Deliberately optimizing for harm
science.org
science.org
Like, this is the whole point of pharmacology: Predicting the biological interactions of chemicals (what they do to biological targets, how potent), and their ancillary physical properties (solubility, volatility, stability etc). For example,
Optimizing for mu-opioid agonist activity gives you super potent painkillers, drugs of abuse, and that stuff Russia gassed a theater with to knock out / kill hostages and kidnappers (i.e. fentanyl analogues)
Optimizing for inhibition of various proteases might give you chemotherapy drugs with nasty side effects, or stuff with nasty side effects and no known therapeutic use (i.e. ricin)
Optimizing for acetylcholinesterase inhibitor activity will turn up nasty poisons which could be purposed as "nerve agents" or "pesticides"
Optimizing for 5HT2a activity will give compounds that are great for mapping receptor locations in brains, which are also drugs of abuse, and which are also lethal to humans in small doses.
And the "predicted compounds not included in the training set" thing is just table stakes for any predictive model!
You sure you don’t mean 5HT2b?
I mean, anything can be toxic with enough dose, but the b-subtype agonists seem a lot more toxic than the a-subtype agonists.
(Fun fact: 6-APB, a “research chemical” recreational substance became an actual research chemical because of it had better 5HT2b selectivity than what was previously used in lab research)
But yeah 2b could be worse. Or many other targets as well
Funny thing, optimizing "research chemicals" for (1) uncontrolled synthetic pathway and (2) potency is common to Institutional, Druggie, and Terrorist researchers. None of them want to go through the bureaucracy for controlled substances and potency is good for [better controlled experiments / smaller quantities to transport / more killing power]
I'm guessing the problem with these is that, in practice, a country can't use any weapons system that could potentially be used to "safely" deliver a nuclear payload (i.e. to deliver one far-enough away that the attacking country would not, itself, be affected by the fallout) without other countries' anti-nuke defenses activating. After all, you could always say you're shooting ICBMs full of regular explosive payloads, but then slip a nuke in. There is no honor in realpolitik.
So, because of this game-theoretic equilibrium, any use of the stratosphere for ballistic weapons delivery is effectively forbidden — even though nobody's explicitly asking for it to be.
It's interesting to consider how much scarier war could be right now, if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons... random missiles just dropping down from the sky for precision strikes, in countries whose borders have never even been penetrated.
I don't think these are quite as viable as you think. ICBMs are expensive. Probably tens of millions of dollars each, for a single-use item. Cruise missiles cost $1-$2 million to deliver the same payload and have a better chance of surprising the enemy.
ICBMs have longer range, but how often do you need to strike targets more than 1000km past the front line? They're inherently strategic weapons.
An unguided 1000kg "dumb" bomb costs $2,000. A "smart bomb" costs $20,000 to $100,000. A cruise missile costs $1mil to $2mil.
In the scope of any protracted real war, sending out lots of cruise missiles is horribly inefficient. Much much cheaper to send out a few planes to drop 100's of tons of dumb or smart bombs. IOW, you can deliver 10x to 100x more boom if you just use planes and bombs. 1000x more if you use long range artillery. But then, the pilots or soldiers are at risk-- and that is a political calculation.
I don't think you could get an engine capable of getting you hundreds of miles at that speed and altitude, much less the sensors and guidance system.
It will be burnt up by the time it runs out of fuel, though.
For a good one it has to be hydro-formed out of seamless pipe, which is likely hot-stretched (like wire drawing, but using an induction heating coil in place of the die, and independently controlling the feed-rate and the pull-rate) in advance to retain consistent wall thickness in the engine despite being cross-section after hydro-forming. Also probably incremental hydro-forming with grain-structure-fixing re-heating between stages.
The hard part is just that most of the work is in making the hydro-forming dies/tools, not then using them to cheaply produce more engines.
Of course, you can definitely make a BALLISTIC missile with a couple hundred mile range using a solid rocket engine, and probably for fairly cheap (especially if you don't particularly care about accuracy)
Also: Scud missiles are comparable, made outside western cost inflation, and still ~$1M each. So I'm guessing you can't get a ballistic missile anywhere near $10k (at least, not one that isn't more likely to kill its owner).
https://disclose.ngo/en/article/war-in-ukraine-how-france-de...
(An order of magnitude larger helicarrier contract was cancelled eventually.)
That said, you could probably make a glide bomb for pretty cheap. The two examples I gave above are in the hundreds of thousands, but I bet if you sacrificed some of the accuracy and payload, and you were really optimizing for cost, you could get that into the tens of thousands
0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/04/terrorism.davi...
This sounds similar to the Nth Country Experiment, conducted by the US in the 1960s. The idea was to see if three freshly minted physics PhDs could design a working nuclear weapon using only publicly available information. In less than 3 years, the three succeeded in creating a credible design for an implosion-style bomb.
For sub-launched ICBMs (like the UK's nuclear deterrent) you also need to factor in the through-life costs of the launcher platform, and the fact that once it starts launching, it has given itself away. We only have four subs, not all of which are on patrol, so it would be barking to compromise these to deliver a conventional payload.
Without nuclear weapons, they're kind of pointless - you don't inflict enough damage to warrant the expense. But the first strike is also so much more survivable.
https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/operat...
The UK's current deterrent force is currently expected to be replaced by the successor Dreadnought class [0] in the 2030s. They are currently projected to cost £31 billion (likely an underestimate) for four subs, each of which can carry 8 missiles max. Again, these are a horribly expensive way to deliver conventional explosives when we have cruise missiles instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought-class_submarine
Don't you need to also consider the vast expense countries (okay, mostly just the United States) spend to essentially extend their "front line" well beyond their own borders?
According to Wikipedia, Minuteman III ICBMs have a 2020 unit cost of $20 million[2], so for the cost of an Iraq invasion, the US could have fired about 6600 missiles. Considering the invasion toppled the Iraqi government, it's pretty unlikely that firing 6600 missiles with conventional payloads would have been anywhere near as effective.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Counterforce
In other words, you can't really target a "building-size" target with these (with maybe exceptions like the Pentagon).
For nuclear payloads, a few hundred meters of error is much less of an issue, of course.
It's an infinite range weapon which arrives in 20 minutes to kill a target your spy satellites see. They would be used all the time.
As opensocket points out, there are many shorter range conventional weapons used across borders. The cruise missiles of gulf war 1 or the drones of the post September 11 world.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/21...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Technical_Applicatio...
Why are cruise missiles any less scary? They are indeed used in precision strikes across country borders, and can kill you just the same. The existence of nuclear weapons still allows some countries to use cruise missiles, as we see happen almost every year.
If the possibility of an untraceable, space borne, hypersonic weapon was on the table we might have had a better deterrent than nuclear weapons. The lack of fallout and total deniability makes it almost certain they would have been deployed and quite concisely ended a few conflicts at the onset.
It is alarmingly frightening, moreso even, because the impact could be extremely precise- leaving infrastructure intact.
