Microsoft Wins $480M Army HoloLens Contract
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Someone is lacking in perspective. The modern US military cannot operate without Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, Internet Explorer, Office, and most importantly, PowerPoint. It's both frustrating and sad.
Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?
Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems.
Many if not all of those could have been discovered in any other circumstances, or equivalents would have been found. I mean that anything we find useful now could have been discovered for their sheer usefulness. War accelerated the process, and prioritised some kind of discoveries, but it's not a source of discovery in itself.
I agree that political tension and the threat of conflict (in particular the whole Cold War dynamic) helped push a lot of innovations, but it's only tension, not bombing or killing of whole populations (it also happened, but I can't see any huge progress coming directly from that)
Personally I feel there's a difference between using hard/software for planning and logistics, and directly in combat - I know it might not be logical, but ethics rarely is.
The Hololens and machine learning tools are also general purpose and not comparable killer robots.
Of course, they never really used Windows for this purpose at any point; Linux is gradually taking over for Solaris on operator consoles and AIX on the heavy processing machines.
To be less blase, that list is far more pencil manufacturer than it is bomb sight manufacturer, whereas holo-lens sales to the military definitely seem bit more like a bomb sight than they do a pencil.
Though it will admittedly make plenty of jobs for the people that do.
Anyway, I doubt anyone blames general purpose programs being used by the military. HoloLens is a bit more specialized so I can see the argument.
China's great firewall uses Linux, but it's not like there is an easy or reasonable way to stop them from doing that.
Some of these people complaining about it are likely the same sort that, when given a chance to ask Satya a question during a Q&A session, ask about getting free food in Redmond.
Either they have access to a completely improved device or expect a lot of devices being chucked out by aggravated servicemen. The current gen HoloLens is not much more than a toy.
Maybe a little ambitious, but if it does half of those things it might be quite useful, no?
I mean if you can't build an efficient phone, I'm cynical you can do build an efficient anything else.
HoloLens has sure better improve by orders of magnitude before I'd ever want to see it used in any sort of field.
It's like looking into a postage stamp of reality.
let them get their testosterone kicks while the rest of us evolve peacefully.
Take self-driving vehicles. Every single piece of technology used in its development could be used with some minor tweaking in a military application to massively increase the lethality of existing weapons and allow for an unprecedented level of increased killing and destruction. But instead of selling themselves out to a future that will be remarkably more dystopian if given in to military application, Google has chosen to make commercial self-driving vehicles which not only will likely save an innumerable amount of lives by preventing fatal driving accidents, but also will be making boatloads of money at the same time!
Technology is a force multiplier for better or worse, and it’s up to us as the future engineers and scientists who will be creating this technology to choose the right path. For those sociopathic leaning people who could care less about avoiding a future of death on an unprecedented massive and automated scale, luckily that path will be no less lucrative.
Sometimes idealists become like pacifists who would rather die than confront someone who is going to annihilate you. That your PoV, but it certainly isn't the majority PoV even amongst Democrats.
The world isn't a dreamy place; you have to make dirty choices, given what's available.
Of course, if you want to see western influence wane, then sure, and allow other less progressive influence wax. That's the realpolitik.
These decisions should be left to the democratic process rather then the province of unelected idealists.
Take a look at police forces who claim to "serve and protect" while summarily executing random citizens (sorry, wrong house SWATTING) or racially motivated (black kid with toy = imminent threat).
"This is especially true in cases where, much to the chagrin of civil liberty advocates, police departments have employed their newly acquired military weaponry not only to combat terrorism but also for everyday patrolling. Before 9/11, the usual heavy weaponry available to a small-town police officer consisted of a standard pump-action shot gun, perhaps a high power rifle, and possibly a surplus M-16, which would usually have been kept in the trunk of the supervising officer's vehicle. Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle — the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America's big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, "special" has quietly become "routine.""
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the...
But where the contradiction lies comes from the fact that the fundamental objective of any military is ultimately in increasing its ability to wage war and defeat other existing militaries. Such an objective is necessarily orthogonal to “saving civilian lives” unless you define only a subset of humanity to be the civilian lives you wish to save treating those outside as expendable. Disregarding how illogical and frankly inhumane in my opinion it is in arbitrarily choosing to delineate people like this, even in purely pragmatic and economic terms, it makes no sense. War is a zero sum game no matter how much you can optimize it such that the least amount of lives are taken in doing so.
The result of a use in military force is always ultimately the destruction of something which if not treated through other diplomatic means will escalate to larger and larger conflicts until at some point, nothing is left. Be very wary of those who tell you that the work you are doing is only to decrease casualty rates and save lives because that same reduction can and will be used to justify an increased usage of military force because of that very newly lowered rate.
