The irony is that this is a good reminder of the harsh realities that Oppenheimer himself clearly grappled with - if you refuse to build it, someone with less scruples will.
Pretty lame excuse. If I don't sell drugs, some else will.
If you're doing it, you are already the one with less scruples.
Do you think the victims care about the scruples of the perpetrator?
That's like saying, I kill people with a clean knife, I don't want them to get an infection from a dirty blade.
That said, I don't think most of what Palantir actually delivers on fits this mold. They're just generally cruddy.
There's this ideal human sociology, and then there's the reality of what we really are. It takes a unique person to accept it, and do the wrong thing for the right reason, and also be able to steer things in the eventual right direction.
In part by firebombing them indiscriminately. The way we won WWII would later be technically outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.
And do you think dropping the bomb on Germany would have humbled them or would they seek revenge in the long term?
The bombs brought as MAD and that only works as long all parties try to stay alive and don't there is a paradise in the afterlife if they die for a holy cause.
It didn't. The fear was that the Nazis might develop nuclear weapons and use them to end the war on its own terms [1].
> do you think dropping the bomb on Germany would have humbled them or would they seek revenge in the long term?
Yes, our eternal enemy the Japanese.
> bombs brought as MAD and that only works as long all parties try to stay alive and don't there is a paradise in the afterlife if they die for a holy cause
Fair enough.
If you refuse to deal with drug addiction, you shouldn't be surprised when drug dealers do.
The dilemma was quite different: if you don't do it, your enemy will beat you to it and will kill you and the people you love. It was a very utilitarian, wartime calculation.
The soft variant you're quoting is just a license to misbehave because others also misbehave - and I don't think that was Oppenheimer's qualm.
Every time you see an argument for the inevitability of X - especially something frightening - know that it's just an old rhetorical tactic, even cheap playground trash talk. It's comic book lingo. They want you to quit; they are afraid of what you will do.
Think of the complete lack of agency, the powerlessness, of that perspective. 'If we do nothing, maybe they'll shoot themselves in the foot.' It's 'freeze' in the fight/flight/freeze response to danger.
In fairness, the parent didn't say that's all we'll do, but few talk about actual actions, solutions, with full agency and responsibility.
The solution isn't a silver lining to a cloud, it's what we will do to make a better world. If we don't make one, who will?
Basically just boring IBM-type shit, except maybe even less honest and professional.
Anyone who would intentionally choose to be compared to Oppenheimer should sooner be scrutinised for his own ethical dubiousness rather than his competitors.
Some ideas from me circa 2011 on how security agencies can actually build a more secure world once they recognize the irony of their current approach: "The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." https://web.archive.org/web/20130514103318/http://pcast.idea... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security. I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot [or Hacker News] is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. ... As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. ..."