Pentagon drafts today’s kids to build tomorrow’s aerial killers
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
As much as I'd like to believe they won't be working on projects like that, I think it's quite literally impossible to make that claim. A better armor idea may become a more-penetrating bullet idea. Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology?
I think that most medical technologies, at the least, can be considered purely defensive. Ie, a mobile defibrillator or penecillin.
Then again, inventions like spray-on bandages increase the effectiveness of an army, which would aid in offensives. But I think the inventor of any such spray-on bandage would agree that the benefits to humanity outweigh the fact that armies can march a little longer with the invention.
So I think there's probably a large class of inventions that have humanitarian uses that "outweigh" the military ones from a general conscious perspective. Spray-on banadages, canned food (which may have allowed Napolean to conduct more and greater expeditions than he would otherwise), etc.
Aside, there have been many purely war-motivated or wartime-motivated inventions that have gone on to aid the public at large. (See for instance the history of the tampon, or the history of canned food).
Penicillin isn't really an invention, nor is it a technology, but we are capable of biological warfare because we know about cellular structures and resistances.
Mobile defibrillators are essentially tasers without a propellant and barbs.
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There are definitely cases where I'd argue something made for war has done more good than harm. Lots of them, even. But I didn't invent those things - how does the inventor feel about it all? If your accounting software turned out to have a unique algorithm that made it easier to keep ammo supplies available on a battlefield, resulting in a few thousand more deaths, how would you feel about it? What if it were tens of thousands? More?
I'm pretty sure I will be. I work with a former Boeing employee. Him and a number of coworkers were absolutely devastated that aircraft they sold where used to kill people.
Granted, it's a small number of data points but I would be pretty upset knowing something I designed killed people.
Or a simpler case: what about those who made planes that got hijacked, maybe even flown into buildings?
Boeing is a large military contractor, so there's not much question that the work that you do for Boeing as an engineer working on planes is going to be used by the military.
>... one of the directors of the program, Dale Dougherty, was quick to point out that the students will not be building weapons for the military.
The only place I can see actual weapon-engineer context is in rdouble's example - elsewhere there's been plenty of room for non-weapon interpretation. "Military plane" came out of nowhere, except that Boeing makes them, as well as many other non-military planes. It even seems reasonable to me to think that Boeing makes more commercial products (and employs more making them), so an average Boeing engineer may simply never touch or create tech for the military. I have no numbers to that effect though, so I could be off. But why would there be 'not much question' that a 7X7-line engineer would have worked on a military plane?
That part makes no sense to me - since it's nothing to do with the engineer in question, and they had no part in the decision.
Because they feel like they contributed directly to the death of another human being.
The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) portion of the FANG program focuses on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative design and distributed manufacturing experiments. DARPA envisions deploying up to a thousand computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) additive manufacturing machines—more commonly known as "3D printers"—to high schools nationwide. The goal is to encourage students across clusters of schools to collaborate via social networking media to jointly design and build systems of moderate complexity, such as mobile robots, go carts, etc., in response to prize challenges.
For balance, here's MAKE magazine's take on it: