from natural disasters, horrors induced by already-existing-weapons, etc.)
i agree that we should avoid developing tech that has the exclusive intent of killing, which is what I was trying to imply with my cute SkyNet comment.
edit to clarify: for any given military tech, one needs to consider the possible ramifications. If a given technology is deemed benign, I see no harm in developing it, even if it is for the military. on the other hand, if it has a big potential for destruction, it's not worth developing it for the military, even if it does come with the upside of enabling cool tech to be developed. autonomous killbots is a perfect example, which would probably advance the robotics field at a accelerated rate, but it provides such a huge potential for destruction that it's simply not worth it.
The latest episode of Citations Needed Podcast (http://citationpod.com/) does a good short review of some particularly agregious situations in which the US military bombs countries then the same or related parties praise themselves for their humanitarian response to the aftermath.
Worse, when you bomb a country, for example, it should be obvious that this sets back all of humanity to some degree. Apparently, it’s not obvious. But Earth and humanity are systems, and this analogy is such that we can look at any other system and find the same outcome. Damage one part, and effects will be felt in the others; often not at simultaneously. Some parts will be stimulated only to be depleted later (like the immune systems in our bodies) and require attention. The US is experiencing this sort of reversal right now, though some are in denial or haven’t caught on to that yet.
look at self-driving cars for example. we had that uber-crash recently, that cost a woman her life. does this show us that tech development in the private sector is obviously bad?
it's a little more case by case than that. which is why, as op so nicely put it, "companies need to take a balanced look".
The true cost would have to entail proportions of the human, social, monetary, and environmental investments in self-driving technology. Manufacturing labor abuse in China and other low-wage hardware sources, the labor issues at Tesla, the abuse scandals, including side effects and aftermath at Uber, techsploitation at large, raising rents in tech hub cities like Bay Area, SF, NYC, associated family separations, including homelessness and related social program ceilings, taxes not paid by these giant corporations fueling the “innovation”, privacy invasions by Google, of which the extents will never be known.
It’s amazing how limited tech workers tend to be when it comes to performing systemic analysis at the societal level.
At the end of the day, millions of people would have more security and stability and happiness in their lives without this pace of technological discovery. At the end of the day, there are some things that should take a higher priority. I’ll assert mutual dignity is one of them.