Interesting. I expected that nuklear weapons made us more docile. It's a huge deterrence for big powers to go to war with each other. I think we are seeing this play out in Ukraine right now. If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I'd expect NATO to have intervened much more directly at this point, especially after seeing that Russia seems much weaker than expected.
There's nothing sudden about it, this has been the reality for decades now. We here in the US were on the other side of the matter in Iraq and arguably Vietnam. This is an old truth.
Imagine how that would have gone -- dropping nukes on the Vietnamese in order to "save" them from Communism.
Thankfully saner minds prevailed.
It's just that until last month it was taken as just posturing to remind the West and the Russians that Russia, as a nuclear power, has to be taken seriously.
/btw, in other discussions i've been too cavalier throwing around the likelihood of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. I've thought about it much more since those other threads
[0]https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/23/in-gun...
I'm probably being incredibly naive in saying this, but what about "non-wartime" decapitation strikes — where instead of going to war, you just lob some well-timed hypersonic missiles at your enemy's capitol building / parliament / etc. while all key players are inside; presumably not as a way to leave the enemy nation leaderless, but rather to aid an insurgent faction that favors you to take advantage of the chaos to grab power? I.e., why doesn't the CIA bring ICBMs along to their staged coups?
A key advantage of a hypersonic weapon is the possibility of first-strikes to disable the enemy's retaliation systems before they have the ability to launch more-traditional retaliatory responses. Only submarines are likely to be mostly-immune to them.
https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/chinas-new-weapon-j...
There are counters to hypersonic glide weapons beyond shooting them down. If you can detect it early enough then the target ship can change course and try to evade. The sensors on those missiles have very limited field of view so if it's not receiving a real time target track data link for course correction then it can be possibly be dodged (depending on how many are incoming, weather, and other factors). Even if the target can't evade, a bit of advance warning would at least allow for cueing EW countermeasures.
I supposed the point would be to hit the highest priority targets and nothing else. Loss of command and logistics has a profound effect on endurance
Also, ICBMs in their present form would not likely resemble anything deployed in space
However, the existence of nuclear weapons today doesn't seem to have prevented indiscriminate bombing (using whatever weapons: dumb bombs, unguided rockets, cruise missiles) of targets (including cities) in several countries in recent years.
To be fair, if these become a reality, they would likely strike targets in the Pacific Ocean and South China Seas, far away from the US, but the potential to spook nuclear nations is still there.
Equilibriums change, every major US platform was at one point designed to be nuclear capable, i.e. cruise missiles now liberally launched from planes/bombers/ships that are all nuclear capable. There's no a reason nuclear countries who get attacked by any US platforms should assume any incoming ordinance ISN'T nuclear, down to gravity bombs, except for expectation - knowing US has overwhelming conventional capabilities and would rather use it than nukes.
Same will apply as conventional ICBM matures - we haven't seen much of it because ICBMs have not been sufficiently accurate unless carrying nukes where CEP in meters don't matter. For countries with power projection, it was dramatically cheaper to get closer first and deliver less expensive ordinance. Conventional ICBMs seem effectively forbidden because most actors assume they're too inaccurate for anything but nukes and too expensive for anything but nukes.
But that's changing - there are hints that PRC is pursuing rapid global strike i.e. US prompt global strike, because IMO it's the great equalizer in terms of conventional mutually assured destruction precisely because it isn't banned. A lot of articles being seeded on SCMP about PRC hypersonic developments that spells out meter level CEP ICBMs designed to conventionally attack strategic target of depth, aka Prompt Global Strike.
Ergo (IMO) PRC maintaining no first use nuclear policy while conducting massive nuclear build up to setup credible MAD deterrence. This sets up the game theory of accepting that conventional ICBM attacks on homeland from across the globe is possible and that it's best to wait for confirmation unless one wants to trigger nuclear MAD. Entire reason US / USSR and countries that could moved to Nuke triad or survivable nuke subs was because it bought more time than hair trigger / launch on warning posture.
This makes a lot of sense for PRC who doesn't have the carriers, strategic bombers or basing to hit CONUS (or much outside of 2nd island chain). It makes a lot of sense for any nation with enough resources for a ICBM rocket force but not enough for global force projection (basically everyone). World will be very different place if such capabilities proliferate. Imagine any medium size country with ability to hit stationary targets worldwide - fabs, server farms, power stations, carriers being repaired in a drydock.
Who cares if you can blow up one target once? Unless you marshal enough to wipeout enough infrastructure to really cripple your opponent, it won't do you much good anyway; and if you do cripple them, and they're nuclear, congratulations; you just won a nuclear response. You now have bigger problems.
ABM unreliable, require multiple interceptors per incoming - exchange favors attackers who can always saturate. Also expensive, interceptors usually cost close or more than what they're designed intercept. And currently for anyone not US, just getting US to divert 100s of billions to homeland ABM defense is a win as it will take resources from other priorities. This is also assuming ABM works against hypersonics, including all the recent talk about flak/cloud defense. It's purely speculative.
> blow up one target once
For capital assets that takes billions and years to replace like carriers, subs, supply ships, long range bombers, awacs, critical infra nodes all you need to do is blow it up once. It doesn't take a huge pool of hypersonics to essentially dismantle major US force projection capabilities.
> you just won a nuclear response
Why? Primary motive is deterrence, but with conventional forces. And if it comes down to actually exchanging conventional hits, it will follow escalation ladder, no need to cripple, or cripple to point of existential threat that warrants moving to nuclear.
Interesting! SpaceX was hoping to one day use Starship for quick intercontinental flights. I wonder if this unspoken rule would make that prohibitive?
Not remotely worth the complexity of setting up and executing. Maybe worth it against an opponent with extremely limited launch capacity (North Korea?) but that's a pretty niche application.
It might be relevant, but it's an extremely low-value comment. A good chunk of the people reading the comment (and caring about it) will already know it's describing false-flag operations.
A good way to think about good HN comments is "is there a specific point I'm trying to make". Anything that doesn't try to articulate a point is likely to be downvoted.
Why invest a bunch of time and effort making more and more deadly poisons when we've already got a wide variety of them that are cheap to manufacture, well known in how they work, and don't cost a bunch of research money to uncover?
One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out.
Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago.
With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds.
Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.
Errm, maybe They Do.
On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores.
I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was.
I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...
Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested.
Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists.
I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives).
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Quite possibly!
The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels.
After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water.
Those were the days :eek:
The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it.
EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.
Here's a relevant software-related analogy:
I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc.
Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.
You are assuming rules say what they mean and mean what they say (and are even written where you're looking, and if they are that they're up to date). If it's your first week on the job, by all means, do the most literal and conservative thing. If it's not, well you should know what your organization actually expects of you, was is expected to be reported and what isn't.
There's a fine line to walk between notifying other departments when they need to be notified and wasting their time with spurious reports.
When maintenance discovers their used oil tank is a hair away from being a big leaking problems they just fix it because they are the guys responsible for the used oil and keeping it contained is part of their job.
Your bio lab or explosives closet isn't special. If the material is within your department's purview then that's the end of it.
