Every company I apply to is told during the interview process that I will not work on military projects, and that I would probably leave the company if they chose to take on a military contract. If you have personal moral limits and you’re upfront about them then no-one is the worse off; I’ve yet to be turned down for a job over it and, somewhat the opposite, companies seem to appreciate frankness.
I've seen that kind of thinking in the past and it's pretty popular view. I'm just not so sure about this moral aspect.
Why do you think it's more moral/ethical to abstain of supporting military? Maybe you won't do this but be sure that in some other country some similarly talented people will.
If you (and many others) abstain from it on similar basis you and closest people you know may be in danger of being affected by more advanced military equipment other (possibly hostile) armies can get.
Maybe it's just not in people heads that world and homeland safety is not given for free and granted forever.
It's ironic on so many levels. The first level is, of course, the irony of refusing to do military work at a company that only exists because of defense contractors working on a military project (ARPANET).
More generally, the irony is that the U.S. military has made a far greater positive contribution to the world than Google. Under the Pax Americana, we have seen the greatest number of people rise out of abject poverty in human history. The stable, liberal world order that has been beneficial to so many people has been bankrolled by the U.S. and backed by the U.S. military.
This world where people in India and Pakistan are using Gchat Facebook to talk to each other instead of waging nuclear war against each other is not the result of Google or Facebook. It's not the result of humans evolving beyond their tendencies towards warfare. It's because the U.S. military has made entire classes of armed conflicts untenable.
This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means.
I agree that the US military has made positive contributions to the world, but I don't think it's the main source of the Pax Americana -- strong international bodies (NATO, UN, &c), the tendency for democratic nations (the dominant sort in the 20th century) to avoid wars with each other, and advancements in crop science are all individually more responsible for the relative global stability of the last 30 years.
I don't deny that the military had a role (usually financial) in any or all of the above, but I wouldn't call it a causal role: virtually all academic research funding hits the defense world eventually ("food security", "ecological security", &c), especially during the Cold War. That's the result of political contrivances, not any sort of deep connection between the U.S. military and scientific progress.
Finally, I wonder about drawing comparisons between the past U.S. military and current ventures. The Google engineers in question probably wouldn't be designing waterproof radios for fastboats; they'd be training models that "recognize" "terrorists" from afar and systems that pass that information to drones for remote killing. Put another way: the shift away from conventional warfare changes the moral dimensions of working for the military.
Name 1 Major thing NATO or the UN has done without US support. The idea that they have any power outside what the US sanctions is to be pretty ignorant of the reality of power in world affairs.
You're missing the point. It's not that NATO and the UN are powerful or effective as bodies independent of the US, it's that their greatest achievements have occurred without direct US military intervention.
NATO and the UN both benefit (and suffer) from the power and presence of the US military, but their proudest moments (the German economic miracle, smallpox eradication, historic decreases in child mortality and malnutrition) all stem from smart policy and liberal principles, not from the looming threat of American tanks.
I think you're the one missing the point. While the U.S. military's record in the past 100 years or so is not unblemished, it has unquestionably been one of the greatest forces for good on the planet. Absent the defensive shield provided by the U.S. military:
- At some time between 1945 and 1950 the USSR likely would have moved the Iron Curtain all the way to the Atlantic, and quite possibly to the west coast of Britain or even Ireland. Practically anyone who lived under Communist rule in Central- and Eastern Europe would agree that this would have been a Very Bad Thing.
- In the summer of 1950 the Korean peninsula would most certainly have been reunited under the Kim Il Sung regime — this damned near happened anyway, when the U.S. and ROK forces were nearly pushed into the sea at Pusan — and the South Korean economic miracle would never have occurred, to say nothing of the fact that the North Korean gulag would be that much larger.
- Japan probably would have rearmed, and who knows what that would have led to.
Oh, and absent the freedom of the seas heretofore provided by the United States Navy, the world's economy would look very, very different.
As to "smart policy and liberal principles," those are certainly important. But as President Obama said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, nonviolence wouldn't have stopped Hitler's armies.
Disclosure: I'm biased — I'm both a veteran and the son of a career U.S. military officer.
The fact that people are spurred into action by violence doesn't mean that we ought to be violent, or that violence is even the most effective way to get people to act in the way you want.
> This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means.
You’re begging the question. If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means? When the Roman Empire fell, we call the subsequent period the dark ages. What does that say about whether the Roman Army was good or bad?
> If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means?
I think so. Here's an example: over 3/4ths of released prisoners are re-arrested within five years. Half are re-arrested within a year of release[1]. If my end is substantially reducing the crime rate, I could reasonably claim that mandatory lifelong sentences would achieve that end: recidivism would be eliminated, and there would be a strong disincentive for anybody to commit even minor crimes. But this is clearly a terrible means, both legally and morally: the punishment doesn't fit the crime, and we end up condemning 25% of the prison population to a life in jail because of a statistic.
At the risk of sort of invoking Godwin, I'm curious if you'd apply the same logic to Stalin and the fall of Nazi Germany. What does the victory in the Battle of Berlin say about whether Stalin was good or bad?
It's unfair to pretend these institutions, their purposes, and their effects stay the same across generations. It is similarly unfair to pretend people's perception shouldn't change across those same generations while the other factors do change.
It's like telling someone writing something critical of the Mexican government that it's ironic because of Mayan contributions to writing. Sure the timescales of the analogy may appear off, but so do the ones of technological advancement lately.
> because of defense contractors working on a military project (ARPANET).
Ehh, kinda, but not really. Less military contractors and more research grants given to academics. The difference is subtle, but an academic institution is a public institution focused on advancing science and teaching it to the public. A corporation or contractor is in it for the profit. Notably, the academics involved were able to publish their work as the TCP/IP standard (and others), and anyone was able to use it.
If it had actually been military contractors we would not have the internet as it is today.
Like... while getting his Ph.D so I'm not wrong about the academic link. Though sure, it was literally built by the military industrial complex, but the original implication that the military somehow has a primacy over an idea that was going to take off one way or another is still absurd.
The best the military does is keep stability. Google changed everything. One is static; the other, change. I don't see them as comparable at all.
Anyway I've heard it said that the container ship has done more to lift the world standard up, than all the political action of the last 1000 years. By distributing goods to all the corners of the world at a cheap price.
You're acting like shipping never worked before 1950. Many thanks to the U.S. Navy for what they do today, but they did not invent the concept of safe passage.
Shipping containers have made an impact in the efficiency of shipping, not the existence of shipping.
How can you say that the "military" get credit for preventing conflicts while at the same time not get blame for being the muscle of colonial oppression.
What does the American military have to do with the economic development of, for instance, China? I'm not sure America should be credited for its adversaries' successful pushes to mitigate poverty.
China's recent economic development is the result of unprecedented levels of trade in an unprecedentedly peaceful world. That peace, in turn, is the direct result of U.S. efforts to maintain international stability, through the use or threat of military force.
They now have a lifetime emperor who is enacting surveillance and citizen "ratings" that make dystopian novels look tame, along with crippling polution, poor living and safety standards, intense competition without any consumer or IP protection, lack of political freedom, and slowing economic growth that needs to absorb the momentum of a billion people lifted out of poverty and expecting the good times to continue without a revolt.
Militaries don't create good results, they only remove impediments to good results. You can't grow an economy by bombing infrastructure and killing people.
Where your analysis is incomplete is that military might is not the only reason that people will avoid fighting. A strong military is a negative incentive ("I might lose or die"), but there are plenty of positive incentives for nations to avoid warfare.
