Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract
reuters.com
reuters.com
But your comment is, at best, a fraction of the full picture.
1 No country has ever been as ready to "spread democracy via force" as the US
2 No country has borrowed as much money to run its spendthrift military budget to carry out #1. You combine #1 and #2, and the money lenders are wondering, "Wait, WTF are you doing with all my money?"
3 No country has a tech sector with tentacles that spread as far. That's all fine (for the other countries) if you happen to be, say, neutral and generally non-aggressive Switzerland, but not so if you are a bonafide empire and keep trying to continue being an empire.
4 No country has so many immigrants working in their tech sector. Some of these immigrants are probably wondering "Wait, so I am developing weapons so people I don't know are going to bomb and kill people I actually know?"
5 Last, and certainly not least, "The first casualty of war is truth". A nerd is a nerd because he/she probably knows this very deep in their psyche somewhere. So this nerd ends up in a massive state of cognitive dissonance when asked to develop weapons of war. Its like telling them "Yeah, we won't actually tell you what we might use it for. And you have to just believe any spin we put on the whole issue. Not to mention, we might end up attacking your kith and kin. But its all OK, because WE are the country of DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM".
>> its companies can be counted on to be supportive and/or loyal in the event of conflict.
That's probably a smaller question, as seen by a neutral. A bigger question at this point is, can the USA, which managed to elect Donald Trump, by counted on to be a stable and reliable superpower or should all the other countries already start taking an "every country for itself approach", which is what I think is happening?
Usually the kind of tech+military work that actually gets people bombed and killed is reserved for US citizens with security clearance.
Unless you're implying that, like, deploying Office is equivalent to developing killer drone tech.
"Yes, that's a thing we're totally doing. Cars."
This has been a huge part of academic investment by government too. Yes we'll sponsor your PHD in this area because (often without the academics direct knowledge) we have a need in a certain area and we think this might help.
That might be signal reflection calculation (like more precise GPS in a place with tall buildings).
It might be a new kind of harder material (carbon nanotubes/ graphene).
Or perhaps it's a better understanding of a drug / mental health / the mind that has a side-effect of having nefarious applications as well as helpful ones being considered.
Even if the result is that it doesn't work, the armed forces and clandestine services are very interested in the outcomes of research that might fix a piece of their puzzle.
I would agree that the USA has it's faults, but unfortunately so do the other superpowers, and just about every other country out there (except those nordics maybe?)
Not that saying "everyone has problems" is meant to dismiss your arguments, rather you should consider if at least some of your list are actually problems of the USA or symptoms of global inequality, or even perhaps beneficial aspects of the USA.
Specific rebuttals:
#1: yes, but that ended in the 80's. Iraq or after isn't about democracy. The causes of USA's direct military intervention is complicated. Simplifying to "spread of democracy" is just about the definition of biased, though I agree the interventions are mostly not justified.
#2: yes but the USA is the police for it's allies neighborhoods, for various, complicated, reasons. Projection of power isn't cheap, and it's not just to burn money.
#3: USA's culture and economic impact are global, and it's spread is organic. I would personally call this net benefit, so curious why you feel it's nefarious.
#4: Why focus on immigrants/usa? This is story of anybody working for any big company anywhere?
#5: it seems like you have a lot of strong feelings going on here....
It can be healed from but it takes time. Previously soldiers had a worse reputation with Mai Lai and Kent State. Now if someone is heckled as a baby killer the assumption is they are an abortion doctor and not a soldier.
I hope they drop either the contract, or the workers and their ilk.
Lot of people have blood on their hands under your model.
That's going to end liberalism way faster. The military / real politik foreign affairs are dirty parts of life that we'd prefer not to have, but we live in a world where we must have them.
Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.
I would rather have America be dominant than any other nation. With all our faults, we excercise incredible restraint with our immense powers. This of course could change if we end up electing more leaders like Trump. We need to stay strong militarily but also need good and intelligent leaders which unfortunately we don’t currently have.
However, entrenched interests and Trump haters (both Dem and GOP) can't let that happen.
Simple words by a country's leader could ruin relationships between nations for decades or between different parts of society.
You don't just start hating {insert favorite target jews|blacks|muslims|christians|whites} overnight, it takes time. You plant the seeds of hate and let them flourish into ethnic cleansing|holocaust|interment camps|etc.
