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Comment by serioussecurity | Hacker News Reader

Also selling it to the military to "increase lethality".

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236116/microsoft-holole...

I really don't get the opposition to this. Either we need the military, or we don't. If we do, then we want to have one that's can beat anything that could be thrown at it with as few casualties as possible. If we don't, then going after VR devices rather than the rifles is all wrong on priorities.

Agreed - to pretend that other countries aren't devoting the top tech talent to advance their capabilities in a similar way is beyond naive.

I _want_ to agree with this "ethical opposition" approach, but I know too much game theory / history to know that I also don't want my power grid knocked out on a moment's notice because, say, Googlers opposed stronger cyber security for our military.

I can think of specific projects that might be unethical in that sense, and cannot be justified even by "well, they're doing that".

But I can't see why this one would be in that category.

Well I assume the military generally doesn’t want decreased lethality when purchasing equipment.

Actually they do. Only because collateral is a PR nightmare.

No they don't. Collateral damage is a function of inefficient lethality (killing people who are not your target is wasteful and inefficient).

Increasing lethality decreases collateral.

No that's not quite right.

Lethality is the effectiveness of desired outcome. Was the target eliminated?

Collateral is the side effects of the desired outcome. Was anyone or anything else eliminated?

They are two different metrics. Consider two contrasting analogies which break your understanding:

Ballistic missile: high lethality, high collateral probability.

Polonium tea: high lethality, low collateral probability.

About 20 years ago, I was working in the defence sector, on guidance systems, as an engineer. Sat through many a powerpoint about how collateral could be marketed away. Turns out they won that battle eventually...

Incidentally I bailed out when I saw what a fucking mess of a world I was creating.

This is bad logic.

By your metrics, the most lethal thing in the world is a rusty spoon stabbed into some ones eye; either it kills the target instantly or kills them later due to infection. Very close to 100% death rate. Very lethal. No collateral damages, either.

And yet no professional militaries are armed with rusty spoons

I don't know what logic you're seeing but that's not an accurate description. A spoon is low lethality, low collateral.

That's because the lethality of a rusty spoon is actually very low... The lethality of having been stabbed in the eye might be high, but not of spoons themselves since it is hard to successfully wound the eye of an enemy soldier with a rusty spoon at a distance when said enemy soldier is armed with ranged weaponry, and it is still difficult to do even in melee range relative to how easy it is to wound with bayonets and combat knives.

They had swords that did that. Then they found out that guns had higher lethality with lower risk to the attacker (another primary metric). Collateral wasn't much of a problem back then. No one gave a shit.

What is a bullet if not a very carefully shaped rusty spoon stabbed into someone via a complicated launching mechanism?

The military also buys iPhones, and Androids. What phone do you use? That very phone was probably used to order a drone strike!

Did you use GPS technology this past week? That was the tech guiding the drone to it's target. And this thing called the internet was invented to network the military

GPS is a military technology opened to civilians... going the other way feels different, for whatever reason.

No, GPS was actually designed from the start as a dual military and civilian system. The only part that wasn't originally available to civilians was the high precision signal.

> GPS was actually designed from the start as a dual military and civilian system

No, what prompted GPS to be opened to civilian uses was KAL007 being shot down by the Soviet Union. [1] 269 killed, including a US Rep.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

No, as usual Wikipedia isn't quite accurate. Here's an actual interview with the "father of GPS".

"BRAD PARKINSON: Absolutely. And there are a lot of misconceptions about that. You hear people saying, well it was a military system and eventually made a civil system. That was not true.

When I testified before Congress back about 1975, I said this is a combination military civil system."

https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/how-gps-found-its-way...

Re GPS - civilian GPS signals are not the same as military GPS. P(Y) and M-code GPS signals chirp at 10x the rate as the un-encrypted (civilian) signals.

In the time you get one navigational update for your car/iPhone GPS, a cruise missile's GPS has received 10 updates, presumably helping him guide himself up the ass of some terrorist at ~500MPH.

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