Antiwar Movement Spreads Among Tech Workers
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Steve Blank “Secret History of Silicon Valley” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Post WWII, 90%+ of R&D was military, a shockingly high number.
Coinciding with the year the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 saw that military R&D proportion fall to rough parity:
https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect...
Today, Military R&D has inverted compared to that post WWII, early Cold War environment making it only about 10% of R&D.
But that raises the problem of duel use commercial technology.
Commercial tech being combined or adapted for military purposes.
Personally, I’m far more concerned with the export of commercial off the shelf tech modified for mass surveillance and control than I’m worried about kinetic weapon systems.
Defence/Military money helped found Silicon Valley/Tech.
In-Q-Tel(CIA) has been in the Valley funding startups for 2 decades: https://www.iqt.org
Hacking 4 Defense at Stanford is a more recent addition that leverages the increasing reliance of the military on commercial off this shelf tech(disclosure: I have had some involvement in H4D with their educator’s course).
What’s OK and what isn’t for modifying commercial off the shelf tech for Defence/military use?
What are the perceived black/white/grey delineations working in this space?
However, in this context, what do you propose? WWII was a "real war", it was easy to see you were on the good side and that it was worth fighting. Besides, that huge ("world") war already was in progress. Right now the situation is not exactly comparable?
What I see from this is that somebody else - government or whatever - has a function, and relying on business alone won't work. They won't fund when returns are uncertain, no crazy ideas, no unlimited "costs don't matter" funding. What I also find interesting is that that was unlimited debt-based spending, anyone who had something that looked like an idea got funded to do whatever it took. And it worked, or is anybody still concerned about the amount of debt the US took on during WWII? So either we find a way for similar initiatives in peace times - or we wait for another huge war (or a similarly bad crisis) to convince the tax payers, but also motivate those doing the research, to get another round of innovation started with a similar disregard for debt, cost and plannability?
The defence sector simply can’t afford to fund every “good idea”.
Especially every idea, once selected, that leads to multi-decade and multi-billion(trillion in case of F35) lock in.
My thoughts, and hands on experience with military innovation, is focused on the bottom end.
Both in terms of “user” rank and budget for prototype capability.
I genuinely applaud those in the civilian tech sector who vote with their feet on moral/ethical perceptions.
However, it doesn’t hurt to understand history. Both the early generations of Silicon Valley and tech sector history as well as the last generation(dot.com bubble).
Money is flowing now, but all bubbles pop.
Especially Saudi oil money(40 years ago it was the soon to be deposed Iranian Shah’s money propping up Grumman and others).
When money gets tight, moral/ethical protest becomes less affordable.
I put my time where my mouth is and try to teach young serving members of the military how to innovate themselves(at least an introduction to it), rather than paying contractors to do it for them.
I can assure you the projects we’ve been working on have all been quite practical and ethical to work on.
One concept I push is “Its always H-Hour” stolen from my old employer Amazon “It’s still Day 1”.
Creating a sustainable sense of urgency and bias for action, but with an emphasis on resource austerity. We don’t have a Manhattan Project budget. We sometimes borrow things temporarily.
The Indian austere innovation concept of Jugaad comes to mind.
Personally, I think the answer is a mashup of H4D using a StartUp Weekend-like intro, Jugaad like resource austerity, and a YC like innovation community and pipeline. And perhaps something on the high end akin to the Israeli Talpiot Program.
I sincerely hope those ethically opposed to working on defence projects can continue to afford to do so.
As that will mean the tech sector is still awash with opportunity anD cash which will help nudge defence towards conducting more internal adaptation of commercial tech instead of relying on civilian contractors.
I’d certainly prefer we don’t see another peer or near peer level major global conflict.
But conflict seems eternally intertwined with the human condition. At least for now.
I think where they screwed up is trying to force engineers of a non-military contract focused company into military work...
I think Google should of made an entirely new company and gone out to hire people specifically for military work. I am surprised Alphabet has not figured this out.
If I am hired to work on some camera system and now you want me to work on a weapons system. Guess what... I will probably quit if I dont feel comfortable with that kind of thing.
We are employees not slaves. Give us work we want to do for best results. Otherwise hire new people to work on those NEW tasks...
I do love the hidden history of SV videos they are a wealth of knowledge.
"The US is militarily involved in 76 countries."*
"The U.S. spends more on arms and armies than the next seven biggest spenders combined"
"U.S. and allied airstrikes in Syria and Iraq killed 6,000 civilians"
*7 countries with drone strikes, 15 countries with combat troops (?!), 44 with military bases, and 58 with with counterterroism training programs, 2015-2017
Similarly, measuring the performance of a logistics company by gallons of gas consumed would be pretty dumb right? People would just drive in circles to consume more gas.