Not every bug in production needs to be declared an incident.
>Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
You can sling hypothetical around all you want but for every dumb anecdote about informal process breaking down and causing stuff to blow up I can come up with another about formal process leaving gaps and things blowing up because everyone thought they had done their bit. It's ultimately going to come down to formal codified process vs informal process. Both work, both don't. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.
>The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.
This account is how old? Maybe I just use throwaways because I like it.
sadly, after 30 years of training to be a superhacker on ML, my greatest value is actually in dealing with intra-organizational politics.
At the root of researchers' reactions to EH&S are two things:
1) EH&S will frequently be the source of unfunded and unresourced mandates. "You must stop your research until you've properly tidied up all of your electrical cords" is, in the short term, an impediment to forward progress. Researchers frequently under-budget for safety/disposal costs when submitting proposals, leaving nobody with money to foot the bill for expediting the resolution for a safety stoppage.
2) The statistical likelihood of a single accident is greater for a large organization than for a single research group. One group can get away with a lethal practice for a hundred years before the first death. A hundred labs will only get away with a similar practice for a year.
If you find a competent and reasonable EH&S auditor, they are a great resource. They may ding you for some safety violations, but they'll be able to point the way toward safer practices. In the best case, even if they don't have mitigation funds for longstanding problems, their voices carry real weight and can expedite the allocation of scarce resources toward real safety concerns.
Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance:
"When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0]
[0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...
I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...)
The effects are probably mostly temporary though.
You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that.
Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals.
How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years?
How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage.
If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun.
Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL.
Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.
Dropping anti-radar chaff strips is a very good lo-tech way of shorting transformers and power lines. I can't find a link, but IIRC the USAF discovered this accidentally when training missions led to power outages in nearby towns.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphite_bombs#/...
Interesting example of how cyber attacks could blow back. Anything you put in a virus can be taken out and used against you.
If you wanted to install fear into a country, I think being attacked by some custom, previously unknown chemical weapon would scarier than sarin.
Who might invent a bunch of time and effort in those areas?
Considering this, defense against them is at least mildly important. A proper defense only exists by considering offense, so they're still developing chemical weapons somewhere. The modern hot topic is viruses and other pathogens.
The reason why it fell out of favour isn't because it's dangerous, it's because it was ineffective outside of TV and film.
A siege of a city is more impractical than it ever has been. In ancient times a siege was conducted out of necessity; it was the only way to kill everyone inside if a population did not desire subjugation. Complete death of those resisting you was typically the goal, with the slow communication of antiquity leaving any resistance might mean coming back to an army the next time you visit. It was easier to depopulate the region and move your descendants in.
We see echoes of this in modern times. We "took" Kabul at extreme expense, but did not really "take" it as asymmetric enemy forces continued to operate throughout the entire country while the US occupied Afghanistan. Taking many cities across a nation with advanced embedded weaponry is going to be impossible. If it came down to it, such a country would resort to area denial, like Russia did in the Chechnya and Syria, leveling the cities instead of sweeping them.
We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.
> In static-system vs. static-system warfare. Thus, in Syria – where the Syrian Civil War has been waged as a series of starve-or-surrender urban sieges, a hallmark of static vs. static fighting – you see significant use of chemical weapons, especially as a terror tactic against besieged civilians.
The Russians being in a similar situation because they do not have equipment suitable for a highly mobile army (I don't quite expect them to use them for reasons below, but worth pointing out).
There's a lot wrong with his take. A lot of what he is writing is unsourced conjecture. It's like saying man portable missiles are irrelevant when you can have the CIA topple their government and remove their will to fight.
For one, conventional arms are horribly inefficient at killing in the first place! It's thousands of rounds fired for a confirmed kill, and the stat is equally as bad for artillery. Any marginal improvement is a big deal.
He does not convincingly separate their lack of legitimate use from moral concerns. Developed nuclear states don't use them for a lot of reasons, but a huge issue is that chemical weapons are on the escalation ladder. In the US's case it's also that we don't want to kill indiscriminately. He so much as states this at one point:
> In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.
> But if chemical weapons can still be effective against static system armies, why don’t modern system armies (generally) use chemical weapons against them? Because they don’t need to. Experience has tended to show that static system armies are already so vulnerable to the conventional capability of top-flight modern system armies that chemical munitions offer no benefits beyond what precision-guided munitions (PGMs), rapid maneuver (something the Iraqi army showed a profound inability to cope with in both 1991 and 2003), and the tactics (down to the small unit) of the modern system do.
I take no exception to this, but basically no large army has encountered a case where they need quickly deployed area denial that is different from landmines. A massive retreat into the interior of a country may be such a case, but you run into issues where a decapitation against that state is probably going to be more effective.
For what it's worth, this is why Russia's concern of NATO countries walking up into it is nonsensical. It's just, perhaps, they never realized how nonsensical it was, as their defense planners do not have experience with a highly dynamic army. (But oddly they seem to have some idea of what might happen, as this is what likely led to their development of nuclear/neutron mortars and artillery. But any situation where those would come out is going to be ICBM time anyway.)
There's no point in detailing beyond that. Respectfully, it's like someone suggesting quicksand is a good way to stop tanks because they watched it in a cartoon. I'll add some commentary in good faith but I'm not going to comment beyond this.
The fact of the matter is that the amount of chemical product you need to try to slow down the enemy is so insanely large that it just doesn't make sense to use -- it doesn't make sense to produce, it doesn't make sense to prepare, it doesn't make sense to bother firing.
I invite you to pick your chemical weapons agent of choice (sarin, chlorine, whatever is the one), pick a spacial size you want to attack an enemy in and then do some back of the napkin estimations at how much of that chemical weapon product you would actually need in order to disperse enough in that area to achieve your objective. I don't want you to account for failed launches, or wind, temperature and so on, let's assume that every munition fired will go to the exact spot it needs to be and disperse perfectly.
You'll very quickly realise that chemical payloads are wholly useless. We're talking about in the magnitudes of hundreds or even thousands of rockets to clear out a small area.
Perhaps it made sense in trench warfare 100 years ago, but it doesn't make sense to use against a guerrilla (or even conventional) force in any modern time.
> We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.
None of this is true. Sorry, but it's just not. And hopefully following the exercise above you'll come to see it that way as well.
Do you have a source? Because even with all the controversy surrounding international investigation and the theories that have spawned around that, russia wasn't even a possible suspect.
That is to say: neither the Syrian government nor Russia have used chemical weapons in Syria. They haven't used them because they are -- for all intents and purposes -- useless. If you want to take down a group of people in flip flops and have access to a thermobaric[1] MLRS[2] you're not going to break international law so you can give one or two of them a scratchy throat with chlorine payloads (if you're lucky).
[0] https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/
To your point, some numbers from wikipedia:
The LD50 of sarin is 39 micrograms per kilogram, so 0.0039 grams to kill a 100kg man half the time in theory.
Now consider the worst of the gas attacks in Syria was in Ghouta. Fatality estimates vary considerably, but the highest estimate claims 1729 fatalities. The attack is claimed to have been performed using at least 8 rockets, likely more, each with at least 50 liters of liquid sarin. That's a lower bound of 400 liters of liquid sarin, for an upper bound of 1729 kills. Liquid sarin's density is roughly the same as water, so that works out to more than 230 grams of sarin per person killed. And if you use the lower fatality estimates or the higher rocket count estimates, the numbers are even worse.
Conclusion? The delivery/dispersion of poison gas is incredibly inefficient. In practice you need tens of thousand times more nerve gas than the LD50 figures would have you naively believe.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou...
For example, that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack happened is not disputed by Russia; they dispute who did it.
But in any case, while yes there is a dispute around who did it... Russia was never claimed to be the responsible by anyone. The two options are either the syrian government or the rebels, and that's true for all the chemical attacks.
So the GP was completely wrong, Russia did not use chemical warfare in syria!
Their biggest target throughout their efforts? Ted Postol, professor emeritus of science at MIT, who they claimed was a Russian disinformation agent for finding the theoretical chemistry ridiculous and not practical.
Not really, having new developments all classified is not helpful to anyone.
It's my understanding that the Soviet army doctrine in the '70s and '80s included the use of chemical weapons. That hypothetical threat put a hell of a lot of friction on NATO in terms of training, supplies, and preparedness.
Lets say you had a nation-state enemy who eats a lot of some ethnic ingredient. Come up with a cheap artificial flavor/color or process that is optimize to give heavy consumers cancer in 30 years. Not in one year, that will show up in the approval process. Then have an agent in the target country "discover" thru random chance this really excellent food dye or whatever.
Now you kill half the population with cancer, you're gonna get nuked in response, even non-nuke countries will be pissed off enough to get nukes just to nuke the perpetrator. But lets say you make the victims fat and sick and die a little younger just enough to get 1% hit on economic growth...
Some people would say this is how we ended up with trans-fats and margarine and vegetable oils in general or certain veg oils in specific.
Certainly, corn syrup has caused more human and economic devastation that fission, nerve agents, or most any WMD I can think of...
One reason is lack of data. Chemical data sets are extremely difficult to collect and as such tend to be siloed on creation. Synthesis of the target compounds and testing using uniform, validated protocols are non-trivial activities. They can only be undertaken by deep pockets. Those deep pockets are interested in return on investment. So, into the silo it goes. This might not always be the case, though.
For now, the paper does raise the question of the goals and ethics around machine learning research. But unintended and/or malevolent consequences of new discoveries have been a problem for a long time. Just ask Shelley.
I would discount this, heavily and concerningly, as a false sense of security. The reality is that prohibitive factors in creating new drugs from compounds discovered similarly (by AI or other automated process) is almost entirely due to testing safety procedures and regulations... If the bad actors are trying to find the most lethal compound with no such oversight - and chances are very high that they aren't bound by any such regulation if they're state-level labs operating under impunity - there is nothing but the synthesis that would make the formulation and testing of these as impractical as the author claims. Take away the years-long, heavily scrutinized and regulated multi-stage billion-dollar path to drug approvals and you'll find that barrier is not so high.
I would like to think this data could be helpful to any organizations looking to proactively develop detectors or antidotes for such compounds - especially if the threat was previously unknown to them.
Let's say an entirely novel class of toxin was found in a cluster of these predictions that has no existing references in private or public records - it could be that another organization has discovered and synthesized something similar through one of many other paths.
Many lines are drawn between this type of approach and that of whitehat hackers. You must necessarily create the vulnerability to mitigate it. It feels like "white hat" biolabs claiming the same are operating on the same conundrum and that the difference between "studying for the sake of mitigating" and "creating a weapon" are fundamentally indistinguishable without an absolute knowledge of intent - such is impossible from the outside.
Most drug candidates fail because they don't work, not because of any regulatory procedure. About 50% of drug candidates that enter Phase III trials--the final clinical trial before approval--fail, and that's almost always because they failed to meet clinical endpoints (i.e., they don't do what they're supposed to do), and not because they're not safe (toxicity is Phase I trials).
Toxins don't have those constraints, its not even about regulation. Making something that's safe is way harder than making something that is not safe, purely because of the complexity involved in making the thing safe.
When thinking about whether ML does something novel, we must always compare with some simple alternative. I would be impressed if it'd predicted something like Palytoxin, a highly specific molecule with extraordinary toxic activity. There's no way the tools of this paper would though.
-- director of ML at a drug company.
Of course that fact was no barrier to much hype about the "dangers" it posed, either. I suspect the same now; that we have more to fear from the fear junkie propaganda than the actual facts.
Or look at mass shooting incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
The Las Vegas shooting was rationally planned and carried out. He managed to shoot nearly 500 people, killing 60.
They did happen to pick conventional weapons. But is that because of rational choice, or just familiarity and availability? Imagine somebody like Kaczynski, but instead of being an award-winning young mathematician, he was an award-winning industrial chemist or genomics student.
Also fortunately most political extremists don't want to kill just random people. Weapons of mass destruction don't discriminate, making them poor choices.
But for some goals, terrorism definitely works. Look at the US South after the Civil War. White terrorism worked for more than a century, from thousands of individual lynchings up through mass events like the Tulsa Massacre and Wilmington Coup. Or look at the number of shootings that involve misogyny, which is the enforcement mechanism for patriarchy. In both cases, violence is used to create fear to keep a population subordinate.
It also can work very well against occupying forces. Afghanistan, for example. Or if Russia takes Kiev, we'll surely see how well it works against Russian soldiers.
And it works very well to get attention and heighten tensions. Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks were a big success for them on both counts. If you're in the "immanentize the eschaton" class of kook, which these days includes a lot of people from the far left to the far right, the heightened tensions are their own reward.
And even if it didn't work, that's not really the question. The question is whether somebody being crazy enough to think it will is enough to prevent them from succeeding. I'm saying the two aren't mutually exclusive. Aum Shinrikyo comes to mind here. As, in another way, does Russia. Would Putin using nuclear weapons ever keep him in power? I doubt it. But might he do it anyhow on one theory or another? Nobody can rule that out.
>the number of shootings that involve misogyny, which is the enforcement mechanism for patriarchy
Please translate this to english
I agree he went with something common to the time. But I don't think that was a necessary outcome. After all, his approach didn't achieve his goals, so we can't say his sort of terrorism is any more rational than aiming for something bigger. Indeed, the nominal goals he ended up with, one could argue that mass-death terrorism is more rational.
Of course now, the next step is to use the technology to preemptively search for and develop antidotes to the new potential weapons their tool has discovered.
It makes sense that it could be weaponized. When Skynet becomes self-aware, it would probably just design a chemical that kills us all, and would aerosol that into the atmosphere. No need for terminators, just big pesticide cans.
In contrast, think of what you'd need to do this via machine learning. You'd need to gather data from actual missile strikes first and learn approximation functions from that. While it's certainly doable, this is inherently less accurate, thanks to both approximation error and measurement error. It's not like pixels -> cat where the true function isn't known.
https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812707130_00... (google the author)
https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/nw_highlights_2...
https://erdc-library.erdc.dren.mil/jspui/bitstream/11681/678...
Details are obviously scarce but computers are pretty much the number 1 reason weapons testing isn't particularly necessary any more.
That's true, but it really applies only if you have access to historical nuclear test data. The computer simulations are reportedly parameterized using empirical factors that aren't openly published and aren't available to additional nuclear aspirants unless they run tests of their own. The alternative, if you don't have test data and don't want to test, is to build very simple, conservative bomb designs like the US did with the Little Boy gun-type uranium bomb. It wasn't tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima. That's also the kind of design South Africa used for its secret nuclear weapons program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
Hitler was well aware of its creation, and I believe quite a lot of the stuff was produced for the purpose of warfare. There were several in the Nazi military who wanted to use it, but Hitler declined.
That seems rather odd, given his indifference to exterminating people with gas on an industrial scale beyond the theater of war. It has been suggested that Hitler was probably aware that to use sarin gas would be to invite the allies to do so in response, which would result in a dramatic loss of life on the German side due to the sheer lethality of such chemical weapons. [1]
Perhaps he thought it easier to stick to conventional warfare, in which the pace is more manageable than with WMDs, where you would start going down the road of mutually assured destruction but without the strategic framework in place to prevent anyone from actually wiping out a population before realising how bad an idea it would be.
And I think this reluctance to change the game, this seemingly deliberate moderation, perhaps best demonstrates the true difference between the machine and human in warfare.
It is not a difference in innovation -- we have always been very good at inventing highly optimised ways to end life.
The difference is that a machine intelligence will not hesitate. It will not ask for confirmation, pause or break a sweat. It will pull the trigger first, it will point the bombs at anything that is an adversary and anything that could theoretically be or become an adversary, and it will not miss. And it will not have to face ethical criticism and historical condemnation afterwards. [2]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11...
[2]: Assuming this is a Skynet-like machine intelligence, which doesn't really have the capacity for remorse or negotiation and seems primarily, indeed solely occupied with the task of ending human life.
Obviously, a true AI that is essentially a conscious mind equivalent to our own minds, may experience the same hesitancy that most of us would, were our fingers to be over the buzzer.
Unless the AI independently arrives at a different set of values to us, like the Borg or something.
Same problem with chem weapons. You hit a tank brigade with 1000x lethal dose they aren't any deader than if you hit them with 1x dose. But if the bomb misses which is likely, all you've done is REALLY piss them off. Nerve gas in an empty wheat field just kills a bunch of corn bugs but it really pisses people off. If you target their tank brigade and miss, they'll target your home town, as we did to them with conventional bomb even without having been nerve gassed to start with. If you target their home town then the brigade you missed is going to be unhurt and really angry. Its the kind of weapon thats pretty useless unless you have infinite supply and infinite logistics. Like cold war USA or cold war Russia.
The allies had better logistics than the Germans so they knew the second time around in WWII that trying to go chem is just going to end up in the German's getting more chem'd than the allies.
Another issue is WWI and previous its all about siege warfare and breaking sieges where WMD is awesome and useful, whereas WWII and newer is all about maneuver warfare and blitzkrieg and all of Germany's plans and all of their early success were based on the idea that anything in range of shells or aircraft today is going to be occupied rear supply area next week at the latest, so destroying it would be pretty dumb because we need that area to be the rear of the battle space next week. For a modern comparison the USA could have nuked the green zone in Iraq and there's absolutely nothing anyone could have done about it, but 'we' knew we'd be occupying the green zone and needing something like the green zone, and the green zone is sitting there for the taking, so in an incredibly short term perspective it would have saved troops and saved time and saved effort to just nuke it instead of taking it the old fashioned way, but in medium and longer term it would be counterproductive to war efforts to use WMDs against the green zone, so we didn't.
It was fairly worthless, militarily. High risk, big mess, no real tactical advantage, and it just pissed everyone off. Its only real efficacy would have been for bombing civilian targets, and I don't think they had the delivery mechanisms.
How true is that? Are there components of this process that make things easier now? Where I have chemical structure X, and a system generates the process steps and chemicals needed to produce X. How much of the domain in chemistry / chemical engineering has been automated these days? What are the future prospects for this?
[1] I assume one of the design goals for a new chemical weapon for military use is that it breaks down in the environment, but not too quickly (like say in a week or a month). Though I suppose if you want to just destroy civilization you would design for longevity in the environment instead. And being able to seep through many kinds of plastic if possible.
Undergraduate chemistry students spend a fair amount of time learning how to look at a novel structure X and by disconnecting "backwards" it into simpler components, deduce a route by which it might be synthesed "forward" in the laboratory from readily available starting materials.
There's an excellent book on this, "Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach", by Stuart Warren.
Were / are you a chem major?
Any other major topics or readings you could recommend for someone wanting a general understanding of key concepts in modern chemistry? I'd suppose generally: materials, synthesis, o-chem, and chem-eng.
My own background: began a hard-science degree. One year undergrad uni chem.
> Process chemists take compounds that were discovered by research chemists and turn them into commercial products. They “scale up” reactions by making larger and larger quantities, first for testing, then for commercial production. The goal of a process chemist is to develop synthetic routes that are safe, cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and efficient.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/chemical-sciences...
"That is, I'm not sure that anyone needs to deploy a new compound in order to wreak havoc - they can save themselves a lot of trouble by just making Sarin or VX, God help us."
Researchers have only been using AI for drug development for like 6 years, I think it's way to early to call it a bust
It struck me as incredibly naive, but then - what would someone else do in their situation? Most of us work in silos without awareness of how our work is used, and I suspect we are often causing (unintentional) harm to others whether we are scientists, programmers, in finance, in health, in government, etc. If we realise our predicament, there isn't an moral authority to make things right. There is only the legislation that was been written by lobbyists paid by the corporations we work for.
Putting the article in broader context, perhaps it is about the creation of a moral framework for AI intended to pacify our disgust at the system we find. I expect that we will be expected to look away as AI "ethics" committees justify the unjustifiable, but call it ethical. As whatever-it-is is found to be ethical after all by ethical authorities, most of us we will wave this through and consider that we have acted judiciously. IMO.
The development of the toxic nerve agents (organo-phosphate compouds mostly) in particular was a side effect of research into insect toxins. The nerve agents were discovered in this manner, they worked too well. Nevertheless, these pesticides were deemed safer than the organochlorines because they degraded fairly rapidly after application (although they are implicated in nerve damage related diseases like Parkinson's in agricultural areas).
Insect infestations are indeed a big issue in agriculture and can wipe out entire crops if not dealt with, but there are plenty of options that don't require applications of highly toxic or persistent chemicals.
