Off Topic: Study on Military Use of AI

Research study exploring whether software engineers are comfortable or uncomfortable with a range of potential military applications of Artificial Intelligence and explores some of the factors that might shape those views.

I work at RAND; I saw James give this talk, and it was fascinating.

To my recollection, this was in the wake of the Project Maven debacle [1], and was trying to answer the question about whether the aversion was a vocal minority of Silicon Valley or if it's a truly pervasive opinion.

It also addressed the a wider set of questions about missions: We can mostly agree that unsupervised killer robots are bad, but how do people feel when the DoD helps with disaster recovery and just wants to use AI to help?

> Tech workers have low levels of trust in leaders—even their own

I found this interesting and particularly relevant to the question of how we organize collaborations between the DoD and Silicon Valley. Having gone from RAND to Silicon Valley, I experienced a major culture shock. (Side note: hi you two! Funny that the comment section is us.) I can't imagine many tech workers would be too keen on how the DoD or even most Beltway Bandits manage their projects and workers.