In fact, international relations tend to be dominated by positive incentives, which is why "cheeseburger diplomacy" is such a reliable concept, and open warfare is historically rare, even before Pax Americana.
Google is a much smaller and younger entity than the U.S. military, so you might still be technically right on total quantitative impact. But that's not really a fair way to look at it.
> In fact, international relations tend to be dominated by positive incentives, which is why "cheeseburger diplomacy" is such a reliable concept
“Cheeseburger diplomacy” is not a reliable concept, either the Obama practice to which the media gave the name or Friedman's McDonald's peace theory, which makes more sense in the context of your comment.
I was referring to the Friedman thing. While he was stupid enough to frame his rule as an absolute (thus it has been violated), the reality is that McDonalds is in 119 countries and the number of wars between those countries over the past 50 years can be counted using your fingers.
That was just an example, though. My main point is that the peoples and nations of the world, given the opportunity, overwhelmingly prefer to pursue relationships of peaceful mutual benefit, rather than military threat. The purpose of a military is merely to preserve or restore that opportunity.
The notion that trade has a negative correlation with war is a well-accepted concept in international relations, and one of the reasons national governments exert themselves to grow international economic relationships.
> Under the Pax Americana, we have seen the greatest number of people rise out of abject poverty in human history. The stable, liberal world order that has been beneficial to so many people has been bankrolled by the U.S. and backed by the U.S. military.
It's perfectly coherent to support the overall ends (relative world peace) and oppose the means (extrajudicial drone strikes, invasion of Iraq, etc.)
even on Vietnam war, look at the aftermath of US army giving up - for South Vietnamese: mass concentration camps, shoving inside CONEX boxes, a lot of deaths...
...all of this when the war is over and the communist gov. isn't desperate for anything...
...and US media doesn't cover this because Americans want to think "we lost because we were bad (yay justice!), not because we were stupid/weak/etc"
Of course, US army was too desperate & chose to "shoot/bomb whoever (isn't wearing US army uniforms)" - a combination of stupidity / lack of discipline / common sense
This _is_ a very valuable action logically let alone morally. In the next decades either we resolve to mitigate this "us or them" mentality on this earth, or pure physics and math will resolve to see the end of the civilization as we know it.
Google is a US company yes, but with so many engineers from all over the world and customers from every corner of the world, who is "them" for a Google employee really?
And before you say so, I know this is how things(power dynamics, etc.) work today. That is exactly why this kind of movement towards a change is good and needed.
Lemme just underline this. Google engineers come from all over the world, and Google products are built to serve people all over the world. The Googlers opposed to Maven believe that building software that enables one government to enact (more) drone strikes against civilians in other countries is contrary to the mission of making people's lives better.
Preemptive lazy answers for lazy replies:
Companies only exist to increase stockholder value: Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Improved drone efficiency is better for everyone: hahahaha.
> Maven believe that building software that enables one government to enact (more) drone strikes against civilians in other countries is contrary to the mission of making people's lives better.
I think that's a mischaracterization that's important to correct in the name of accuracy:
> The polarized debate about Google and the military may leave out some nuances. Better analysis of drone imagery could reduce civilian casualties by improving operators’ ability to find and recognize terrorists.
Also, a lack of "AI"-based image analysis hasn't stopped the US military from carrying out airstrikes with drones, and denying them better analysis tools is unlikely to cause them to reduce their frequency. The US military tries to avoid civilian casualties while still performing its mission, so giving it the tools to do so could arguably prevent civilian noncombatant deaths.
Sorta like how increasing surgical strikes in Vietnam will end the war faster and save thousands of lives?
These sorts of arguments come up constantly in these discussions, and are laughable. More efficient targeting just means more strikes. And all of this targeting is extra judicial anyway...
> Sorta like how increasing surgical strikes in Vietnam will end the war faster and save thousands of lives?
Maybe not the former, but certainly the latter if it meant a reduction in alternatives like carpet bombing, etc.
In World War II, the military would drop thousands of bombs over a wide area in the hope that a few would land on a German ball bearing factory. Now that they have more precise weapons, they don't need to do that anymore to accomplish similar missions. If the military feels it needs to smash something small, they'll use a big, oversize hammer if they don't have a small one available. They don't give up and go home.
> More efficient targeting just means more strikes.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know how you could reasonably be so certain about that.
> And all of this targeting is extra judicial anyway...
I could very well be wrong, but I believe the statement these people were making is that they did not want to work on technology that kills people. It doesn't really matter if the work they would be doing would be to make it kill less 'good' people and more 'bad' people, they just don't want to work on stuff that kills people.
Why you seem to think Maven will target civilians is beyond me. If you build better recognition systems for drones they will be better able to mitigate collateral damage. Is this not exactly what you want?
"Why you seem to think Maven will target civilians is beyond me"
Because it's for the US military. They have an unbelievably shitty track record in not hitting civilians. It was shitty under Obama, and it's gotten even shittier under Trump. And the issue isn't the ability to target better; it's that the military simply does not care.
I don't know if it's true or not, but based on a little thinking about availability bias and publication bias suggest it's plausible.
No one is likely to write about "targets hit exactly as planned, no collateral damage" and even if they do as a puff piece for the military we're unlikely to remember that.
In contrast, every single mistargeting is plausibly worldwide news and our brains are wired to remember such things.
To be clear, I don't have any hard data either way. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's true given the asymmetry of typical cognitive bias in evaluating such a claim. The folk version of this is that you "only ever hear about the CIA's mistakes and not of their successes".
Please stop and try to talk to some active military personnel before you just pass judgement like this. War is messy. This isn't a video game. The US military goes to extreme lengths in order to avoid collateral damage, including the blood of our own soldiers to protect as many innocents as possible. It's unfortunate that civilians will die but saying the military doesn't care is so beyond the pale that it just sounds like pure hysteria.
For Google, "Us" is the government that could in a pinch just grab the damned technology and leave them with next to no recourse, and "Them" is the governments who can't.
Hopefully, if you're choosing to work for a company, you understand that you're at least implicitly adopting those definitions, and that you may find the licensing requirements of your work hastily restructured in an emergency situation.
I do not claim scenario you proposed is not likely, but submitting to what harms you will only increase the harm and abuse over time. Standing against will make it less and less likely, over a long period of time.
It is just like the fear of darkness. As long as you avoid the darkness, your fear will escalate.
I acknowledge that the safest condition for me, my loved ones and next generations is not the one which has draconian governments, one-button-away nuclear war and killer drones.
One needn’t make a decision that would stand up in all times and all places. It’s perfectly reasonable to take a stand based on the current circumstances in particular country.
Agree, not all times and places. But it's not like you can flip a switch and suddenly have all the technology you need when your quality of life is in imminent danger.
To make it concrete, currently the US spends more than the next ten countries combined on its military and associated projects and has done so since at least the end of the Cold War. It has far and away the most ships, planes, missiles and bombs. While it doesn’t have the most troops the two countries with more troops do not nearly have the same as much training or as good equipment.
Presuming the OP is in the US, and in light of the above, it seems perverse to suggest that his refusal to work on military projects is endangering his loved ones.
Everyone seems to forget that the projection of might in of itself is a deterrent leveraged by all nations. Further, the US is part of multi nation programs, such as NATO in which it's the largest supplier of Capital and Manpower by a large margin. Most of the countries external to the US that bring up this argument, are happily accepting Military and in some instances Economic Aide.
