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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

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> Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

The US is the largest weapons manufacturer already with the largest military-industrial complex. How many more drones and bombs do we need?

> All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

You act like we do.

Doesn't the US already spend more on military than all our rivals and allies combined?

We need a lot more. Actual US manufacturing capacity is very low. We can't even supply Ukraine with enough regular artillery shells

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-she...

The Navy's fleet is actually shrinking because we lack shipyard capacity, and can't even maintain the ships we already have.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbu...

There is like the middle ground of both don't do ads and don't do war, too.

Unfortunately, our enemies also get a vote. Perhaps you can convince them not to do war? Because telling them not to hasn't worked.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-moscow-r...

That is not an example of "don't do war" policy of the Biden admin going horribly wrong. Rather the opposite.

Is there no third option here?

Regardless of what side you are on the "warfighting software good" or "warfighting software bad" spectrum, what we really need as an industry is more individual software engineers questioning and judging the ethics of the use cases they are supporting with their software. Too many techies just want a "challenging problem" to work on, and as long as the technical problems are complex and challenging, that's where their judgment ends. We should be more willing to look at the end uses of our creations and refuse to work on things that go against our own ethics.

I have quit a job where I knew that my software was going to be used by the military and law enforcement in order to target people, among other reasons. Yes, I am lucky and privileged to be in a financial position where I am free to up and quit a company, but I'd like to think that even if I weren't I'd do the right thing and refuse.

> we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

Nope. I'll be doing neither.

So our options are either "consume consume consume" or "kamikaze drones".

We're fucked...

Fascism won

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