Otherwise, this is just another of the many issues modern technology has created. Smallpox is another one - in the late 1990s, there was a great debate over whether to destroy the last smallpox samples - and then in the mid 2000's, someone demonstrated you could recreate smallpox by ordering the appropriate DNA sequences online and assembling them in a host cell. Then there's the past ten years of CRISPR and gain-of-function research with pathogenic viruses, a very contentious topic indeed, and still unresolved.
The opening was for "Lethality Engineer": Ideal candidate with good physics and medical background.
I said that the main perk was that at least on Halloween he wouldn't need to buy a costume. He could just go out as himself.
He didn't take the job.
My stance has previously been that I am unwilling to work on weapons technology, because history has shown that these weapons sometimes end up being used for an indefensible cause. Then all of a sudden you're an accomplice to murder, and getting away with it.
In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which is just a continuation of its historical imperialism, working on weapons is something I would be perfectly okay with and probably even motivated to do. But stop for a moment and think what a history of aggressive military actions does to our society's ability to recruit for this important job.
It’s not unethical to work in the auto industry because people can die in car accidents. It’s not unethical to work in the beer business because people can become alcoholics. It’s not unethical to work for a credit card company because people can bury themselves in debt. And it’s not unethical to work in defense because the weapons may fall into the wrong hands.
What’s unethical is encouraging these problems and not trying to prevent them. And yeah, it’s hard to navigate these ethical issues, but we’re professionals like doctors and lawyers and part of the reason we get paid like we do is because we may have to wrestle with these issues.
Why not? Cars are pretty fucked in a lot of ways. I wouldn't consider someone working in the auto industry to be morally bankrupt but that doesn't mean that automobiles are not ethically ambiguous
> It’s not unethical to work in the beer business because people can become alcoholics
Why not? You are producing a dangerous drug that is constantly killing people. Would you say that people manufacturing illegal heroin are absolved from their externalities?
> It’s not unethical to work for a credit card company because people can bury themselves in debt.
Also why not? Credit cards, like automobiles, are pretty fucked in a lot of ways.
> it’s not unethical to work in defense because the weapons may fall into the wrong hands
Once again, why not? It seems as though weapons have consistently fallen into the wrong hands for all of history.
Im not saying that all people in these industries are bad people, but we can't pretend that our actions have no externalities just because those externalities are accepted by society as normal
* Ropes can be used for hanging, and even for racially motivated murders as they were in the south. Does that mean it's unethical to work for a rope-making company?
* Paint thinner can be huffed recreationally for a high. Does that mean it's unethical to work for a paint thinner company?
* Computer security course knowledge can be used to hack systems. Does that mean teaching or learning computer security is unethical?
The thing about "externalities" is that, while some of them can be blamed on the producers of the products themselves, the blame for others lies on the people using the products. While in the above three cases I listed, the answer is more obviously that the people using the products in a harmful or irresponsible way are to blame, the assignment isn't always as clear cut in other cases.
That being said:
* Saying that working in the auto industry is unethical in general because of car accidents is silly, especially when we are talking about accidents due to human carelessness. Driver education in the US is atrociously limited as-is. While I would agree that some accidents can be attributed to manufacturers designing cars badly, or some other problem on the end of the company, the fact is that, if you put a sufficiently stupid person behind the wheel of a huge metal apparatus capable of going faster than a cheetah, bad things can and do happen with that person behind the wheel.
* Saying that working with alcoholic beverage production is unethical is in my view rather silly. While one could argue, and I would agree, that marketing specifically to drunks is unethical, there are plenty of people (myself included) who have drunk beer and wine, but never gotten addicted. Comparing heroin (a far more addictive and dangerous drug) to a drug that many people have been able to use without getting addicted is poor argumentation.
* Credit card companies may often have predatory practices, but that does not mean that every person who goes into credit card debt isn't using those cards in an imprudent, irresponsible way. While some of them are victims, most would, in the absence of credit cards, be falling prey to some other vice.
* As for defense: while weapons can and do fall into the wrong hands, nothing would change even if we magically went back to the pre-firearm era: bullies would just use swords, clubs, and trebuchets instead of firearms and missiles.
There are many externalities where the blame lies squarely on the companies (pollution, global warming, overuse of plastic, environmental degradation). But to assume that all societal issues involving industries can be blamed solely on the companies and people working in those industries is naïve.
I never suggested this at all. I am just saying that there are externalities that our work generates and we should be critical of that instead of pretending that it doesn't matter.
As for the examples you gave, I think it's pretty obvious that there is a major qualitative difference between manufacturing rope and designing weapons that are regularly used to kill people. One provides general utility and the other is specifically designed to mame and kill.
> Does that mean it's unethical to work for a paint thinner company?
Yeah why not? Shouldn't we be trying to manufacture non-toxic chemicals that don't poison people and the planet. People working at those companies arent solely responsible by any means but that doesn't mean that their actions don't have serious negative affects on society and the planet.
Also cars are bad for many more reasons that just accident. Cars are loud, they pollute, they take up valuable space. Building roads and parking lots to support them destroyed entire neighborhoods, historic buildings and public space. They also isolate people, encourage wasteful sprawling urban design, and make it more difficult for disabled people to get around. The list goes on and on
I should have been more clear that this was a general statement rather than a paraphrase of you argument. My apologies.
There is a qualitative difference between ropes and guns with respect to this argument. I agree with that. I would argue that there is less of one between that and the other things I listed.
> Yeah why not? Shouldn't we be trying to manufacture non-toxic chemicals that don't poison people and the planet.
To be clear: I was arguing whether people recreationally huffing paint thinner was a valid argument against working for a paint thinner company. There may very well be other, valid arguments for not working for a paint thinner company, but people huffing paint thinner contrary to all common sense and the instructions on the container isn't one of them. This also applies to the earlier point made in the thread about car companies: there are many potential ethical issues with working for them, some of which you have listed, but I don't think, say, human-stupidity-causer error by distracted drivers is one of them.
Also, while using non-toxic chemicals is desirable, sometimes it's not an option. This is why, in my example, I chose paint thinner (which AFAICT oesn't really have a non-toxic alternative) and not something like freon, which not only does have alternatives but is arguably much, much more environmentally damaging than, say, mineral spirits.
One could be excused during these two decades for erroneously assuming that the world has for the foreseeable future moved on towards trade and economic competition, rather than wars of aggression. With nuclear weapons ensuring the balance. It was probably naïve, but not helplessly naïve. Against this backdrop, regularly seeing weddings and maybe-civilians bombed from drones on dubious intel, it doesn't seem like a childish or cowardly stance to just turn one's back on the weapons industry. I'd call that a reflected decision.
The same reasoning is almost palpable in European politics, which made a 180 degree shift away from this in the two weeks after Putin dispelled these notions. My point is, it wasn't obvious from where I stood that we would be back here today. Now that we are, the calculus seems clearer.
Maybe with a more measured US-led use of military force since 2000, Western defense politics wouldn't have required so much hand-wringing.
This does not mean we shouldn't do something but we have to realize nothing is permanent and the fruits of our labor can very well be misused the next day.
The west needs the capability to defend the ideals of classical liberalism and individual liberty. In order to do that it needs a strong military capability.