You can't look at the % of spending / annual cost of the greatest military power without taking into account it's responsibilities around the globe.
Nothing above says you have to agree or disagree with the military, in fact many of us aren't pro on a lot of their actions, but this common retort as posted above, is selective data analysis, which I would hope the intellectuals of HN would be able to separate emotions from facts.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point I made. Regardless of any self imposed “responsibilities” at the end of the day if it was ever necessary the entire US military would be available to protect the United States and the people living here.
There’s no way to recontexualize the numbers such that we are in imminent danger if some software engineers decide they will not work on military contracts. We are absurdly far away from such a scenario.
Well, for the past 20 years, the military has been preoccupied with bombing brown people halfway around the world. I'd say simply by virtue of not doing that, Silicon Valley is better, yes.
Doubt that to be honest. In theory maybe, but in a real life scenario I don't think there are many people who let themself (and their loved ones) to be killed than to kill.
Even though I have a lot of respect for Ghandi, I am not sure if I could respect someone who would let his family murdered, out of a moral point.
Here's how I see it: I'm not going to be held accountable for someone else's actions. I'm going to be held accountable for my actions. I'm not going to plan ahead to make it easier to kill someone in some as-yet hypothetical self-defense scenario.
"I'm not going to be held accountable for someone else's actions"
I agree, you are not. You are responsible for your own actions. So if you choose a life of non-violence - that is allright and it allways depends on the real situation, so I am not saying you should buy a gun. Because there is also this old proverb "Live by the sword, die by the sword" meaning I guess you also think that the more someone spends energy with something - like preparing to shoot someone for self-defense - the more likely it is, that he will have to do it at some point, so you just completely refuse it.
Well, there is some truth to it, but on the other hand - I for example train martial arts since I am young, but I never had to use it for real - even though there were many situations where I was glad, that I could - I never had to back off in critical situations. The knowledge that I could probably beat the aggressor, gave me the confidence to defuse the situtation calmly.
My point is, you should be aware, that there are indeed many bad persons around and if you choose the path of non-violence than you will have to rely on other people to protect you. And even if you never encountered violence, than this will just mean that those protectors (usually police) did allready a good job of keeping the violence away from you.
Is it okay to not torture someone, if by doing so other people might die?
Is it okay to not (legally or illegally) surveil a people, if that might result in physical harm to them?
How much does the chance of missing out on action x to (maybe) defer undesirable outcome y weight against the mere consequences of pursuing action x in the first place?
You tell me and then I'll tell you. It is a question of morality and as such has an infinite number of right and wrong answers.
If we are in peaceful state, then it isn't. If we are in state of war, then it may be okay (it depends).
My turn: when war starts, is it okay to send someone else to die at war to protect your children? Or it better to let your children die, but save soldier lives instead?
I haven't had to accept/reject any form of military contract so this is all theoretical - but my biggest issue wouldn't be assisting the military, it would be not having transparency into what my contributions were being used for.
If I could write software that actually helps our military without hurting others, I would be perfectly fine with that. My fear is that you would be given a black box problem that could be used however they see fit.
But, I also wouldn't join the military for the same reasons. I would be more than willing to assist and help, but do not want to be put in a position where I have to take, or contribute, to taking some one else's life. However, for every one person like me or you, there are plenty of people who sign up eagerly to do just that.
Why do you think it's more moral/ethical to abstain of supporting military?
What should you do if you support the ethics of self-defense aspects, but do not believe that [your countries] military is acting ethically? What is your morally consistent path? Other than voting, which is part of it.
This is a very old form of the argument you are putting forward, and while I can see how people will take it to inform their morals, it's also easy to see reasonable versions that reject it.
Move to a different country, where you feel the history and current administration more closely align with your worldview. Voting with your feet is the best way to do so - especially if you feel you have the skills to do it.
Of course, but if you don't believe in what the government is doing then why would you support it, and the community you live in, with your taxes or your additions to the GDP?
That is also an old argument, but has fairly obvious weaknesses.
We are talking about morals here, after all. It can be the most rational path for you to work towards improving [in your mind] how things work where you are.
My question was genuine, by the way. I don't have the answers to any of this. I do distrust moral arguments that seem naive or overly simplistic.
"Why do you think it's more moral/ethical to abstain of supporting military? .... Maybe it's just not in people heads that world and homeland safety is not given for free and granted forever."
Well unfortunately most armys today (and especially your US-Forces) are not really "defensive" armys. Despite they all hypocritely call themself that. They are mostly very offensive conquering ones. Where is the connection again to homeland safety, when you invaded Iraq, Libya, Syria...? It is simply about dominance. So sure you can say, it is for world peace - all accept our empire and we will have peace. But that is not really my definition of peace nor freedom. (and not a working one, with so many other wannabe nuclear empires around)
I was also not in the military because of that. I would defend germany in germany, but not in Afghanistan.
But when you join the military or work for them - you can't really choose only for the defense part.
This would only be possible if we would have only armys for defending (so in switzerland I probably would have served).
And about real international peace-keeping missions, to protect against genocide etc. - well, that is a different story. UN-Troops are an option, even they got used for dominance and powerplay as well and lost credibility because of it. But when a nations army goes into a different country to fight a war - it is allmost allways about dominance.
Working on missile guidance? Then I can see your point of view... but everything else in some way facilitates or contributes to facilitating such things.
One can rapidly reduce it to "fixing a Linux bug... facilitates the military industrial complex". You might wish to not work on things that directly are used by the military, but the vast majority of technology is indirectly used because the military and their supporting companies, processes, logistics is so broad that it's almost everything.
At which point can you say your work truly does not facilitate or contribute?
I am not trying to over-simplify, but should I stop buying goods and services because the taxes taken on these transactions benefit the military?
The dividing line varies from person to person, of course. I think most would agree that improving a guidance algorithm for missile targeting is directly supporting the military. Fixing a kernel bug is not directly supporting the military. I'm a pacifist and I would go by my definition of direct support.
I know of an immigrant couple that although they were green card holders and have been living in the US for about 10 years, they decided to pack up and leave to Europe (to another foreign country, not to their native country) and one of the reasons they said was that they didn't want their tax money to support an immoral government and military. It seemed weird to me at the time, was the first time I ever heard someone say that for a reason to leave the US but they seemed dead serious and knowing them I have no reason to belief they were lying...
No and I never said that nor implied it but you should recognize that it is absolutely a luxury. There are people around the world literally fighting for their right to exist while you sit here on your "Moral High Ground" as though your position is unassailable but it isn't.
So basically, you're complaining that some people do have the ability to take a stand.
Here's the deal: Yes, some people are not as fortunate. That does not matter one iota in this conversation. Just because others have it worse does not in any way, shape, or form mean that we shouldn't continue fighting for better. You complaining about this is nothing more than you advocating a race to the bottom.
Right, what about Microsoft Office? I'm sure that's used by some military. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it makes up a vital part in planning real military operations, where people die.
But would you refuse to work on Office if you worked at MS?
I think it's okay. Just a small quip thrown in from the side that's still relevant to the topic of discussion. It would not be okay (IMO) if you tried to derail the discussion to focus on your link instead; in this case, a regular submission should be made.
To be fair you should just refuse to work on PowerPoint because you will save millions, potentially billions of hours of other people's time that have to endure those presentations.
Imho, the important thing is the degree to which a comment contributes or adds information to the discussion.
