I want to write software that helps kill people.
gist.github.com
from the Philosophy in a Time of Software discussion list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/philosophy-in-a-time-of-software/SnV8qMUQc3Y
gist.github.com
If you're not actively and directly involved in military activities, there's little that you can do about the knock-on effects of whatever it is that you're engaged in; and even if you can quantify the human cost of your activities, it needs to be offset against the positive externalities. For example, the same software that allows Palantir to identify 'bad guys' who are potential targets for military attack is equally capable of identifying peacemakers or other constructive individuals who are good candidates for receiving financial aid or suchlike.
Technology itself is neutral. Don't use it as a stick to beat yourself over the imperfect state of the world.
Kevin Kelly (a former editor of Wired) wrote a book called "What Technology Wants." He reminds us that technology does have a purpose, does influence human behavior, and may in fact be changing human nature.
Kudos to the OP for taking a reflective, responsible, and principled stance. We should all be so discriminating.
A steak knife is designed to cut meat during a pleasant, community event: eating dinner together. I can still use it to kill you.
You can politicize anything, but sometimes a video codec is just a video codec. As opposed to a "remote surveillance and murder technology".
Kelly has interesting points to make about path-dependency, but I don't share his teleological viewpoint, though having said that I've only read extracts and essays by him rather than the full book.
Due to relativism, I can't tell you whether your view is intrinsically right or wrong in a manner that all people are guaranteed to respect, but I can tell you: I would be upset if you used that logic to find fault with someone else who wrote NoSQL database engines, and blamed them for killing people (terrorists or no). I think it would be horribly unfair and modestly ridiculous - and if you agree with that when it applies to other people, consider whether you are, in fact, giving yourself a fair shake here.
And let's face it, its something you benefit from tremendously. You do not want a society in which the US does not have the power to kill everyone. That is a society in which your lifestyle is not as nice as it is now. Indeed, with the challenges we face in the coming century (oil, water scarcity, etc) as well as the ascension of India and China as world powers, our ability to kill people is going to be more important than ever.
That makes me sad. Does anyone on HN(besides me) believe that one day humans will be able to rid themselves of war? That one day we'd find a solution to these issues that don't involve sending a group of armed people to kill?
Indeed, US hegemony is good for peace. You can eliminate the rational self interest in going to war by imposing an external cost to going to war (like any negative externality). That's the role the US serves. Its military machine implicitly backs things like international sanctions that are punishment for anti-social behavior.
Nathaniel Borenstein
That sums it up for me.
It's pointless to think about the impact of a micro action on a macro event. Especially macro things such as war. There are so many different factors that culminate in a war.
And about the good/evilness of war, that has a been a debate since ages. One can never win this argument.
They believe, correctly, that macro-events are the culmination of micro-events, and that change begins on the personal level. It takes just a handful of dedicated people to start revolutions. Startups should know that.
This is a phrase that should only ever be used ironically. :/
There is currently only centralized, pooled, coercive funding. Certain institutions (e.g. war industries and monopolistic entities) are disproportionately backed by forced funding. Certain road contracting is also backed by forced funding. It's illogical to suggest that a conscientious objector to the war industry is therefore being hypocritical by using roads. They are, as it happens, trapped within a system where the only alternative would be to refrain from using roads, which itself is a highly oppressive suggestion and a predicament many people find worth conscientiously rejecting. The funding of roads and the funding of unethical industries are not mutually inclusive. These are the types of moral imperatives that most discriminatory and anti-humanitarian policies have imposed on people throughout history.
Wiser is the one who asks why and listens. Many things that appear hypocritical are, in actuality, the superficial understanding of a much deeper dilemma taking place.
Even if you could somehow iron out the kinks, the end result of your sort of action is a host of additional licenses that bar the various bête noires of their various authors, eventually leading to code that simply can't be used together because of conflicting moral obligations. I really don't want to have to run a program just to sort out the ethical dependencies of the stuff in my Gemfile.
While I don't consider everyone who owns a firearm to be violent - firearms are instruments of violence.
So this means that a brown person's life costs the government what 3 million USD per person to take. That is grossly inefficient. I am sure that if they just offer the dictators and warlords the money directly to kill their own populace they will manage to bring down the bill to 10K per person.
The goal of the US military is not to kill people (it is just not good enough) or defend the country (there is no real threat and terrorism is a joke) - it is to waste GDP in the best Orwellian way possible in which it excels.
Just take the example "pornography": in most Western countries pornography is accepted and not considered as "evil", but in many Islamic countries, pornography is considered sinful.
Licensing it differently is one option, but either they wont care or they will just copy the intent and make their own version.
This is a problem without a good solution at this point except to have a frank and adult understanding of the consequences of your actions, and to be politically active so that you may contribute you part to preventing your government from the continuous war.
Crockford in this particular case seems like the most likely plaintiff, but I don't know if there would be other parties who would also have standing or not (also, i'm not a lawyer, so take this as you will).
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.highe...
This is why legalese is so dense and complex, to remove as much flexibility and doubt as possible, so that you don't have a judge/jury deciding things. If you include the definition of the terms in the contract/licence then the judge/jury had to follow that.
Any desktop fits #2 if I open it up, open up the power supply, and lick the output of the mains rectifier in the switching power supply. Or consider a laptop/tablet having an uncontrolled thermal battery reaction (aka bursts into flames) on an airplane over the middle of an ocean.
Somewhat more directly, my dentist can't use a "sorta-open-source" calendaring app because people have died in dental offices from allergic reactions to injected dental antibiotics/anesthetics. Its kinda rare, but has been recorded to happen.
Simply naming or defining organizations is not as simple as it appears. Your freedom fighter group is someone else's terrorist is someone elses pacifist organization.
You need a cop-out for intention and rarity. By the time you add enough cop-outs that anyone can actually use it, you've almost certain cop-out enough that the .mil can also use it.
Essentially, double-effect means that your good actions can have unintended yet foreseen evil consequences. If you make a hunting rifle, and someone uses that to shoot children at a school, are you responsible? Not an easy question to answer.
Someone driving a car into a crowd does not make it Ford's fault. Society does not ban cars just because 50,000 people a year are killed by them.
Double-effect has four criteria for making a judgment in any particular case. The intent of the maker is only one of the four. The most pertinent criteria in the case of the hunting rifle and school shooting scenario is the last, of proportionality. Does the good to be gained by having hunting rifles exceed the evil to be suffered by school shootings?
That's a tougher question to answer than whether there is an ill intent.
Perhaps it's the European in me that can't wrap my head around the American idea of guns. To me "Guns are dangerous" seems obvious.
It's an interesting cultural difference.
Personally I think that although this idea makes sense for knives, guns cannot be justified because they have no purpose other than killing (hunting is still killing).
Suppose someone is trying to kill you or your loved ones. Do you really not see how a gun could be beneficial? Do you really not see how killing someone could be the right thing to do?
On the front page is a story about someone recovering a camera from a thief. One comment says that confronting the thief could be dangerous, since they might have a gun ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505464 ). Here in Ireland if some low level criminal stole my camera, they wouldn't have a gun when I meeting them in a café.
(The rationale behind the question was based on fighter jets, to some extent, using software written in C++.)
The question was not tongue in cheek. Everyone in the auditorium laughed, though.
Right... what happened to just saying 'hundreds/thousands of times better off#' in hyperbolic sentences? Too pedestrian?
#Of course you can replace 'better' with any fitting adjective.