Not Without Us – Joseph Weizenbaum (1986)
dl.acm.org
dl.acm.org
In front of that Draper building, there was a strange pillar, which I liked to imagine housed a geo-positioning reference point -- perhaps even the origin of a coordinate system. Then, if ever there were an ICBM guidance failure, on that fateful day, Draper might be ground (0,0,0). Like an engineer standing under the bridge they built, as the first trucks drive over it.
I was thinking of that as intentional/conscious by the engineers.
(BTW, I'm not criticizing; only a little dark humor reflection upon a grave, world-ending responsibility. Given that nuclear weapons were inevitable, I'm glad my country has some, that apparently MAD has worked thus far, and that there hasn't yet been an apocalyptic incident. I also hope that certain autocratic world leaders are taking their vitamins, and won't get even nuttier.)
Also, think of all the past plausible/likely bad scenarios that MAD averted, such as involving the Soviets.
I sometimes joke about a utopian future of humanity, all peace and love, for thousands of years... until we encounter malevolent space aliens. Humanity had lost the ability to even reason about such a conflict, unable to imagine many options. Fortunately, humanity had maintained the cryogenic suspension of Kissinger and other historical figures capable of cold-blooded ruthlessness. And there was a Thaw button. (In some versions of the story, as soon as the anti-dream team wakes up and starts talking, we decide they're even worse than the space aliens.)
Did you ever examine it closely? Nobody would try to stop you. It had a metal cap with a hole in it and some scratches. A few times over the years I remember seeing a tent around it. On those cases I didn't try to see if anyone would try to stop me!
I know I and my friends thought the same as you.
If it didn't have that cap on it, I might've leaned a bit more towards suspecting it being vestigial from a lamp or flagpole.
IIRC, the pillar was still there after the snazzy remodeling of the building entrance that happened in fairly recent years.
I (thinking of some of the better ideals) said something favorable about the sense of honor/duty/etc., and that I just didn't work on weapons systems nor domestic surveillance. I'd actually thought of it before, and those two spaces seemed problematic.
Earlier, I'd actually worked (on non-mil things) with someone who at previous company had been a manager for a defensive military system. Which system everyone had seen on CNN, shooting down conventional missiles that some aggressor was launching at civilians. Which was great (albeit, CNN sometimes strayed into propaganda, and maybe not all the great stories were true).
But, thinking of that great defensive use, I also thought that I wouldn't want to someday see on CNN something I worked on being used for something terrible. It wouldn't be sufficient to claim that I thought the Slaughtertron 3000 would only ever be used for good. Even a purely defensive system (Shieldtron 4000) could be used to shield an aggressor -- leaving the victims less able to defend themselves, and making aggression more viable.
We'd all do well to read things like this article, and think about what we choose to work on, and how we do it. Then follow through on our better thoughts, in our behavior.
In particular, the tech industry overall has become a festival of sociopathy. With many techbros, in moments of reflection, rationalizing, "but I gotta feed my family", while pulling down quite a lot more money than we need to do that.
That wasn't very defensible when coders were regularly hopping jobs with 5-6 figure pay bumps each time, or doing startups that essentially involved selling out users and oftentimes later investors, ignoring regulations, etc. Even now that jobs are looking a lot less certain for most people, we still need to be very skeptical of ourselves every time we grasp for rationale.
I don't think the commenter you replied to tried to make a specific point here but they basically said that on the surface there are maybe a handful of areas that are problematic (like national surveillance and missile systems) but when you actually think about it, even defensive systems can be used to shield the aggressors and just like you wouldn't want to see a missile you worked on blowing up an orphanage on CNN, you probably wouldn't want to see the good guys desperately trying to get around your missile defence system and failing.
Ukraine is just another war where the good and the bad side is very clear (at least to me as a German). But a lot of conflicts in the recent past might have been more questionable.
Also, I think the point the linked article is trying to make is that if we all collectively would refuse to work military related jobs, there would neither be missiles nor missile defence systems. You just couldn't build those.
Not necessarily true anymore since we have enough nukes for everybody by now but in the mid 80s this sort of call to inaction might have been more reasonable.
There is even no need for a pilot today. Videos of drones killing people are freely available on reddit.
Even with semi-autonomous Switchblades there is always a human choosing the initial targets - thanks to the voice in the post and other like this military has agreed that fully autonomous systems are something we should approach very carefuly and only under very specific scenarios.