I would be heart broken to learn that my work was used to facilitate killing.
I empathize for the developers involved; I hope those that feel as I do find brighter opportunities.
I empathize for the developers involved; I hope those that feel as I do find brighter opportunities.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Where do you want to draw the line?