So something like linking an article about PPT overuse in the military w/ a quip is much better than just a quip at PPT's expense. (Given that some people might not be aware of the reported overuse of PowerPoint in the US military)
This is me speaking for them but it seems to me that they mean to say that the point where they draw the line is where you take a contract/business from the military. In other words, if they are paying you that is over the line. Working on missile guidance for NASA? That's okay. Working on a text processor for the military? That's not okay.
This seems like a reasonable way to draw a line. Obviously things get questionable as they might work for a company that has a contract with a company that has a military contract. How can they be sure that their work won't be used as a part of that contract?
But as a start I think this framework isn't so bad. Probably better than something I would be able to come up with on the spot
Yes, it seems that the earliest (Egyptian) references make it out as "know your place", and that even the earliest Greek references put a slightly nicer but still comparable "be moderate, self-restrained".
But there are several references by Plato that are relevant to the interpretation that I implied (to know yourself = to know your moral standpoint) mentioned in the Wikipedia article:
(Plato's Phaedrus dialogue) Socrates says, "But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things."
(Plato's Protagoras dialogue) Socrates mentions "the far-famed inscriptions, which are in all men's mouths,--'Know thyself,' and 'Nothing too much'.". Having lauded the maxims, Socrates then spends a great deal of time getting to the bottom of what one of them means, the saying of Pittacus, 'Hard is it to be good.' The irony here is that although the sayings of Delphi bear 'great force,' it is not clear how to live life in accordance with their meanings. Although, the concise and broad nature of the sayings suggests the active partaking in the usage and personal discovery of each maxim; as if the intended nature of the saying lay not in the words but the self-reflection and self-referencing of the person thereof.
I am not sure why you turned this into a US military thing.
Sweden has a thriving military export business (Bofors, SAAB) that is close to top of the world in USD per capita. Not wanting to work with that seems reasonable.
Contributing to something which could be used by the military is different to contributing to something which will be used by the military specifically.
That’s the standard argument, and yes, it’s true. There’s a difference between actively working on a defined project and putting some stuff out into the open though, and that at least for me is a reasonable border.
Especially with dual-use technology, e.g. open source infrastructure, open accessibility moots some qualms about empowering a specific military at the expense of others.
(On the other hand, in terms of wars not happening and pure global peace and stability, there are arguments for elevating between 1 and 5 powers above others)
If you're paying taxes you're also contributing to military projects. There is a difference between working on a weapons system and working on an operating system that can also be used in weapons.
So this person shouldn't have any quandaries working on military projects, because they might have contributed a bugfix to some code in libcurl or some other library that is used somewhere in the vast US military? Seems like an awfully weak argument.
You maybe joking but military loves them some games for training purposes. So ironically enough having a nice gaming platform actually gives you good chances of contributing (unwittingly) to military projects.
> If you've taught kindergarten or middle school, you've probably helped raise a soldier.
I believe that on HN you perhaps talk to the wrong audience for this argument. If the teacher really had the "hacker spirit" in teaching, the pupils will be too freethinking (as in hacker) to be suitable soldiers.
you will find many points that will make such a person a really unsuitable soldier, for example "Mistrust authority — promote decentralization", which is at least in my worldview quite the opposite of the life as a soldier, where obedience, chain of command etc. are central.
The same holds for "All information should be free", which is quite in the spirit of Snowden and Assange, but quite the opposite of the values of being a soldier, where military secrets are (for good or bad) of importance.
>If the teacher really had the "hacker spirit" in teaching, the pupils will be too freethinking
This is the comment I was shooting at. I don't believe this. Instead I believe something far more terrifying.
"Society manages complexity by the occasional cull of the free thinker"
Lots of smart people can bring a lot of good change to a society and culture, but one needs to be very careful to think the majority of the population in that society will accept those changes, and the faster they occur, the more resentment builds. Suddenly you have politicians and activists pining for the 'good old days'. Suddenly a nice authoritarian figure pops up and tells the masses that he can fix all their problems. There are ample examples in history to see where this leads.
That damn Newton and his laws....mass murdering bastard that enabled all kinds of weapons to be developed. And ol' baby-killer Franklin should have never flown that damned kite of his either... some people, i'll tell ya' what...
Because the GPL (and other such) is a license, that can apparently have almost arbitrary restrictions, can there exist a NMPL -- non-military public license -- that excludes military use? For a current and real example, much commercial software is licensed under terms that exclude use in nuclear or lifesaving critical applications.
I'm not sure how one enforces such a license. Let's be real, even a successful lawsuit isn't going to remove said software from the military's hands. And to the extent it is honored, it has the negative effect of driving up the cost of developing military software, which of course comes out normal people's pockets.
But it might be an interesting way to take up a principled stance.
Yes, until people understand the nature of duality, they struggle with simple concepts. If I choose to not protect myself , am I enabling murders and evil to flourish? Life and death, peace and war, these things are necessary for the engine of reality to continue to cycle. Living itself is a fight against death- would you deny death it due?
If you are in Oil industry you are helping military projects. Irrelevant because 99% of the use for that activity is non-military. In such cases military has million options if you refuse.
I'm not quite sure why this is downvoted, although I understand the nuance, it seems an interesting and related point.
Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects? ISTR reading something recently about it being legally questionable to discriminate between who can accept a license, but that was in the context of allowing open source for non-commercial purposes.
I don't think the idea of free software and banning specific uses is compatible. OSI also says that they require no such discrimination: https://opensource.org/osd (points 5, 6)
Crockford’s original JSON licence banned the use of the technology for evil, but IBM’s lawyers knew that a bunch of their projects couldn’t be guaranteed to be 100% evil-free and negotiated an exemption.
I imagine that someone who wants to prevent use of their work by the military would not be concerned over whether something is technically not open source or not.
> Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects?
This question is an oxymoron.
Both the definition of open source (by the Open Source Initiative) and the definition of free software (by the Free Software Foundation) explicitly forbid discriminating against any person or a group of people for software to be considered as open source / free software.
I don’t think you realize the security of our country has been built by hundreds of thousands of mechanical and electrical engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. Sure, working on military contracts may include uncomfortable problem spaces. But is it morally wrong to work on contracts that ultimately protect American lives?
Do you sincerely believe that us dropping bombs in the middle east is "protecting American lives"? If anything, it's spawned a whole generation of terrorists who hate the US for destroying their country.
The best way to protect Americans would be for our country to get out of expensive, overseas wars and invest that money in healthcare and ending the drug war, things that actually kill Americans in large numbers.
As an Israeli, I believe that US intervention in the long term and the fact we were stuck in a proxy of the cold war did us mostly harm.
While we see the US as an ally here - we haven't traditionally been at war with Arab countries and I think a big part of it was the influx of military equipment from the US to Israel and from the USSR (and later Russia) to the surrounding countries. (This is an oversimplification but for brevity - I opted for just the gist of things)
Intervention in Iran and conquering it and installing a puppet government (the Shah) also did more harm than good in retrospect.
I believe that if the US exported more education and equalizers (like more accessible MOOCs, better infrastructure companies to get work there, more remote position etc). It would both be more competitive economically and would contribute more to middle-east stability.
No Israel hasn't been at war with its neighbouring Arab countries for a long time. They periodically attack Hezbollah, there is tension with Syria at the moment and obviously they are still occupying Palestine. However Egypt for example helps Israel with the Gaza blockade by not opening the Palestine-Egypt border.
