'He then focused on defense work, lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were “largely refusing to work with the defense sector.”'
I wonder to what extent that is still true. There is clearly a lot of money flowing and some definitely followed the money ( Palantir exists after all ).
Getting tech people into defense was easier when they never saw the aftermath of what those weapons did or were largely unaware of what they were actually building (a la Manhattan Project). But when people can watch a live-streamed bombing of a random neighborhood on Twitter, they may have second guesses about assisting in that...
Scientists were unaware they were building an atomic bomb to use in WW2? Oppenheimer certainly was aware.
I imagine approximately every single person that worked on this project wouldn't be there if the Nazis and Japan weren't actively trying to kill... well whatever share of the world's population they desired to kill. (I'm pretty sure the union would be close to 100%)
Easy: Give potential employees similar salaries to MAMAA companies, and a similar amount of freedom and independence (at least in the ways in which it is possible at a defense company) as it existed in the early days of Google and Facebook, and I think a lot of potential employees (though of course not all, but this is not necessary) will "forget" their initial moral objections and go for the money. :-)
Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
You just developed an insanely small part of this machinery. Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot. :-(
If you still have bad feelings, there exists the charity-industrial complex: donate some decent paycheck to give a poor, starving child a better life - something that you could not have done if you hadn't accepted the well-paid defense contract.
Definitely. When I worked at a aerospace co some of the young engineers had internal conflicts they rationalized away by saying "we aren't building bombs." No, they were just building the targeting systems. Pointing the gun but someone else pulling the trigger. So it's all good.