Spending is about input, not output.
Spending is the measure of intention. The US intends to be the world's healthiest war cult.
Had there been no birth of communism and Nazism and Japanese militarism, it might have stayed that way. But those did come about, Britain's dominance (also France) of the globe was to be replaced, which turned out to be US and not communism/Nazism/other-ism. And I am personally mightily thankful for that.
But in modern day with big jets, fast transports, such stance of not having army big enough seems not wise.
Let's start with the revolutionary wars. About 200,000 Americans picked up arms during the revolutionary war, which is a lot! Especially next to the 121,000 troops the British had in 1781.
Except that 200,000 is wartime total, while the 121,000 figure is all at once in 1781. The average number of men under arms that the Americans had was about 40,000, roughly on par with the 48,000 committed by the British in the colonies. Keep in mind that this was a demobilized and underfunded British army, with the British coffers being empty after the 7 years war.
There are a series of battles on the continent that would see more men committed to a single battle than the Americans had under arms at once during the revolutionary wars. The Prussians (Germans to you and I) committed 20,000 to the Battle of Mollwitz in 1741, and 36,000 to the Battle of Hochkirch in 1758. The Austrians committed 80,000 to that exact same battle, twice the number of Americans under arms twenty years later.
By 1776 Frederick the Great would have 187,000 men under arms during the peace.
There is a very good reason why the founding fathers wanted to remain aloof from continental interests.
The US Civil War is the bloodiest war that we've participated in, because every casualty was by necessity an American. It was a much larger conflict compared to the revolutionary war, but it doesn't really stand out as conflict containing large armies, compared to other European conflicts before and after.
2,200,000 Americans fought on the Union and 750,000-1,000,000 Americans fought for the Confederacy during the war. The estimated peak size of each army was 700,000 for the north, and 360,000 for the south. So we're an order of magnitude up from the revolutionary era, how does this compare to other wars on the continent?
.... Not good, as it turns out. The French revolutionary government managed to get a peak of 800,000 men under arms during their various wars half a century earlier. The Napoleonic wars saw 1,200,000 men under arms on the French side at once, with roughly 1,450,000 British, Prussian, and British soldiers arrayed against them. Napoleon dragged 685,000 men into Russia (and left half of them there...). To put that into perspective, he dragged the entire Union army into Russia, and then left the entire Confederate army dead on the outskirts of Moscow, then he kept fightinng.
Heck, even previous conflicts dwarf the civil war. The 30 years war (1618-1648) saw armies of roughly half a million squaring off for 30 years.
The Franko-Prussian war (1870-1871) saw a max of 950,000 Germans (we can call them that now) squaring off against 710,000 Frenchmen at once.
Side note: the one thing the Civil War has going for it is that it previewed the horrors of WW1 much better than the napoleonic wars did, even if it was smaller. Better artillery and better rifles started showing up by this time, including limited numbers of repeating rifles. Apparently the European powers sent observers to see how this would all work out, and if that's true then holy crap did they not learn the right lessons.
And between these large conflicts you find .... nothing. From 1800 to 1810 the US had less than 10,000 men under arms total (excluding reserves). You see a nice little spike of 20,000 or so around the war of 1812, having your capital burned will do that to you, but it's all kind of cute compared to the millions of men under arms trying to kill each other in Europe at that exact time. The numbers remain in the 20-40k range until the Civil War, and then it climbs into the heady territory of .... 50,000 men and slowly climbing. At the start of WWI the US had 130,000 men under arms, less than half the number of casualties that the French would suffer in the first month. The first battles of WWI would show the French and Germans committing twice as many men to a single battle each as the US had available in total.
Of course, we know how this ends. The US eventually builds up its army and comes in to finish off an exhausted Germany. Then we start keeping larger and larger armies until today, when we outspend the next 7 countries combined. Nowadays we absolutely do keep a very large army, but from the very beginning? Not so much.
I am just going to leave this here because somehow it got lost along the way:
- US population 1776: 2.5m (Revolutionary war)
- US population 1861: 31.4m (Civil war)
- US population 1914: 99.1m (WW1)
- Europe population ~1776: 200m
- Europe population ~1861: 280m
- Europe population ~1914: 482m
You are comparing apples to oranges all over the place.
200,000 out of 2,500,000 is 8%. If 8% was enlisted in the regular US army in 2018 (population: 328m) that would give you an army of 26 million people. To put things in perspective: the largest army in the world, with human population at its historic maximum, has 2.1 million people (China, with a population of over a 1.3b people).