It's our duty to nip that shit in bud right now :). We have come so far to let that sort of shit take us back.
I apologize for taking this discussion in a political direction. In any case, I think it's important for us to have a strong military and Microsoft helping our military build better weapons/systems/tools is a good thing. A strong America is a good thing - as long as we have no Trumps :)
And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor, but is becoming one, you can yell and shout if you think it might deter the company and let you stay where you like staying.
Do you have any idea how many decades Microsoft has been getting millions in income from the Pentagon? The whole DoD runs on Microsoft products. Windows. Office. Outlook. Sharepoint. Access. All of that stuff has expensive licenses and enterprise support contracts.
Any employee who joined Microsoft after, say, 1995 and thinks they weren't joining a "defense contractor" is just willfully ignorant.
But, winning over China as only Trump would say, is more about economics than anything else, isn't it?
Ie. a big thriving economy and by implication a high quality of life gives power and influence -- how does military R&D factor into that?
Also, LOL if they think Microsoft is going to drop $450M in revenue -- even if was hand-delivered by Satan himself.
U.S. prosperity is built on the U.S. military. From our acension to the world stage after WWII, to the spawning of the Internet through military R&D. The pointy end of America is an essential part of what makes your life so fat and comfortable. It’s what allows you to consume a vastly disproportionate share of global resources. To live a life where you can worry about finding dates in Tindr and finding the best avacodo toast place, instead of surviving in a hostile world.
Nuclear weapons have no proportionality, so it's bad to rely on them for defense. If you do rely on them, you're either going to start WWIII over a border skirmish, or your enemy is going to chip away at you because you won't.
>Several Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel …
Three employees. Since when do three employees make these kinds of demands and have management take heed? This isn't some Morton Thiokol and an O-ring issue where you need management to listen to a real issue.
If I were Russia or China, this is exactly the kind of agitprop I'd like to create for a foe.
The US may fall behind simply because we believe in ideas like privacy.
Kai-Fu Lee's book goes into this in detail.
Although if we're being realistic, less scrupulous companies such as Amazon will step in and take the contracts.
The economy is basically a distributed optimization heuristic.
If you're talking about "falling behind" in the global sense (using "AI" to centrally plan), then you're hypothesizing that we can essentially port the distributed algorithm into the silicon realm and further optimize it (eg prune destructive adversarial behavior). We certainly have more computing power now than say that past attempt based on fluid flows, but that's still a huge if.
If you're talking in the local sense (that "AI" will help companies themselves optimize better), than whatever extra percentage gained from that will not be enough to outrun the State deploying the same technology (as in the above goal), and destroying the individual businesses.
One thing I do know is that even if this turns out to be the winning strategy, sacrificing our values in an attempt to compete at it will still only net us second place!
--
Having written that, I think this implicit assumption that it will be economically beneficial for AI to be directed at individuals and individual behavior needs to be directly examined. How much individual productivity is actually being left on the table? The US system is quite good at motivating people, so much so that it's common for lower classes to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". There are a few deviants, but for the most part lack of individual productivity is a failing of the larger structure. Heck, most of the US's criminals are in jail for engaging in economic activity!
Rather, the narrative seems like the age-old keep-the-plebs-in-line play, not a legitimate approach to economic success. If AI has something to offer for planning the economy, then wouldn't that be properly applied to the government-company interface? That's where the structural gains are actually available to be had!
China isn't centrally planned anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.
But there are two motte-and-bailey terms in the above comment - "ahead" and "AI".
If we're only talking about the narrow scope of China being ahead in AI, with "AI" meaning predicting outliers from large populations, then that is not so worrisome! Google (et al) can simply buy the better population surveillance technology from China and apply it to their own business, as the US will still be generally ahead.
But rather such talk seems to be aimed at invoking a worry that a lack of individual rights means China will succeed at a more generally useful "AI" (whatever that means), and that it will then be applied to their economy to get them "ahead" in general. This is the underlying idea I am addressing.
So honestly I find these sorts of responses misleading, irresponsible and agenda driven. The US does not need to be afraid of China or Russia, it dwarfs their military capacity ten times over.
And that American workers in the tech industry are conscious of the risks of having the military seep too closely into consumer facing businesses is a very good thing in a liberal society. US tech workers always had a libertarian streak, be that right or left, and the US wasn't defenseless as a result. We'd be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development.