And the New York Time's view on this issue is also understandable, but I sincerely believe that had it not been for US and its ventures abroad, we(over here in Europe) wouldn't need defending. Like when US wants to build anti-missile defense systems in Europe, and goes "look, we're just trying to save you from strikes from Middle East guys!" - great, but why would Middle East strike Poland for example? Oh that's right, because we're participating in every US war in that region. Great.
It's basically US stirring trouble all over the world and then saying "look how great we are for defending peace across the globe!".
Yours is equally naive, but understandable viewpoint :) If anything, America's role is destabilising (see attacking Iraq on false pretenses that destabilized Middle East and helped ISIS rise to power). The same goes for other wars waged by US: they are started to protect American economic interests, long term consequences be damned.
What you and the other comment seem to miss is that there's nothing fake about the military which actively works for its citizens. But maybe it's all a big joke to you...
I think you'll find quite a few people would find it is quite a stretch.
The attack was planned by a group that wasn't the internationally recognized leadership of any country, and they hid in a war-torn country whose government was being violently contested. And the Taliban were also not recognized, at least not officially, as the leadership of Afghanistan.
Sure, there will always be people who think this not "real" war. But that's an irrelevant classification detail to the belligerents or the people caught up in the collateral damage.
But think of how much better off we'd be today if we hadn't treated it like one.
9/11 was not an act of war. It was the work of a few deranged cultists who got lucky, nothing more and nothing less. Our response was equivalent to reacting to the Branch Davidians by bombing the Vatican.
An act of war by whom? Which nation? Osama Bin Laden was trained in the United States by Reagan's authority when he funded/supported the Mujahadeen in a proxy war against Russia.
Fast-forward 20 years to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is funded by his family, and by other rich Saudis, which means the government of Saudi Arabia because all Saudi wealth is owned by the House of Saud.
But they're our allies, so instead, we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers were from either country. To get approval, we lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, which we never found, because they didn't exist.
I'm not really following your war narrative, but I am finding a lot of cronyism and false flags.
I fully agree with your assessment of the reaction (or lack thereof, and its reasons) to 9/11 by the GWB administration. It is well supported by the testimony of Richard Clarke [1] and by the investigations of senator Bob Graham [2] [3] so I don't understand why your comment gets flagged.
My point was limited in scope to the 9/11 attack itself. I think terrorism on that scale can be classified as assymetric warfare.
Warfare predates nation states. Today, most of the world is parceled into nation states. But violent non-state actors never ceased to exist. And therefore we shouldn't limit our definition of warfare only to war between nation states.
No but in the context of Google refusing to work for the US DoD, it's pretty clear that most of the posters in this thread are talking about the US DoD/Silicon Valley relationship. Further, a comment like "I always tell employers I won't work for the military..." has a significantly different meaning if we're talking about Swedish tech companies and the Swedish military than if we're talking about US companies, so it would probably have been helpful to clear up the setting in this context.
> But is it morally wrong to work on contracts that ultimately protect American lives?
Would love to work on actually protecting American lives but at this point Pentagon in an unaccountable monster that has actually funded terrorist organisations and has made America (and rest of the world) unsafe. Not to mention I find it morally reprehensible that our young kids are dying in distant third world countries like Iraq, Afganistan and Syria and involved in killing thousands little kids and innocent civilians in the name of "protecting American lives".
And if I were hiring, I'd certainly think less of you for taking that stance.
Picture this: we're deep in the Cold War era, and Ronny Raygun is the president. The Star Wars initiative is in full swing. Nuclear mishaps and near-misses are still an all-too-frequent occurrence. Nena's red balloons are ready to fly. The President has just gone on the air and promised to "Outlaw Russia," and that "The bombing starts in five minutes." Some officers from the Pentagon approach your company's management and ask them to bid on a project that will involve launching dozens of military satellites equipped with atomic clocks, designed to locate any person, place, or thing on Earth at meter-scale accuracy.
Do you threaten to quit the company, lecture everyone who will listen about the potential for misuse of such dangerous technology... and miss out on the chance to contribute to GPS?
Or, how about a few years earlier, when they ask you to work on a colossal air-defense computer system using technology that hasn't even been invented yet. They want to use computers to vector fighters to intercept approaching Soviet bombers, and to target missiles to kill the ones the fighters miss. It's obvious to anyone not in uniform that the whole idea is insanely stupid, wasteful, and destabilizing. They want to spend $50 billion to develop a system that guarantees one whole 'nine' of uptime, that can be trivially jammed or disrupted, and that will literally be obsolete the day they turn it on since it can't deal with ballistic missiles.
So you tell them, "No, I don't want to work on SAGE. Peace out and fuck off." As it turns out, the system is indeed useless at its stated purpose. The spinoffs, on the other hand, not only revolutionize the entire IT industry, but create it. The next thirty years' worth of progress in computer architecture, memory and storage, networking, display and human interaction, and fault-tolerance is traceable directly to this boondoggle. All of these things would probably have taken decades longer to evolve without military funding and backing. Nobody dies as a result, but a bunch of your coworkers do get to play with a lot of cool toys.
Then there's the whole ARPAnet thing, funded by DoD to survive nuclear holocaust, asteroid strikes, plague, fire, and famine... any threat imaginable by anyone other than telecom-industry lobbyists.
Even the very wise cannot see all ends, and that goes for modern-day hippies too.
> And if I were hiring, I'd certainly think less of you for taking that stance.
If you don't want to hire me because of this fact, I am perfectly fine with that. In fact, that is exactly what I and the OP would want. I do not blame you for working on military projects. You are free to do that, and I think no less of you for it. But by the same token, the OP and I are free to not wanting to work on military projects.
If you want to judge people for their personal preferences, that is your choice to make. They might reciprocate, though.
Yes, I guess in the same way the people who fought for democracy in 1980s Poland were just freeloaders, instead of embracing communism and contributing to the cause they wanted to change something. They potentially even benefited from communist policies while actively fighting against them! What a hypocrisy!
If you couldn't guess, my point is - if you want to change the system(in this case - the US military hegemony) you need to start by...not participating in it, even if people call you a freeloader for it.
As if there is some sort of moral equivalence between a communist regime and the US. Was that regime interested in keeping the people safe, or just keeping itself in power? Give me a break.
Hegemony is essentially a zero sum game. If your goal is to displace the US from that position, then who do you think you'll be left with?
No, I'm saying you are denying people who want to change the current status quo the right to do so by calling them freeloaders. Like, I don't think it's difficult to see that pretty much any political change would be impossible in the world if everyone had your approach.
>>Was that regime interested in keeping the people safe, or just keeping itself in power
That just demonstrates a lack of political knowledge on your behalf, but I'll give you a break on that, like you requested. Communist government wasn't all bad, there's a reason why plenty of people yearn for return of the "good old days" - it has succeeded in many of the "for the people" goals, but failed spectacularly at others. Just like US succeeds in certain areas(freedom of speech) but fails completely at others(making sure everyone has access to healthcare and education). It's not as far fetched comparison as you'd imagine.
>>If your goal is to displace the US from that position, then who do you think you'll be left with?
Hopefully someone who doesn't get us into random wars we have no interest in. Like, EU could finally go for the full unity, get a proper army and stand on its own without US interventionism.
> No, I'm saying you are denying people who want to change the current status quo the right to do so by calling them freeloaders
Changing the status quo is a political action. The military largely isn't political, they are a tool of the politicians, a loaded gun that the politicians point and sometimes shoot. The focus on the military is simply incorrect.