Part of what makes massive countries so dangerous is that they can field huge armies without damaging their economic base, which is why you’ll never see China field an army with 5% of their population, while smaller countries might have to.
This means by your measure the largest armies in the world are fielded by small tribes, which might have over 50% of their population at arms! Except this is absolutely silly, and we all know it.
But fine. Let’s play that game.How big are America’s armies by percentage of population?
You can’t use total people served, because that’s not the size of the army. When you measure total served you’re picking up the size of the army, the length of the war, and various bits about how recruitment and retention worked. The actual size of the army was 40,000 in 1776, which is a more prosaic 1.6% of the population.
By that measure the revolutionary army is decently sized (1.6%), the civil war army is actually about the same size (3.2%, or 1.6% per belligerent).
In between the wars you effectively have no army, by percentage. With 20,000 men under arms before the Civil War that’s 0.06% of the population. The army we had on the declaration of WW1 was a little bit larger at 0.16%.
Contrast that to Prussia above which had 187,000 men under arms in 1776 and had a population of 9.7m in 1800, which yields over 2.0% at peace, and that’s fudging the numbers in your direction because I can’t find population totals for 1776, which would be quite a bit lower.
France has a population of about 30m during the napoleonic wars, and they pushed a peak of 1.2m Frenchmen into the field at once, which was 4% of their population.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. When other countries are tossing up armies an order of magnitude bigger and comprising more than double the proportion of their population, you don’t have a “large” army, you have a moderately sized army. Ditto when there are peace time armies larger than your war time armies.
I tried to illustrate my point to the best of my ability, but this disappointing reply just highlights how absurd your narrative is.
There were large armies in Europe, but there was also a balance of power, and armies kept each other in check. Prussia could have an army of 187,000, but they could not commit a significant portion of their army to an American campaign without being invaded by their neighbors.
That's how a force that would be considered small by European standards of the time, could project significant military power circa 1776.
I never said that the Americans didn’t have the correctly sized force for their situation, I in fact pointed out that our numerically small armies were partially explained by weak neighbors. I was disputing the idea that we had a “large” army, which we for certain did not. You are correct in pointing out that “large” is not the same as “effective”, but that wasn’t the point I was making.
You are correct that European powers would have a very hard time projecting power over the Atlantic. If you had said that America was highly capable of defense because of its army and the high logistical cost of mounting an invasion across the Atlantic in pre-modern times, I would agree with you whole heartedly. France’s disastrous invasion of Haiti would also be a nice example to back this theory up too. But you said “large” and large in this context is an absolute without other qualifications (unlike say “effective”), which can be examined numerically.
What is large, exactly? If a large person was 1% smaller, would that person be still large? How doing this repeatedly and asking the same question each time?
In the context of North America in 1776, the American army was large. QED, have a good life.
Education: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_researc...
Etc. Pick your stats and you can tell any story.
But still. The details in education put the US at #4 even for lower school (where the US understands the same obligations) including all source of money? The US doesn't want education very much. (I could say there is an education cult in the US, but not that the US is an education cult.)
I think that is one fact Trump turned around to use as his talking point. That seems to be one reason Trump seems to be annoyed with NATO about. He claims US has to spend that much more because NATO and other allies are not spending enough. Or so he says.
Honestly though, what doesn't compute is following events/articles:
1. this article about antiwar movement
2. the airstrikes in Yemen by Saudi
3. SV happily taking investment of a few dozen billions of dollars from Saudi as posted on HN just a little while ago. https://qz.com/1426370/silicon-valley-is-awash-with-saudi-ar...
The real issue was the conditions that created ISIS in the first place, in which US foreign policy played a huge role.
I assume those are the official numbers. But remember the U.S. doesn't count any male it kills with drone strikes that is over 16 years old as a civilian. The real number is probably at least an order of magnitude larger, if no two orders of magnitude larger.
Since the 90s, the Executive branch and US Congress has used the Military to do a lot of non-military stuff, that arguably the State Department or other non-military organizations should be doing.
There are a lot of reasons for this:
1. At 600,000+ FTE's, the DoD has the largest number of personnel in the Federal Government
2. Military members are trained not just for their specialty, but to do a wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical tasks that can be used in non-military capacities.
3. It's often easier to tack on money for non-military specific functions to augment military organizations, than it is to create new organizations.
As a result of this, the DoD is constantly asked to do things that are not directly related to combat in support of international relations, international logistics, basic services and basic research worldwide.
This sound like the most efficient thing that the government has done. Its probably also a good way to instill compassion in our ranks by having them perform civilian tasks. Instead of everyone just being something they shoot or dont shoot in these countries.