How is it wise? Most weapons are developed and manufactured in a kind of public-private partnership.
During the Second World War, for example, the vast majority of industrial capacity turned towards building war equipment was private, dwarfing the capacity of government arsenals by a fair margin. Much of the design and development occurred in the context of public-private partnership, with national proving grounds and military agencies collaborating with aircraft manufacturers and other manufacturers of heavy equipment to design and develop weapons systems.
Boeing, Lockheed, Texas Instruments, Browning — and to go further afield, Supermarine, Marconi, Glock — these are all private names, not the names of government agencies. There are few cases of states where all, or even most, development of weapons systems is in state hands: totalitarian states.
When Amazon develops facial recognition technology that can just as easily be thrown at migrants at the border the line isn't as easy as talking about building aircraft to fight fascism in Europe.
In liberal democracies there's a line between civilian technology and military technology, and you generally know what you sign up for. This is also precisely what the engineers here talk about, they did not join Microsoft to build weapons.
This isn't true. Consider Boeing, Colt, Texas Instruments, CamelBak, AM General. Even companies, like Colt, that are dedicated to making arms also sell products into the civilian market. That is in part because in a liberal democracy the government can not restrict a company to doing business solely with them: companies are allowed to recycle their know-how in the civilian market.
Working with private enterprise and repurposing civilian capabilities is how liberal democracies do defence. Should it be otherwise? It would seem to imply even greater scope for secrecy and mismanagement, and even less civilian control and input, if defence agencies didn't work with private enterprises for most of their needs.
I'm not sure you realize how much of our modern technology is thanks to defense technology grants and DARPA. Military, academia and private business have always been tightly coupled in the US and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. Microsoft has always had plenty of defense contracts, hell , they have the largest or second largest R&D division in the world. These moral qualms are entirely new.
Also, it has to be said: it's a verdict on US leadership. The man in the oval office isn't someone I'd feel comfortable arming, nor was Bush. Even Obama had the thing with the drone strikes. When US Presidents demonstrate carelessness and unpredictability in their use of force, it turns reasonable, peace-loving people off.
What if they aren't? You can have all the peacekeepers and diplomats in the world, but if the other side isn't willing to play by that game, then they wont.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is about operating with zero knowledge from and coordination with the other parties. Diplomacy lets us avoid that in the real world.
It isn't so much about our freedoms or our GDP, although they play a role.
Unlike China and Russia, we have WAY more guns and we're WAY less corrupt. That's a pinnacle of financial security; you can be confident that the United States will honor its treasury securities. China and Russia? Probably, except who knows what internal or external conflicts shake their fragile economies, and maybe they just won't pay out on time or at all.
People hate the fact that we spend so much on our military, but the inconvenient truth is that we have the comfortable lives we have now in large part because we have so many god damned weapons, and very advanced ones at that. That goes for those who live in foreign ally nations; deep down, their leaders know we will intervene on their behalf if shit hits the fan. America has had its share of fuckups, but they're still not eclipsed by the fuckups of Russia or China.
What specific things in terms of Defense is America responsible for on the European continent?
- If any NATO country is invaded by anyone, all NATO countries will go to war to defend it. This doesn't apply if the NATO country is the aggressor.
- It outlines some minimum funding commitments, but those are more aimed towards the non-US countries involved.
Why should we draft a bunch of folks from South Dakota and Kansas (and let’s be honest here ... folks from New York or SF who write opinion pieces about this aren’t going to be the ones paying blood) to fight Russia? Why can’t these countries defend themselves?
NATO is a low cost way for us to maintain our geopolitical position as a leader and to maintain a reliable group of military allies in case we need them (yeah, we spend a ton on military, but that is not due to us defending NATO countries from Russia).
Your point about spending is ignorant and silly. We don’t buy billion dollar submarines to fight Islamists in land locked countries.
You don't buy billion dollar submarines because of NATO either. When the DoD talks about preparing for near-peer adversaries, Russia is not the primary concern. Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?
Are you kidding? Then what's Grafenwöhr for? Entire procurement strategies have been - and are - focused on countering Russian military hardware (the IAV is just one example - there are plenty of others).