People who may not have even considered the ethical situation. It seems the people who are concerned about the ethics or morality of a necessary but questionable job are exactly the ones you want in that role (although not activists who would try to shut it down entirely).
That doesn't mean everyone needs to work on weapons, just that the work on weapons is necessary and those that do it are not ethically compromised in some way. It's just a recognition of this without pretending not engaging is somehow more morally pure. Not engaging is just removing yourself from dealing with the actual hard ethical issues.
Also, I think the design space of "radical defense" is under explored. Our (western) armies are still designed for attack and force projection, although we have long since renamed our war ministers secretaries of defense.
But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable. Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense. Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator? Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)? Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
I think if we wanted to spend money researching stuff to keep us safe, it doesn't necessarily have to be offensive weapons.
The Swiss approach what with literally bunkering in the mountains and everything is interesting, but the logistics for larger countries would be exponentially harder (and most lack the geographic help). "Fostering world-wide political transformation" is so pie in the sky it's honestly not worth serious discussion. It's fanciful.
Someone will always be willing to make weapons for the bullies because a lot of people don't view them as bullies in the first place. Ask people in Iraq, or Chechnya, or Ireland, or Pakistan, or Taiwan, who the bullies are, and you'll get wildly different answers that will cover approximately 90% of the worldwide population.
You can't uninvent weapons, and you can't prevent the bullies from making their own weapons.
The problem with an impenetrable defensive shield is that it gives your potential enemies the heebie-jeebies (technical geopolitical term) that, now that you have the shield, you can attack them without fear of reprisal. If the enemy thinks you're working on a credible shield (or even a shield you think is credible) their best option is to attack now before you, emboldened by your sense of invulnerability, attack them.
False. Bullies are a problem even if no one has weapons beyond what can be grabbed and used from the environment without any invention. Heck, bullies are a problem if everyone just has the weapons built in to their bodies.
> But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable.
Not without incidentally developing a huge edge in offensive weapons that would make you attackable when it inevitably diffused to others. Uniquely defensive technology mostly doesn't exist.
> Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense.
Much better interceptor missiles mean the technology for much better missiles generally. Directed energy interception means direct energy weapons. Hypervelocity kinetic interceptors are general purpose hypervelocity kinetic weapons.
> Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator?
That kind of indoctrination can also be used offensively, but the enemy doesn't need collaborators to attack you. (They might need it to conquer without genocide, but attackers willing to commit genocide for land are not unheard of, nor are attackers whose goal isn't conquest.)
> Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)?
Mining your infrastructure is itself creating a vulnerability to certain kinds of attacks.
> Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
It's been tried, repeatedly. The League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the UN. It’ll be nice if someone ever finds the “one wired trick to prevent war forever”, but it seems distinctly improbable and particularly suicidal to bank your defense on the ability to find it.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but it's not as easy as pretending that the weapons "we" develop are purely for morally and ethically righteous purpose.
My point was really about the fact that this job title "Lethality Engineer" actually exists. And moreover, that it asked for medical qualifications, which would go against any doctor's Hippocratic oath.
Most of us who've done defence related work are happy at the edges, with tactical information systems, coms or guidance (my stuff ended up in targeting).
But when it comes down to figuring out how fragments can be arranged around a charge to make sure the waveshape optimally penetrates as many nearby skulls as possible... hmmm suddenly not so gung-ho about it.
That's not a distant, theoretical morality about tyrants and bullies. I've no problems contemplating my family's military history and am plenty proud of it, even though we'd all rather live in a world without this stuff.
This has already happened with groups the US has armed in the past. The US itself has been the bad guy sometimes.
There is no proper resolution to this struggle, and people who are guided by their conscience should not be attacked for having a "cute philosophy" that relies on "rough men standing ready to do violence on their behalf."
The gun thing is completely tautological though. Yes, if you have a gun you're more likely to be injured by your gun than someone who doesn't. How would someone who doesn't own a gun be injured by their own guns in the first place? It's like saying you're more likely to be in a car accident if you own a car. Of course you are.
When I said gun owners are more likely to be harmed by their Gus, I meant as opposed to using the gun to protect themselves. Instead of an incident where the gun came in handy, it is more likely the the gun is used in a wrongful way or against oneself. I’m not sure where the tautology is
I'd add, the weight of violence—if anything—is going up. People today are devastated when a dozen soldiers and scores of civilians are killed in a suicide bombing or urban conflict, but go back to Vietnam and those incidents barely register because they happened all the time. The number of people killed in any given armed conflict has dropped quite a bit in the last 50-or-so years. (The Syrian Civil War is one big exception.)
The argument that "we need defense!" only justifies the need to stockpile and develop _sufficiently_ lethal and tactical weaponry to neutralize incoming threats (like anti-ballistic systems). It doesn't justify inventing deadlier weapons. No dispossessed victim of foreign invasion has ever needed a bioweapon to assert themselves, and there's no chance developing one would ever be used for anything but war crimes. You should absolutely turn down roles like "Lethality Engineer" from an ethical standpoint, even if you agree military defense is necessary.
People raise the spectre of deterrence as a utilitarian justification for needing more powerful weapons ("har har, they'll think twice about attacking us if they know we have nukes!"). But that's narrow thinking. Deterrence can be achieved in other less-damning ways, like strategic alliances and building more robust defense systems.
tl;dr defence != deadlier offence.
This is a good struggle to have. What's ironic in many cases is that we don't experience these quandaries in other jobs, but the ethical and moral ramifications still exist. The early days of search in Google or social in Facebook probably didn't elicit the same kind thought process as a lethality engineering post. (Anecdotally I spoke some years ago with an acquaintance Googler who told me that he enjoyed working there precisely because he was working on privacy issues that worked against some of the advertising side of the business.)
I've worked in telecommunications, industrial systems engineering, and energy. There are ethical and moral issues in the work that I've done/do as a contributor in each of those domains, even though I'm not involved day-to-day in decision making that feels particularly moral.
One of the base assumptions we probably need to make in our work is that whatever we do will always be misused in the worst possible way. If we explore that idea, it might give us some sense for how to structure our output to curtail the worst of the damages.
It did for at least one person (me). I was 16 in 2004 with 11 years of dev experience, trying to decide whether to go out to SV, go to college for CS, or do something else. I was from the same city/community as Larry Page and in Zuck's age group, so it wasn't an absurd consideration to try. Lots of things went into my decision to do something non-CS related for college, but morals were one of the reasons I didn't go to SV (I objected to the professionalization of the web + Zuck creeped me out + I didn't agree with cutting out humans/curators from the search process like Google did).
It's just that until very recently, people either thought I was lying OR that I was just batshit insane. Who is invited to a gold rush and doesn't go?
I can't imagine I was the only one.
I'm sure not, and hopefully the description I provided isn't a blanket one. And, to be clear, I'm also not trying to say that working for any of those organizations is per se unethical. I don't think that this is the case.