The issue is that the military takes on so many roles that it becomes our first choice in dealing with problems, whether they require the military or not. So we go at problems with the military mindset, then we're surprised when we find a military solution.
Let's go in for peace, diplomacy and honest-to-god negotiation instead of imposing our will on countries with air superiority and more guns than people. Maybe we'd foster a little less resentment in countries we're in if we stopping occupying their airspace and bombing them 10,000 feet and 400mi away.
These skills aren't distinct from the skills a military needs to function. Logistics is a huge component of warfare, for example - and would you prefer that combat medics be civilians? Elsewhere in the thread people are commenting about dual-use technology - these are all dual-use skills.
As clarification, in my opinion The military should not take on these jobs.
Instead of a Space Force, I'm in favor of a new branch of DoD dedicated to non-combatant operations. Nation-building, partner-support.
Making one big pile of money that does all the things DoD does makes it impossible to make decisions about what's being spent well or not.
They used to call it the War Department. At least with that name, the public discussion about it could be honest.
No matter, the budget is vast to train up people in house, plenty of young people will relish the tech for the tech's sake.
Why do people think DARPA funds those challenges?
It's a hard decision to make, and an easy thing to say is just if you do anything for the DoD, you're making it easier for them to kill people and hence it's wrong. Blanket statements like these however put people like janitors and paper pushers in the same bucket as those who manufacture arms that are shipped to Saudi Arabia.
What's that saying about wars being won more through logistics than through arms?
If you are working for a startup that merely delivers pizza to the troops, sure, you can't seriously be put in the same category as a torturer in Abu Ghraib. But you're still (indirectly) helping the military kill people.
Whether that sort of indirect support weighs heavily on your conscience is something everyone has to decide for themselves. Personally, I don't want anything to do with the military or military contractors, even if in an ostensibly peaceful capacity.
And even then, by living in the US, you benefit somewhat from the military defending our borders and being a ward against threats of invasion. I am against most military spending because that ends up inflating contractor salaries, as is our constantly meddling in other countries including other democracies, but so many turn this into a blanket opposition to the idea of the military full stop, which doesn't make sense in our world today, especially when everyone in this country essentially thrives due to it.
Is it a general trend such as it happening in Engineering, and/or sciences or is it localised to just tech?
Perhaps the younger generation is more anti war?
Thoughts?
Antiwar sentiment goes up under Republican presidents
Probably they should just spin those divisions off into a different sister company under the Alphabet umbrella.
I think it’s quite reasonable to resist weaponizing machine learning. To say “I’m not comfortable making it cheaper and easier to kill large numbers of people at a distance”
If you were to do as you suggest and found or spin off a company to work on weapon systems, at least the people who joined would know what they were signing up for. I do hope you’d find it difficult to recruit, and I fear you’d not find it impossible.
I would like to think that thoughtful people would be able to see that building terrible weapons moves us closer to a world we shouldn’t be rushing to create.
If the last war we had participated in was WWII and the cold war then who would object to advancing our weaponry in case we had to fight a terrible war again? Conversely, if we are routinely killing civilians in pointless decades long engagements in the Middle East, supporting both sides of civil wars in foreign lands, selling weapon systems to brutal monarchies, etc it's easier to see why people have doubts about participating.
The Vietnam War was immoral in many ways, but it was not a genocide. Throwing that term around willy-nilly cheapens it. Please don't.
Edit: Oh, I forgot this is HN...
A massacre is not genocide, neither is irresponsible environmental damage. It needs to have a specific intent and exist in a context that (is intended to) produce such massacres on a large scale.
e.g. German "reprisals" in France after partisan attacks were war crimes, but not genocide.
This is not a new concept, but it’s nice to see people realizing that they have a responsibility their inventions. People in tech make things more efficient, easier, cheaper. When tech skills are applied to weapons systems, those systems start to get terrifying —the machine does more of the work and it’s better, faster and cheaper. If you make a weapon that makes it easier and cheaper to kill it will be used to do just that. Once the invention leaves the creators hands the inventor gives up the power of choice and can not control if it is used for good or for evil (putting aside for the moment, the question of if it’s possible to kill for good). Is that who you are? Are you a maker of terrible weapons?
I can only answer for myself. I have the aptitude, but that’s not who I want to be. I’m not a pacifist, I have anger and fear and the urge to escalate in response to perceived injustice just like anyone else. But I make the conscious effort not to do violence, and not to create weapons. By doing that I decide that’s not who I am.
I don’t presume to answer for you, but I encourage everyone at least think it through and decide for themselves.