>Do you really think we would stop spending massive amounts of money on military technology development if NATO didn't exist?
You should really reconsider that statement, and which clause follows from the other. This has nothing to do with my first point, which no one seems interested in answering. My original question was attempting to tease out why people think NATO is useful in a post-post Cold War world. I don't think it is, and struggle to understand this obsession with Russia that continues to warp people's perception of the global security situation. Instead people pivot to "well it was actually about reducing the amount of nuclear weapons" or "we would spend that money anyway", neither of which address the fundamental question of whether or not NATO in its present form is useful or whether the US should have to continue shouldering the vast majority of the security responsibility in the Western World.
Just because an internet search puts America as less corrupt than the likes of China and Russia. Doesn’t mean it’s actually less corrupt.
The perseption of America is that it’s less corrupt but in reality we have absolute no idea what’s going on behind closed doors and what deals are being done.
"We" = the 1% which reads Hacker News? Speak only for yourself
You uses fallacies to spread misinformation about war. No source, no number, no reference. Convenient.
No, actually "we" as in most Americans and many other countries in multiple senses of "comfortable". Yes, there is poverty and many social problems present in America. At the same time, many aspects of the average American life, as well as life in Europe and other parts of the world, have consistently improved, and millions of people still choose to live in America instead of even other places of comparable rights and opportunities. Contrasted with many parts of the world, we're pretty damned comfortable.
But you know what? That doesn't even matter. If I were to alter my premise to only encompass the "1% which reads Hacker News", it wouldn't affect my comment at all. Why do you think Silicon Valley continues to exist in America and not the UK?
Fallacies are specific, and you haven't mentioned what "fallacies" I've made. What I wrote was a comment on an industry forum, not an academic paper. You want citations? Work it out yourself. You're on the internet. Nothing that I wrote hasn't been said before by others with greater authority than mine.
You haven't made a single argument, yet you accuse me of using fallacies and misinformation. By not justifying your claims, you're being very unfair.
Russia never threatens to attack first.
Apparently, the desirable situation for the US is that it can fuck any country and no country cannot harm it back? And if it isn't so, the country is threatening the US, right?
Our duty is to find better ways, not bullshit excuses to indulge in the old, horrific ways.
* MS has had various contracts with the military for decades. The baseline of nearly all end user software in the military is composed of MS products like many other businesses.
* Augmented reality headsets are not weapons anymore than rucksacks or combat boots.
* The military has some cool training aids, such as converted SNES systems that help teach marksmanship on simulated in door ranges. That is by no means unethical.
This really just sounds like activists searching for something to fight about.
I used to work for a company that specialized in lightweight life support devices. Their major customers were mostly military. But their uses were mostly non-combat: natural disaster response, goodwill, etc.
Of course not everyone in the military is an expert in medical care, so having something like a hololens and the ability for doctors and trained technicians to guide the situation remotely would literally be a life saving option.
Governments would still throw napalm and bodies at problems. Many more people would be dead and conflicts would have escalated even further. Overall, refinements in sensors, targeting, and munitions have saved lives.
I was on the fence at the time: "if we don't do it someone will ... it's a defense project for national security so it's fine, right? ... etc etc". But ultimately after what has been happening in Yemen I'm SO glad I don't even have to wonder whether it has my name on it.
I recommend the movie Good Kill as a solid fictional example. The topic in the movie is morally ambiguous and that doesn't change through the movie. It starts out completely ethical, but the ethics go away once the governing processes are removed and consequences follow.
If we want our military's actions to be humane, we need to keep real people somewhere out on the front lines, and we need them to be well trained to defend themselves in the event of a real threat, rather than reacting inappropriately to a false one.
Which is to say, our military can be unethical, but us having a military is not unethical.
So you're saying the US should have nuked Afghanistan? I think you have an oversimple view of international relations and military affairs.
Or enact similar immigration restrictions, like Trump did about a year ago.
In a post-nuclear world, this is incredibly complex so it usually ends up playing out in different theaters (Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, etc.) rather than the shores of the U.S. as you pointed out, but the total reserve and reach of that force is still just as important.
The argument can get slippery though when trying to justify allocating resources, because with deterrence it's hard to know exactly how much you need, especially when gaining that knowledge usually comes through defeat of some sort.
It's hardly similar circumstances. An attack on the US mainland today would mean global nuclear war. It's highly improbable to ever happen.