> Communist government wasn't all bad, there's a reason why plenty of people yearn for return of the "good old days" - it has succeeded in many of the "for the people" goals, but failed spectacularly at others
Very debatable, but your argument is simply invalid. Many also yearn for "the good old days of racial segregation", but that doesn't somehow imply racial segregation succeeded at some things that we ought to admire.
> Was that regime interested in keeping the people safe
Interesting that you think the US military's operations over the last 100 years have been about protecting its citizens instead of protecting the financial interests of the 0.1% ruling class.
I don’t disagree that a lot of technological benefits have come out of military technology, it’s just that your comment completely ignores the death, destruction and calamity that’s also arisen. You’re fine to believe that the military is a net benefit for society, that’s your choice. I just don’t, and that’s mine. And while yes, I’m sure you’d think less of me in an interview situation that’s not been my general experience of hiring managers.
I don’t disagree that a lot of technological benefits have come out of military technology, it’s just that your comment completely ignores the death, destruction and calamity that’s also arisen.
Let me know when you find a job where you know your work will never be misused.
Meantime, your comment completely ignores the irony inherent in having been made over a network that was created by people you reflexively refuse to work for.
These employees are free to exercise their right to (not) work for whomever they want, but the certainty they express (as well as most commenters here) in their own self-righteousness seems misplaced to me. There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement.
Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?
Granted, as stated in the first sentence, I'm not in favor of compelling anyone to work for any purpose, let alone military ones. But to pretend such a lien doesn't exist strikes me as somewhat selfish/narrow-minded in its own right. For that reason, I think the ostensible certainty that these employees (and their abundant proponents here) have in their convictions seems a little naive to me.
There's also a real chance (though perhaps small) that an industry-wide refusal to cooperate with the US military could have disastrous consequences for the world, and that alone should give one pause before being so self-assured about such a decision. I agree that there is also a real chance (also perhaps small) that the US military could use the technology with disastrous consequences for the world, but--again--that makes this a difficult ethical conundrum, not the clear right/wrong moral issue as I often see it portrayed as in the industry.
As a Brit, I'm very grateful to the Americans. By antagonising a substantial proportion of the global population, you've really taken the heat off us.
The people of Afghanistan have a long and justifiable tradition of hating the British, mainly thanks to the three Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839, 1878 and 1919. Since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we seem almost quaint by comparison; our brutal imperialism is tinged with a vague hint of nostalgia for the days before cluster bombs and counter-insurgency tactics.
We invaded Iran during the first world war, backed a military coup of their government and ruthlessly looted the country for oil, but all of that seems like water under the bridge compared to the CIA's persistent efforts to destabilise Iranian society.
Pakistanis have every reason to hate the British - we imposed a bloody and brutal regime across the Indian subcontinent, then so badly botched the transition to self-governance that at least a million people died. Thanks to a decade of poorly-targeted and possibly illegal drone strikes by the US, nearly a century of totalitarian rule under the British is almost forgotten.
I can't remember the last time I saw a British flag being burned by an angry mob. Your government's decision to remain constantly at war probably hasn't done a great deal for your safety, but it's really distracted attention from our barbarism.
It is fascinating as an American how cold war military spending has basically become so traditional that even when our military budget is larger than the next ten nations combined you have people carrying on about rebuilding and strengthening our military.
Give it fifty or a hundred years and Americans will be thanking the Chinese for the same reasons.
It's slightly misleading to say that because other countries, like China and Russia, aren't as transparent with their budgets and there is some hiding of military spending in other parts of their government, from what I've read.
It’s hard to imagine we secretly spend significantly more than we say we do, because we publicly spend a lot. I’m sure there are some secret projects with secret funding, but they couldn’t be more than a rounding error compared to the amount of money the military officially spends.
Google is at this point not just some US company, but a multi-national one. I'm not a US citizen, so for me the US having a strong military isn't necessarily in my best interests, depending on circumstance.
So what stops me, as a Google customer (which I am), to stop doing business with them, given that I see proof after proof that they are working against my interests?
This is the same problem as with the Snowden leaks. I don't care if Americans feel more safe with the NSA secretly watching their emails via gag orders, if my privacy as a non-US citizen is being violated, therefore at this point absolutely all US companies are suspects, starting with a negative ranking in my book; at this point I always prefer European ones. Also the usual arguments that countries collaborate with each other is bullshit, because in the EU I can sue companies, or my government, for cheap too, whereas in the US I have no rights.
And if you find that acceptable, then maybe balkanizing the Internet isn't such a bad thing after all, lets start with ICANN.
> There's also a real chance (though perhaps small) that an industry-wide refusal to cooperate with the US military could have disastrous consequences for the world
There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
If you don't have an assessment done by experts of what might actually happen, then such arguments are bullshit.
> I'm not a US citizen, so for me the US having a strong military isn't necessarily in my best interests, depending on circumstance.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. What if in the future, my country and USA will be enemies? It is not very probable, but so wasn't a prospect of war in Ukraine, for example. You just don't know how things will develop, and if a company want's to be global, it shouldn't directly support a military of a specific country.
That's not how things are done today. Military technology is shared widely among allies. If we cannot trust our friends, we are doomed.
There might be national secret-sauce here or there, but the major military contractors are all international. Lots of projects involve R&D spread across multiple nations. Things mostly get dicey when looking at nations that are too unstable to trust (Egypt, Pakistan, etc.), or those that are current rivals (Russia, China).
Isn't it the case that the only nation getting an F35 comparable to the US version is the UK? It's unclear if even that version is the same. Everyone else seems to be getting some sort of F35 lite export version, including Australia, Italy and possibly others.
Is that trusting one's friends or are they too unstable to trust?
The US generally does not export its most advanced defense technology. Almost all fighter aircraft exports over the past century have have limitations on its equipment. Generally the receiving country replaces some equipment with their own domestic variants. Israel and Japan do this with their US fighter aircraft.
Trusting an ally with any version of the F-35 is a big thing. The base F-35 is still going to be a very great fighter aircraft.
There is no such thing as an "export version" of the F-35. All F-35s have the same installed mission systems, the same avionics, and the same mission performance. This was one of the big goals of the program -- to give the US, allies, and other friendly nations a common, capable, 5th generation strike aircraft.
That's funny, I've read the claim multiple times in the media amongst the controversy over its procurement. Not least because it took years for the US:UK dispute over technology transfer to resolve during the Bush+Blair years.
Even since resolution there's unprecedented restrictions of maintenance in RAF service, requiring some major components returned to BAe in the US when BAe are a British based company.
The major components returned to BAE in the US are probably related to the AN/ALQ-239 Electronic Warfare suite, which is made by BAE's US subsidiary. BAE UK does not directly control its US subsidiary.
Just because Israel is allowed to add additional equipment to the F-35 doesn't mean anything in terms of the F-35 itself. Which, as I said, is the same as everyone else's.
What if in the future their country ia attacked by the US military for some bullshit made up claims of WMDs? If you weight the outcomes with their probabilities of occuring, they believe that the US military is a net negative. You just have a different cost function and a different pdf of certain events occuring.
Sorry to rain on your parade Google is a "US" company - just because its sets up in Europe to get access to cheap labour and as a lobbying tool "look we employ x people in your country" - doesn't make any difference.
Eu companies do the same German pro union at home hire dodgy American union busters in the UK for example
Legally, absolutely. If the US declared war on all of Europe tomorrow, there's no meaningful question what Google would do.