The point, rather, is that ethical and moral considerations are actually much nearer to us than might appear at first blush. Sometimes this happens by the mere nature of the work (killing people more efficiently) and sometimes by scale (now when we surface search results, we make direct impacts on what people learn, where they shop, how they receive advertisements, etc., none of which was true in 1999). Navigating this isn't easy (indeed, you can make an argument that there is a morally good outcome for killing people more efficiently; I'm not saying it's necessarily a good one, but that one can be made), but we don't routinely equip people to think about it.
To make matters worse, our cultural assumptions shift over time. The Google/Facebook difference is illustrative. Page and Brin are a generation older than Zuckerberg, and their assumptions about what it means to be moral are probably not the same. These assumptions also change based on circumstance--when we scale a business from a garage to a billion dollars, it's hard to maintain the True North on your moral compass (assuming such a thing exists).
Anyway, I think a deep skepticism about human nature and the utility of technology is probably very useful in these situations.
I believe the world shows there is plenty enough supply of talented people that are willing to do immoral jobs. So removing yourself from the pool of candidates makes little difference.
Alternatively, one could work in an immoral job and make a difference from the inside.
Why not do that? Perhaps to feel impotently virtuous, or perhaps the work couldn’t be stomached by the virtuous, or perhaps the virtuous but weak are scared of losing their virtuousness...
Also, if an ethical person doesn’t take this job, someone far more unethical probably will. And they will raise no objections if they should ever be necessary. Kind of like how a lot of bad people become police officers when no one good wants to do it.
I always drew the line at small arms so. Way more people die because of those, they end up in every conflict and there have been too many scandals of those smalls arms manufacturers circumventing export restrictions. Quite recently I added supporting countries like Saudi and the UAE to that list, even the job would have been really interesting, providing highly sophisticated training services to the Saudis is nothing I could do and still look myself in mirror. And civil aerospace is fun as well.
"Yeah, but who's their client?"
I do understand why those companies chase Saudi and UAE contracts, that's where the money is. Maybe that changes if NATO members increase defense spending, it would be a nice side effect, wouldn't it?
Perhaps we should simply have one “biologically active molecule” generating network. The dose will ultimately determine the toxicity.
Whaaat? Are you saying there exist molecules which are very harmful in a (much) lower dose, but are beneficial at a higher dose?
Do you have any examples?
I mean the urine of someone on chemotherapy is pretty toxic, still we consider the molecules beneficial to the patient overall (the patient-tumor system if you will, not the patient by themselves).
I mean take some beta blockers (helpful molecules) at 100x normale dose: pretty harmful.
Edit: Yeah my original comment didn’t come out right, I agree.
Now think about nerve gas. We have discovered lots of different nerve gas agents and know pretty well how much of each type you need to kill a human. Said software can be used to find new versions of nerve gas that kill with even lesser concentrations. You could also optimize for other variables: Nerve gas that remains on surfaces and doesn't decay by itself for example.
Now, the people asking computers to do that realized they can ask the computers to make more poisonous chemicals.
RNA molecules can often be "evolved" in vitro to bind/inhibit target molecules with high specificity (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligand...)
I imagine it would not be difficult to create RNAs that inhibit some essential human enzyme and then use the RNAs for targeted assassination.
I mean, if you're doing an autopsy, you might run standard drug tests for poisons, but who's gonna screen for a highly specific RNA?
edit: just read the wiki for the latest Bond movie. Apparently, there is nothing new under the Sun.
Thank you.
BA.2 is even more infectious than BA.1 which is saying something, imagine an engineered BA.3 with even more spread and then make it as even more deadly. You might even be able to target it to one race or region if there is a gene specific to that area.
Always hoped the future would be Star-Trek-like but it seems all it takes is one dictator or terrorist to end the world, slowly at first but then it would double every other day and impossible to stop.
Still a scary lesson though.
The use of chemical weapons might not be as obvious if they are slow acting. And the production of chemical weapons is much easier than that of nuclear weapons. Though, the dispersion of chemical weapons is non-trivial.
The use of biological weapons need not be obvious at all -- "it's a naturally-evolved pathogen, this happens!". The development and production of biological weapons is much easier than that of nuclear weapons. Human and animal bodies can be made to help spread biological weapons, so their dispersion can be trivial. The only thing that a bioweapons user might need ahead of time is treatment / vaccines, unless the bioweapon is weak and the real weapon is psychological.
Sobering thoughts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_(2005_film)
On a more serious note, anything that's going to affect behavior is going to have a dosage range. Too little absorbed, and there won't be enough effect. Too much, and that will harm / kill people in interesting ways.
With chemical weapons, you only worry about the bio-accumulating enough to kill your enemies. An enemy receiving more than a lethal dose isn't a problem.
Most armies aren't filled with people with evil intent; they're filled with draftees who couldn't get out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_hostage_crisis_chemical...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M44_generator_cluster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M43_BZ_cluster_bomb
> The M44s relatively small production numbers were due, like all U.S. BZ munitions, to a number of shortcomings. The M44 dispensed its agent in a cloud of white, particulate smoke.[3] This was especially problematic because the white smoke was easily visible and BZ exposure was simple to prevent; a few layers of cloth over the mouth and nose are sufficient.[5] There were a number of other factors that made BZ weapons unattractive to military planners.[5] BZ had a delayed and variable rate-of-action, as well as a less than ideal "envelope-of-action".[5] In addition, BZ casualties exhibited bizarre behavior, 50 to 80 percent had to be restrained to prevent self-injury during recovery.[5] Others exhibited distinct symptoms of paranoia and mania.[5]
Fortunately, there's a lot of considerations involved in deployment of anything. It's easier said than done to get something of a medical nature into a population surreptitiously, because it's hard to get a certain dose into one person without someone else getting not enough and yet someone else getting way too much. You'd have to come up with a way of delivering a medical dose in a controlled fashion and lie about it or something, you couldn't just sneak it into the food/water reliably.
Further, just because someone can name the exact complicated effect they'd like doesn't mean there's a drug that corresponds to it. Serenity, already mentioned, is a bit of silly example in my opinion because such a large effect should have been found during testing. But it does no good to pacify the population such that they'd never dream of so much as peacefully voting out the current leaders if the end result is that nobody would ever dream of so much as having enough ambition to show up to their jobs and you end up conquered by the next country over without them even trying, simply because they economically run circles around you. Or any number of other possible second-order effects. In a nutshell, it's dangerous to try to undercut evolution just to stay in power if not everywhere decides to do so equally, because you'll be evolved right out along with the society you putative rule. Evolution is alive and well and anyone who thinks it's asleep and they can screw around without consequences is liable to get a lethal wakeup call.
> The report states: “These findings, which are consistent with the finding in clinical trials that lithium reduces suicide and related behaviours in people with a mood disorder, suggest that naturally occurring lithium in drinking water may have the potential to reduce the risk of suicide and may possibly help in mood stabilisation, particularly in populations with relatively high suicide rates and geographical areas with a greater range of lithium concentration in the drinking water.”
The amount of people that feel the need to "debunk" it makes it all the more mysterious.