Instead of working to increase the effectiveness and lethality of militaries, why not choose to spend your energy on trying to find ways to make it easier and more effective to resolving conflict by other diplomatic means? If such a belief is idealistic in today’s world, perhaps it is. But I believe there exists a future where such a world is possible if we only choose to not immediately give in to the cynicism of that other belief.
Civilian casualties in current conflicts are at an all time low because of advancements in military technology and capabilities.
We used to wipe whole cities, we don’t do that today.
The effectiveness and lethality of a military dies directly to its ability to maintain peace, we have had the ability to blow each other up 10000 times over yet are living in the most peaceful time in history.
Yes there is a bunch of crap going on that ideally should not be, but that is a matter of policy not capabilities.
The British didn't bomb Germany in any significant way until after the Battle of Britain. This wasn't some moral decision or anything - they didn't have a bomber with the range to attack Germany until the Lancaster[1] which flew in 1941. The Germans occupied France and the Netherlands which let them attack Britain much easier.
The Battle of Britain (when the Germans were bombing Britain) finished in 1940[2].
It's true that the German campaign against factories (and airfields) was effective and their switch to bombing cities allowed the RAAF to survive as a fighting force.
Have you seen Aleppo?
People always seem so resigned and certain in their beliefs that warfare and killing are inevitable and impossible to avoid. It always strikes me as almost irrational in a way, or perhaps it’s a sort of sunk cost fallacy wherein once you’ve committed to military conflict, it’s extremely difficult to go back on it as that would require admitting the already existing destruction and death that has accumulated was all for nothing. And so to protect themselves from such a truth, they continue the cycle of death and destruction knowingly or unknowingly acting to condemn their children to the same fate.
Thus the resignation of fate, giving up, and falling into an endless cycle of destruction with which the second paragraph consists of. What parts do you find vague?
Precision is a numbers game. It doesn't feature human selective bias.
You do realize DARPA funded the competitions that kicked off self-driving cars right? Silicon valley wouldn't exist without the military
On the other hand, Google has been on the record saying they won't develop military AI, that an autonomous weapons race is dangerous and unwanted, and that they want to organize the world's information to keep it accessible to anyone.
Microsoft employees knew what they signed up for and have moral authority to make that decision. Google employees thought they signed up to "do no evil" and their efforts were used by a secret project that violates all but one of their safe AI guidelines (the one about delivering technical excellence).
I myself am a bit more agnostic/apathetic about creating technology that could be used for bad: I just want to create and focus on the best possible (gun turret, data mining, missile tech), that will deliver on its promise of what it said out to do with utmost accuracy and robustness. That's why I find it really important to work for companies and governments that I can trust to not abuse my technology once it is out of my hands, and are transparent about its usage. But I don't find any damage to my soul if the decision makers make an evil usage decision: That is fully on them. I am not going to handicap or refuse to work on something interesting, because their morals are out of whack.
If people have qualms with how the weapons are used they should take effort in the political process.
War and politics are very much the same thing, if we would have have managed to "fix" politics by now I'm pretty sure war would have also been "fixed" instantly. But "fixing" politics is an elusive (and I personally think impossible) job, we've been having a go at it for at least 2,400 years (think Plato) but apparently it still seems that people in power like to promise the impossible to the multitudes who believe them just because (think the propaganda lies told to the Athenians just before the ill-fated expidition to Sicily [1]).
The cornerstone of the sovereignty of a polity is the credible capability to project force within their territory. To put in another words, the zeroth rule of existence of the state, is that the state is the entity with the potential for instrumenting most violence within the territory over which they claim dominion.
As an example failed states can have various factions claiming sovereignty over mini-fiefdoms of their own, mainly due to their superior force projection capability. See the fragmentation in Libya, or the warlords of Somalia, etc.
That's what I meant about fixing the political process. Over a specific territory there is always an entity with the most force projection capability, and that entity likely has the most political power over that specific area.
You can't have a state without capability for violence. That's why military service is an honorable profession, (and not a crime against humanity) and absolute pacifists are completely delusional about the current state of human existence.
I would like to have a world without war as well, but that's not the world we live in right now.
Like in large software projects, you can't rewrite the world. You just have to try to maintain it and make it a little better, while learning to live with the quirks and the bugs of history. Currently war is hard coded to the political structure of the world.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/26/microsoft-to-u-s-military...
Given how powerful the military-industrial complex is I'm not sure if those should be reversed to "mainly for economic reasons... also for security". US military from one point of view is a huge state subsidy not only to capital owners, but to the people employed there as well.