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Comment by cronz | Hacker News Reader

Why is this good? (I'm not American)

It isn't. The military should be equipped with the best talent and tech we have to offer, for the best defense of the nation. We don't live in a vacuum and there are now lifetime dictators like Putin and Jinping with major military power and constant cold-war and cyberware tactics being deployed.

It's easy to throw around ethics but many people don't think that far ahead and saying "we shouldn't make weapons" is naive and dangerous when the rest of the world already has them pointed at us.

What value is AI assisted drone strikes going to provide? If another country, China, Russia, etc sent drones for targeted drone strikes, we could send ours over with untargeted drone strikes that also cause collateral damage. This is also considered offensive technology, not defensive technology.

I think the potential negatives with this technology outweigh the positives.

You're arguing that collateral damage is a good thing in a comment seemingly about why advanced weapons tech is a bad thing? How is this ethical or cogent?

AI isn't only used for drone strikes, and more accuracy in means a better outcome in actually hitting the target while preserving the lives of innocents (and thereby ending the conflict quickly and reducing the chance of eventual retaliation by other groups). We can always launch more attacks if we have more targets to destroy, not just hope the drone randomly blows things up during its mission.

There is also no offense or defense, they are the same thing when talking about weapons. Having the best weapons and never using them is far better than being unprepared when someone else comes along with more capabilities.

Because they are taking ethics into account (or claim to be).

Lets me really honest, they pulled out because they couldn't compete with Amazons offering. Google is driven by profits and growth just like any other company.

You’re being downvoted, but you’re almost certainly correct.

“If someone’s going to do it, it might as well be us” is about the extent of corporate ethics.

I guess ethics dont factor into Chinese censorship?

Because data mining and AI shouldn't be use for unethical purposes (Spying on it's citizen ...).

Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but shouldn't you fix this at the source i.e. the government? If the American people don't want their government to spy on people .. vote for another government?

For any given US government, we’re basically always voting for people that we don’t trust very far, except to be marginally less of an asshole than the person we didn’t vote for.

The spying on citizens part is pretty entrenched, I don’t see any candidate running on a platform of not doing that.

Begging someone who does something bad (spying on their people in this case) to please stop doing bad things? That works?

Equating voting with begging is a serious false equivalency.

The government is made up of normal people. They get voted in by the rest of us. You can definitely change things if you dont like them, but you have to get enough other people to see it your way.

Who defines what is unethical? What is unethical for you might be ethical for others and vice versa.

The whole concept of ethics is about systematizing what's wrong and what's right. Obviously it's not a solved problem, but it's very far from just being a free-for-all.

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