... but practically and on the ground, the Google employee base is large and international enough that there may very well be employees with friends or relatives in US military hot-zones where the US has not successfully demonstrated sufficient care about civilian casualties. Their desire to only work for the company in relatively peaceful times is pretty understandable.
Nobody wants to wake up one morning and realize they're an IBM employee in 1940.
Does anyone not think of Toyota as Japanese? General Electric is certainly an MNC, but they are quite proudly "American" as is Volkswagen proudly "German."
So, it's silly to think that MNC's, by virtue of their MNC nature, jettison their national allegiance in the ultimate case.
If you want to make the case that they should be truly "multi-national", then we're off to my favorite possible dystopian world, where a corporation becomes a sovereign entity with the power of a state, which is the ultimate conclusion of such thinking.
>Google is at this point not just some US company, but a multi-national one. I'm not a US citizen, so for me the US having a strong military isn't necessarily in my best interests, depending on circumstance.
A multi-national company is still responsible to multiple nations in differing amounts though, no? It shouldn't mean "responsible to no one." And America quite clearly should have some significant claim on Google, even if it isn't all of it (or necessarily even a majority). Furthermore, most of the those non-American countries that Google should be accountable to (i.e. most democratic countries and most developed countries... as that is from where it draws revenue and employees) rely, in large part, on the US military for their own national security.
>There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
This misses the point entirely--which was that whether or not the US military is good or bad for the world is a complicated and difficult question to answer. At the very least, this is clear from the large number of democratic countries who have chosen to mostly rely on the US military for their own national security. So the apparent certainty in the moral correctness of those refusing to work on technology for it is unjustified.
Again, I'm not saying that these employees are necessarily making the incorrect moral decision. I'm saying that the conversations on this topic seem to overlook a lot of the ethical difficulties associated with their choice.
Im sorry but google isn't just active in what you call demcratic countries and which country in Europe does the USA protect, the Ukraine? The last military interaction my home country had with the USA, was be accidentally beeing bombed in WW2. And you did great in protecting the dictatorships south of you, really great. So many democracies had to fall, judt because they were left leaning.
You've been using your military the get cheap resources in the midfle east, ever since the cold war.
So I dont want to work for such a military, even in proxy.
"who have chosen to mostly rely on the US military for their own national security"
I often wonder if statements like this are disingenuous. The US military "polices" parts of the world where American interests lie; ie Natural resources, supply chains, potential markets for American companies to exploit. When you say countries "choose" American military protection you are not considering the considerable economic pressure America can leverage when it wants something you have. In developing countries this can be a difficult choice too. By not spending on military you can spend elsewhere. Even if that means resources end up in the hands of politicians directly; which is no different to any first world country.
Just because some people who don't know any better say the US invaded Iraq for oil does not make it true. And ignoring Iraq, did the US intervene in the Balkans because of natural resources or potential markets? Or in Somalia? Please try and put in a little more effort into your thought process.
The US occupied Iraq for over a decade, and installed a new government. The US spent a little time in the Balkans and Somalia and then gave up. There's a difference.
> The US occupied Iraq for over a decade, and installed a new government. The US spent a little time in the Balkans and Somalia and then gave up. There's a difference.
A similar difference to the one that motivated its even longer occupation of the oil-less Afghanistan.
> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest.
The USA was formed on a basic distrust of the government, including checks & balances, and non-federal armament in the 2nd amendment. It is not allowed to be a single, trusted federal power, but rather one whose powers are defined by limited and explicit allowance, with default powers resting on the distributed states and people.
The notion that the USA should stand in a singular trusted and empowered situation over the rest of the world neither fits with fundamental American concepts, nor notions of robustness in general. Strength of militaries should be distributed among independent allies, not focused on any single point of failure or corruption.
The military strength of the USA certainly benefits the USA. But a singular point of above-and-beyond military strength is not a model of benefiting the world.
One point I haven't seen raised here is that "a strong military" is not a one-dimensional proposition. The military does a lot of things in a lot of contexts, and they don't all have the same moral value.
If someone wants to build better Humvee armor for the US Army, I wouldn't criticize them at all. I don't think there's a reasonable case that better-armored Humvees are worse for the world. (Not least because we proved in 2003 that a lack of proper armor doesn't deter the US from starting wars.)
But I think the work Google engineers are likely to do for the US military is not likely to advance Pax Americana, which is mostly about a nuclear umbrella and secure international shipping lanes. Instead, it's very likely to abet either the drone war or mass surveillance, since those are closer to Google's area of expertise.
Quite a lot of people who are not strictly against US superpower status are still deeply opposed to the specific sorts of action Google would be best-placed to enable. And since they haven't actually signed on with the military, it seems totally reasonable that they would object to doing such work even if they do value a strong US military in other domains.
Defensive technology can shift the balance of power and escalate violence in ways that are hard to predict. Humvees carry armed soldiers, who could act more aggressively if they were safe from retaliation. Reagan's missile defense proposal was criticized for undermining second strike deterrence against US missile strikes, and thus escalating the arms race. Ultimately, there is no technical solution to prevent war. Education, tourism, economic ties, diplomacy, and humanitarian efforts are better ways of promoting peace than military defense.
> Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?
Why do these workers have such a lien, whereas the people who happened to go into a career that isn't useful for the military don't? That sounds quite unfair. I'd say they pay their obligation the same way everybody else does: through taxes. And people who benefited more from that environment will earn more, and subsequently pay more as well.
"There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest."
Then make a case, don't just state that you can and move on as if you did. For example here is my counter argument:
The US is currently stealing children, this is obviously not in the best interests of anyone, womp womp.
"a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world"
Democratic countries like to keep their democracy not be ruled by a tyrant. The US Military is very tyrannical, the CIA has been a massive destabilising force in a lot of democratic countries.
"Given that society created the environment"
The tech companies created their environment, just like their employees spent their time and effort acquiring their skills. You are claiming authority over other peoples work with no justification.
"I'm not in favor of compelling anyone to work for any purpose"
You just stated the opposite. These are hypocritical weasel words so you can walk back your argument.
"There's also a real chance -sic- refusal to cooperate -sic- could have disastrous consequences for the world"
Such as? You make a lot of wild claims with absolutely nothing to back it up.
Your argument is ultimately trying to make a case for totalitarianism as long as the US are the totalitarians.
> Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?
No.
Education ideally is a gift from society to the individual, in the hope that it will be reciprocated, by work, but also by making informed decisions. And those can easily include refusing to work on a project (military or not) if the individual deems it harmful. Harmful to who? To the society that financed the education, to their family, or to "the world"? That's up to the individual to decide, too.
> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement.
That's probably true for US citizens, but I highly doubt non-US folks share that view (at least from a western European perspective I'd say definitely not).
Fellow Western European here, and I understand that sentiment. However, it seems that countries which are closer to Russia or China don't mind the American military nearly as much. See: Baltic States, Sweden, Taiwan. Pax Americana is a thing, even if it's usually overshadowed by completely braindead interventions like the Iraq War.
I doubt that US would help those countries in the war with Russia. US didn't help Georgia, US didn't help Ukraine. It's naïve to expect that US would protect someone on the other end of earth.
Did you kind of forget that Russia pretty much controlled half of Europe not too long ago, and sent tanks to fight citizens when it was needed to maintain "order".
Countries under US rule never faced such severe repression.
That's because the US already took over and genocided the interesting parts of its continent (+ Hawaii), and used covert operations to install friendly dictators across the hemisphere when it needed to maintain "democracy".