We must protect our country. Let’s not be naive to the fact that we have enemies who want to destroy us, or overtake us in power and influence if we’re weak.
Personally I want the smartest people in the industry working on protecting our country and developing this tech.
Which do you trust more, a self-flying UAV with deadly cargo developed by Google or some random government contractor?
> Which do you trust more, a self-flying UAV with deadly cargo developed by Google or some random government contractor?
Neither. Why would you want google to develop uavs?
Don't create a weapon, if you don't want your enemies to have it too.
I'm thankful US Manhattan Project went on to successful completion, and not cancelled with above reasoning.
The series "The Man in the High Castle" shows what could've happened IF Hitler first got his nukes before US did. Most would agree that Hitler would've used it on London/NYC/DC with no qualms...
Why do you think no other country could match USA R&D now or in foreseeable future?
And if that had happened, US (and rest of world) would've been really screwed. Manhattan Project used 1/7 of all electricity generated in US at the time. No way such gigantic project could've been conceived and completed in peace time in US. And definitely not fast enough if USSR had developed it first.
I think (not sure) Andrei Sakharov referred to Klaus Fuchs materials as a 'distraction'. Meaning it actually impeded their progress due to interference by Soviet political leaders. That's in line with a comment about the true nature of nuclear weapons 'secrets'. The secret isn't the design. The secrets are in the skills and technologies needed to manufacture a weapon. Which makes me think Klaus Fuchs and others were basically idiots.
This is in no way intended as snark. It's a serious question. Where do we, as a society, put the dividing line between adequate, not enough, and too much military spending?
I certainly agree that many of America's recent military actions have likely not been a net contributor to world stability. But I also think that the commonly presented idea that if we just stopped, somehow there wouldn't be anyone left that wants to cause damage to the states is naive. The United States is one of the most developed countries in the world, and to be near the top is to have a target on your back, one way or another.
Is it not better to be clearly stronger, so as to be able to negotiate from a position of strength?
And again, to be clear, these are good-faith questions. What is it that we lose, as a society, by spending as we do on our military? What is it that we gain? There are solid points in both columns.
How does China's spend of ~228 billion compare in purchasing power to the US's 610? How does Russia's? What can we do to de-escalate the otherwise runaway cost of defense, while still maintaining a position of strength? I think Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex speech* from 1961 was exceptionally prescient, and we've done a poor job heeding the warnings. I also think that the general disdain I see on HN for most anything defense-related is an outlook only possible when one hasn't experienced living in actual conflict zones. We need to be able to talk about defense needs with clear, rational heads.
If another country were to surpass the US military capabilities, more budget, more high-tech, more soldiers (let's say all of those), do you think that alone would mean a territorial threat to the US?
I mean, given that ever single country that isn't the US has lived with this exact situation for many decades, even if we assume it happens, why is that a problem? Even from a US point of view. When I say "US" I think we may also have to look at who exactly benefits, is it the majority of citizens?
I think there are a lot of potential very interesting questions that could be asked and answered. Just saying "this is bad" is not enough, not by itself, but mostly because I think you can start some really good discussions if you look at details. This includes questions about how and why one comes to the opinion that one chooses to express, not just that opinion itself. Seeing the path, the justification, is I think very valuable. Even more so when such fears lead to such extraordinary results as never before seen weapons and same for military spending.
Ukraine would have preferred holding on to Crimea, for one example.
(Plus the influence of Russian money in US politics; it's much cheaper to bribe the US not to fight back!)
Without a deterrent, nothing. If we stigmatize building deterrents/weapons the other countries will step in and project their own values on the world because they’ll have to strength and technology to do so.
Furthermore, it's not really in the best interests of the general public to have already too-powerful tech companies running the largest and most omnipresent domestic surveillance systems becoming increasingly dependent on defense budgets. Those contracts give the government more leverage over the companies they fund and create more conflicts of interests.
and secondly the threat of large-scale conflict with an adversary with a comparable military.
I just don’t see how increasing the efficiency of an already effective drone program protects against either of those threats. And as to the question of wanting people at google to work on it... I don’t think this sort of thing is what people join google to do. People interested in weapon systems probably go and work for known defense contractors and those companies do reasonably good work within the confines of their structure.
And today, of course, WWIII is playing out on the Internet and the screens of our phones.
In the general case, from first principles, we have the automation of human intentions. If those intentions are harmonious and ecological, all is presumably well. If those intentions conflict, however, we have automated war: drones and IEDs, and eventually Skynet and Terminators, and then just vast robot wars.
I don't think there's a a stable equilibrium between these two strange attractors.
(FWIW we have technology for harmonizing human intentions. We just have to use it.)