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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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?