Hacker News Reader

Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.

View on HN

Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely curious. If everyone was as honorable as you and decided to stop working for the military industrial complex - do you think China and Russia would just sit back and say "That's cool - we didn't want Americas land/resources/overseas territories anyway" ?

This is like a thief saying that they steal something because otherwise another thief would steal it. What the parent is suggesting is that engineers around the world should agree to not make such systems similar to how doctors have the hippocratic oath. It may seem naive and can probably never prevent such systems from being built but I think it's worth a try. We have to collectively agree on systems we should not build.

If you are going to use a thief analogy at least make it accurate. Having a moral objection to defense is like objecting to doors and locks (defense against thieves) and so not only are you going to not work on anything lock related you are going to openly advocate no one else work on them or manufacture them as well, leaving us all at risk.

isn't this somewhat fallacious logic?

It sure would be nice if this industry had the tiniest shred of collective consciousness and realized our capacity to exert some level of control over what gets built and what doesn't.

I took computer ethics 101 about 20 years ago (that was the only ethics class on my math/cs degree plans). I learned that the ethical thing to do when a system kills unintentionally/accidentally, you stop it and redesign from the ground up from first principles evolved beyond the principles used to design the killing version.

This needs to be applied to nation-states & so much more we're engineering.

I'd love to see a design methodology grounded in accounting for all nondual needs of humans. This idea usually comes with complaints of that being an impossible task, without really understanding the issue.

Lots of us are IEEE members bound to ethical standards: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

There are also numerous other organisations with such standards.

this made me curious if the ACM has something similar, sure enough: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

The people working on these understand the alternative looks like a WWII bombing campaign with greater loss of life

That isn't that calculus that a moral people run. We operate in the present, with the tools we have now with compassion. Unless you are the people working on these AI targeting tools, how do you know what they understand.

Not to be combative with the response here, but the density of destruction in Gaza is on par with the likes of Dresden. It's not really exaggeration to say that Gaza is one of the most bombed places since Vietnam, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can go to companies like Maxor and purchase satellite images on the open market and see for yourself.

The ratio of civilian deaths to military combatants seem to indicate a different picture: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...

Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio. Yet the author of that article credits the IDF for setting a new, humane standard.

“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...

Irrelevant. The horrors of October 7th have no bearing on whether Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians should continue.

It’s directly relevant to the linked article in the comment I was responding to, which uses the IDFs reported Palestinian civilian to soldier death ratio to claim that Israel’s military actions are uniquely humane. That conclusion is challenged by a showing that Hamas’s achieved Israeli civilian:soldier death ratio.

The question I’m implicitly raising is why would one be worse than the other?

In fact, Israel is counting every adult male as Hamas in their death counts. If we were to use “IDF rules” and count every adult male victim of the Oct 7th attack as a “soldier” (a claim made by Hamas, bolstered by the fact that almost military service is required of most Jews in Israel), then the ratio would be less than 2:1.

And now they know they were wrong?

Not everyone sees the world as you do. Given this article and other information I know about this system, I would be honoured to work on it and take a significant pay cut, as it actively makes the world a better and safer place.

Turns out one of your associates has been identified as a terrorist.

So sorry.

A lot of my associates has already been identified as Jews, and that's quite enough to get them horrifically killed.

Pretty sure these days more people get killed for being Palestinians than for being Jews.

If this was the case, nobody would use the systems described in this article.

Low effort trolling, you can do better

I don't understand why you consider this trolling. This is my sincere position and the best intellectually honest argument I could use in this argument which I use myself when I put this position to test of doubt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com