Much of Mexico's territory is de facto controlled by enemies of both Mexico and the USA, and Russia has, or at least is eyeing having, an outpost in the Caribbean right now.
The US used its army directly in the New World at least as recently as 1982, in the invasion of Grenada.
Or even more recently in '89 down in Panama.
Or in Haiti in '94 -- though that one wasn't necessarily an invasion but the troops were in the air if diplomacy failed.
I think there's a coordination issue here. Tech can be intolerant of views that don't align with progressive orthodoxy (doubly so in tech hubs), the DOD needs tech workers who are more aligned with their mission than the progressive techie detractors. Why don't some badthinkers band together and get a DOD contract? I imagine it's because the DOD isn't going to give a new shop it's first chance but has anyone looked into this?
If your military policy is to siege populated cities and villages, bomb amd shell them, killing thousands of people caught in the cross-fire in the process, that's what should be the focus, if you're interested in humane military.
That's already much more indiscriminate than some Google killer drone ever will be.
Sorry about your friends. That really turns my stomach. My son was an Army Ranger (FIST/JTAC) he said being in SOCOM gave them more ROE freedom. And, in the rare cases when things started to get sketchy bombs and missiles could be brought on target on the authority of the ground commander (company cmdr or platoon leader) no questions asked.
edit: a/an
These things will still be commanded by humans, and there will still be decisions made at some level wrt how many bystanders it's ok to kill in the operation. Just like with bombs, artilery, etc.
Wherever you draw the distinction, know that it's arbitrary.
A military with guns but no transportation is like a clock with an escapement but no gears. Gears are used by lots of things, not just clocks, and clocks need an escapement, but without gears that clock doesn't function. The gears don't define the clock in quite the same way as an escapement, but they're nevertheless necessary.
My point here is that making cars for the military but refusing to make guns for them is quite silly. If you really want to opt-out of the military industrial complex, you'll need to make more sacrifices.
"Car" in this case is shorthand for
> "generally useful tool that can be used in the commission of violence (eg. cars)"
A humvee is just that. However it's also specifically designed to be one component of various weapon systems; e.g. humvees with TOW anti-tank guided missiles mounted on top. When configured in that way, a humvee is no less a weapon than a tank. So a humvee is also "a gun" (shorthand for "something that kills".) That's not hypothetical either, such humvees were used in the killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein.
So let me reiterate. Just about anything the military uses is used to facilitate killing in one way or the other. The degree to which any particular widget contributes to the lethality of the military is a smooth gradient. This was my point with the humvee, it exists somewhere in the middle. Since we're dealing with a gradient, where you decide to draw your line in the sand arbitrary.
I find this news to be incredibly ironic.
And I disagree with the demands, just in my personal opinion.
We have real, powerful enemies that would love to dethrone US as the dominant nation. Those who demand this restriction for working on military contracts have to seriously consider this.
If private sector workers can regularly get their private sector companies to pull out of US military contracts, we have a problem.
Microsoft seems to be a lot more grounded in the dollars and cents of running a business. I doubt a few squeaky wheels distract them.
Google seems to still attract many idealists who feel they’re creating a better world (ironically, through advertising). They seem to operate with a flatter management structure that gives engineers freeer reign.
Also, the nature of the projects seem to be fundamentally different.
using straw-men like this doesn't typically end well, so why use one?
I believe people who work on these technologies simply don't want to have that "blood" on their hands.
Unfortunately, for every person that don't want to get involved in this, there's probably a few that do. So those $450MM will end in the bank accounts of Raytheon or any of the other usuals suspects.
Of course the psychological impact of such artillery was almost as devastating as the lethal impact. Knowing that at any moment you could be killed without warning by a shell you'd never see coming, by a man over the horizon induced a great deal of PTSD.
Compared to carpet bombing from 50,000 ft smart weapons make war very personal.
If it doesn’t dehumanize war at the very least is commoditizing warfare.
Do you have any idea how ignorant that is? Even if we set aside Babbage's vaporware, the first electromechanical programmable binary computer was German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
* Alan Turing and Thomas Flowers were British, and Colossus (the first electric programmable computer) was built at Bletchley Park in Britain.
* ENIAC was a project at the University of Pennsylvania.
And from there, it's all universities and businesses like DEC. The computer, aside from Britain's contributions during WWII, has largely been an academic pursuit that the US military has had fuck all to do with.
Hell, the Internet was just one of many WAN systems that happened to catch on (networks like ALOHAnet were implemented well before)...and it was mostly due to academic use, culminating in some crazy researcher at CERN in Switzerland developing World Wide Web for it.
You can parse my words however you like, but my general point is that the US military industrial complex was the biggest driver in the creation of silicon valley.
This was completely military driven:
> Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[0]
Regarding the article itself:
Employees posted a thing to twitter. Microsoft is currently not planning to stop working on this contract.
Quote from the article:
Microsoft and the U.S. Army did not immediately respond to requests to comment. Company President Brad Smith said in an October blog post it remained committed to assisting the military.
“We’ll engage not only actively but proactively across the U.S. government to advocate for policies and laws that will ensure that AI and other new technologies are used responsibly and ethically,” Smith wrote.
Then go live in some other country instead of freeloading on the protections afforded by this one.
Hang on, I'm gettin' there.
Other times the "second one" makes it occur to you to extrapolate all the way to the end. Your friend eats one of your doughnuts - "Enjoy." She eats a 2nd one, "Hey don't eat them all!" This is more like that. When one big tech company's employees say no to a military contract, it's like "The military will go somewhere else." But when the second one does it, then it occurs to me to ask, could it ever happen that everybody would refuse? Could the Pentagon ever run out of competent tech people before they ran out of people refusing? I don't think it's likely, but still it's interesting to imagine. Far from leading to world peace I suppose it would just mean that those projects were still done, but incompetently. Dunno how I feel about that. War sucks, but waging it competently is better than e.g. blowing up your buddy by accident.
If you work at Microsoft, you can sign the petition on the intranet site https://aka.ms/hololens4good
you already have a say 100% it’s called freedom to decide where you work
If you ambush people with a reveal that they were actually working on military tech you can't expect them all to be happy about it. That's very different from taking a job offer, showing up to work, getting told 'we're making military tech' and saying 'OK'. HoloLens is an existing product, the result of a very large amount of engineering and research. Many of the people who contributed - perhaps even pivotal, highly-compensated employees - were definitely not aware that it would get sold to the US military, even if it's not a big leap to suggest that they might be a customer.
OCCIDENT, n. The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call “war” and “commerce.” These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient.
BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.
CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted.
PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were settled by physical contact of the disputants, with such simple arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times could supply – the sword, the spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by the most courageous. Its capital defect is that it requires personal attendance at the point of propulsion.
Apparently "several" means three. How and why is this news? Microsoft has thousands of employees.
“Several” has long meant three or more, but the article says that three workers described the effort to Reuters, not that the three constituted the entire effort.
"Described to Reuters by three Microsoft workers" doesn't necessarily mean only three workers are involved in this protest. However I would be interested to see the actual numbers. If the number of employees signing the petition were impressive, I'd expect it to be prominently reported. Since it's not, that leads me to suspect it's not very much more than three.
I did - and more fool me, perhaps. But I clicked. And that's all that counts.
I empathize for the developers involved; I hope those that feel as I do find brighter opportunities.
So while the "lethality" certainly is all about facilitating killing, I would say the other points are at least somewhat about lifesaving for our troops.
If you work on a smartphone app for hailing taxis, that's probably not going to be plausibly military. But what if you work in a steel mill? You help in the production of steel that is necessary to create buildings and bridges, but also military ships and tanks and just about everything else. Is the production of steel a part of the military-industrial complex? Could the military-industrial complex continue operating without steel? Definitely not, the production of steel is essential to the military, yet it seems a bit strange for producers of steel to lose sleep over what their steel is used for.
But actually, let's go back to that taxi app. Most military personnel aren't in warzones, virtually all of them own smartphones, and a great many of them may be using ride hailing apps regularly. If such apps increase their personal efficiency, perhaps letting them get to work faster. If a drone operator in Utah uses your app to get to work hung over after a hard night of drinking, does that mean your taxi app is helping to kill people?
People in those industries don't even have the fig-leaf of "national defense" to help them sleep at night.
For them it is only about money, t-shirts, and free food. Who cares how many lives they ruin along the way.
They are true sociopaths, though inexplicably they would feel horrible if their work helped save a 19 year-old soldier's life or helped enable shooters recognize an incorrect target before harming innocents.
I guess we could always go back to the good old daze when advanced tech or computers were not used in weapons systems. I wasn't around back then, but it sure seems like there sure were more innocent people killed in the bygone days of software-free weapons systems.
High-tech weapon systems save lives. But I am pretty sure you already know that.
Not the OP, but what the high-tech weapon systems do (among other things, like killing innocent people attending weddings in remote parts of Afghanistan or Yemen) is to disengage the killers (i.e. the people making the decision to shoot, sometime from thousands and thousands of miles away) from their acts, as those doing the killing bear almost no risks of getting killed in retaliation and they also don't get to see the distorted limbs of those they get to kill. As such, the decision to make the kill becomes more and more easy and more and more random, because it doesn't have almost any effects on those who are responsible for said killings.
This is a very, very sad state of affairs for us, as a species, I mean, the fact that we've managed to make the act of killing to have almost no moral consequences on those that actually carry said killings.
> Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Heather Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, wrote in the Guardian. "When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience."
> "It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was there,” Bryant told KNPR Radio in Nevada. "I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself."
https://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumat...
The estimated cost of deaths of pushing the Pacific invasion without the bomb was higher than the cost of deaths using the bomb to force a surrender. Keep in mind this was in an era when total war existed, and civilians of warring nations were considered unarmed combatants.
Are the designers of TCP/IP responsible for everyone whose death was assisted by the internet? Are Orville and Wilbur burning in Hell for all the people who were killed by things dropped from planes? And God help whichever unfortunate human invented the wheel. Sorry for my tone, but I find this perspective naive and annoyingly sanctimonious.
I'm making tools. People can use them for whatever. I hope no one murderers anyone (unless they have a really good reason) but I'm only responsible for making sure I don't murder anyone, and so far I'm doing okay.
Implies to me that I should feel bad morally. Just my reading of it, but if lots of people are reading it that way as well, you may want to work on the wording if people are attributing more than you intended.
I'm pretty liberal but I do not think the military is a vestigial organ. Your worldview is not the only worldview. Your morality is not the only morality.
If you meant anything other than that by your post, feel free to explain. But I don't see any other way to interpret what you wrote. I don't think I'm guilty of misinterpretation, and certainly not "bad faith" i.e. willful misinterpretation.
I once had a neighbor who worked at Boeing, programming the guidance systems on smart bombs. The only reason I even remember him to this day is because immediately after introducing what he did for a living, he followed with, "I don't actually pull the trigger. I make the smart bombs smarter so they don't hurt innocent people."
I only remember this exchange because it can be interpreted several different ways.
I totally support individuals rights to work on these kind of tools; and I totally support people demanding their work not be co-opted for lethal purposes
Joseph Stalin famously used the telephone in the middle of the night to make calls leading to the mass murder of thousands during his reign.
Churchill and Roosevelt used the first application of spread spectrum technology to securely communicate. This led to the deaths of millions of Axis personnel.
Are all of these equivalent?
I would be actually horrified to find out after the fact that I did not do all I could do to stop monsters such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. If something I build could stop someone like that, I'm all for it.
Where do you want to draw the line?
Should tech companies provide assistance to the military is an important topic but this headline is Sensationalist clickbait garbage at best.
The alternative to US military dominance, isn't a peaceful utopia, it is either Chinese military dominance or Russian military dominance. You can be sure that Chinese and Russian tech companies are trying their best to increase the effectiveness of their country's military.
Eventually, though, it's necessary to find some solution, outside of the game- or, eventually, the inherent instability of ever-increasing military power will cause some very, very bad outcomes- for all parties involved.
The only way to get out of this equilibrium is to stop developing all technology.
Yes, it is true and well known around the world that Russia, China and the USA are warmongers that use military force to get what they want. It is something we have become used to.
I'm very pleased to hear MS workers aren't happy with this status quo.
But not being in a war at all sucks even less than being on the winning side!
The status quo is sometimes hellish.
Would you have the same feeling if the Nazis had won World War II?
"Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history." - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/books/chapters/what-every...
You can't conceive of any situation whatsoever where you may want someone to trained and equipped to defend against force being used against you or someone else?