I'm genuinely curious - what do you think the world would look like if the US decreased their military capabilities and stopped involvement in any world conflicts or terrorism?
I'm a US citizen and I would like to see the US stop being the worlds police for 5 to 10 years, just to see what the world looks like at the end of that.
I don't know whether it's the truth, but in my country it's universally accepted opinion among many people that most middle-east terrorists are created and financed by the US. Given the fact that western forces utterly failed to fight ISIS until Russia was involved and then tried to oppose Russia as much as possible (yet Russia still crushed ISIS), it doesn't look very unlikely for me. So one possible way for the world is to have reduced terrorism which might help even the ordinary americans.
No idea, but I'm not convinced it would be worse. Maybe we'd try more international consensus and only do UN sanctioned intervention and peace keeping.
Best way to figure it out might be for the US to try it :) (but it seems to go in a different, likely more dangerous way instead: isolationism from the international scene with increased military spending).
> I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement.
wow. words fail me. I used to see the US as the "big partner overseas". That was 20 years ago. Maybe I'm projecting my own views and development here, but IMHO the picture the US as friendly or even just benign faded over a decade or so, then got utterly destroyed by whatever the heck US politics is today.
Even if one agrees that a "strong US military" is beneficial this doesn't neccissarily includes all forms of warfare.
For example I can argue that a strong military is important to defend the country (or maybe even the West or whatever) while a military made out of drones and robots mixed with AI, driven by a Space Force is too easily deployed in combat, since risk on own loss is low, while the opponent might see civilian casualties, causing more harm than good.
>"Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?"
Yes. And that's the rub. I had the good fortune to work in research for the military for almost 10 years. They have more patience and willingness to adapt than any commercial company I've known. Their time horizon spans a much longer interval than most corporations. Did neural networks out of the PDP groups work in the '80s, and when things were too slow, they went yup and bought a bunch of Mercury computer cards to speed stuff up without squawking or delaying.
Now I do work in stereoscopic machine vision. I'm pretty certain that biological or machine, the lowest levels of the visual stack are just targeting systems based on feedback loops. Here I agree with Dr. Russell at Bezerkely. We must not, can not, make autonomous killing machines because the consequences are potentially too catastrophic. So I refuse to work on anything resembling autonomous mobile weapons systems, as do many many others in this field.
This has happened before - we were playing with enhanced radiation weapons in the '70s and '80s (neutron bomb), and over time pretty much every participant decided it was a very bad horrible no good idea. I would argue that for talented players capable of dragging the future into the present, the issue is not that the military is bad, it's whether a specific application they want is unequivocally bad. It's not about who, it's about what.
> Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?
Which society does have that lien, the one I left behind that fully payed for my education (although almost everything I know about computers I learned on my own) or the one hosting the company I happen to work for right now? What about some years in the future when I move to another company/country?
Militaries, police, and other government security organs have benefits, but they also have downsides. It's not purely up to them which is which. Tools are not neutral, and tool-makers even less so.
The general reputation of private sector weapons makers used to be very low. They were "merchants of death." This comment assumes their legitimacy.
> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement.
Given that the U.S. is being consistently voted as being the biggest threat to world peace, I'd vaguer not. That does not mean we want Russia or China to dominate us instead, it just means the world doesn't want to be bullied by the U.S. either. You do realize that every single empire in history assumed it has a more moral position to bully others that those that came before it, don't you?
I don't know how it reflects in American society, but in the rest of the world the fact that the U.S. killed a million Iraqis here, a few hundred thousand Afghanis elsewhere, enabled the slave-markets of Libya, funded terrorists in Syria and is currently helping to commit genocide in Yemen does not reflect anywhere near great on the U.S.
Some of us actually think that the people from these places are also valid, genuine human beings who deserve to live, so no, many people do not think the U.S. has any moral high ground here. It may be hard to swallow for some U.S. patriots, but I'd say you should be proud of the country and what it is supposed to stand for, rather than being proud of the government, (government != country), and what it is doing in many places.
Despite what many Americans seem to think, you do not have the best healthcare in the world, nor the best education system, nor the best infrastructure and I could go on and on - please focus on that instead of empire building.
One thing I find strange about this is why Google is so keen to get this government business in the first place. They’re amazingly profitable already, one of the most successful companies of all time; is defense work really something that could become another major revenue stream? Given the obvious conflicts with their company culture (obvious to rank and file employees, anyway) it doesn’t seem like a very appealing trade-off. Or is the leadership looking to other potential benefits, like increased leverage for lobbying?
It's like this: Google has to keep growing to justify it's stock price. In order to do that it has to expand beyond search and ads. Google's technical infrastructure is the best in the world in many aspects, so they decided to open it up to other companies. However, other companies don't just come by themselves. That is why Google hired a bunch of sales people. Now these sales people do what they were hired for, they sell including to the government.
Tech companies tends to not just take over an existing market. But to grow it, by opening opportunities that didn't exist before. Like how smartphones created a market for apps, inventing a need that wasn't there before.
I don't see how that's likely to happen with military contracts. What beneficial need are they going to invent?
Google wants in so more senators lobby for them. Anytime you talk about cutting military budgets a whole load of people get on the news and talk about how you're hurting Americans with jobs. Google just wants in on the political action and guaranteed income.
That isn't enough. Due to the frankly idiotic way corporate investors think 'any company that isn't growing must be dying'. Google will need to continue to demonstrate growth forever despite that being impossible. Growing in the ad market is hard because they're already the biggest player, so Google are looking at new things to do. This is just one of them.
> That isn't enough. Due to the frankly idiotic way corporate investors think 'any company that isn't growing must be dying'.
I despise it when I see large companies make business moves purely to "grow". The big ones are roughly the size of the first world, excuse them for not growing a full 20% like they did last year.
Investors are in a bubble of "bigger is better". Who cares if you have a monetization strategy or how good your product is, how big are you? Who cares about the quality of interaction, how much did you get?
You see the social media giants like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc, make UX moves that their dedicated userbase displakes purely because they're trying to tap into the long tail of users. Sometimes it feels like they would prefer 3x the userbase at 1/5 the average interaction quality because moar unique active accounts/month!!111
I would bet this ridiculous obsession with QonQ growth is responsible for half the irritating garbage UX we experience. It tests better for engaging the long tail so it ships. It's why your timelines/feeds refuse to sort chronologically, the casual masses only do drive-bys and need to be hooked/engaged every micro-chance that presents itself. It's why they want to curate your feeds, because most people are turned off by a raw firehose and the best content needs to be front and center when they do glance past it.
It's why Twitter literally runs ads literally telling people how to choose a username[0], because if you have a phone then please create an account, like seriously omgplzcreateanaccountwehavetogrowlikethisquarter!!!
Yes, it seems that the traditional "stocks and shares" approach to funding is only suitable for a particular phase of the development of a business.
Past a certain point it's actually bad for the business, employees and customers. I wonder why businesses don't just seek a more stable funding model once they get there.
Pardon my ignorance but this sounds like just the kind of thing that "Bonds" are for. Long term, slow steady growth. It also sounds like specifically the kind of investment opportunity Warren Buffet seeks out, so there must be some logic to it.
That’s not true. Google is trying to grow because it thinks it still can, and thus investors expect it to. Companies like GE or Maersk have already saturated their market positions, and are now considered value stocks that return dividends, rather than increasing investors stock holding value.
They have businesses in very broad areas, including areas of high growth and innovation. Lack of imagination, poor management, poor judgement, poor execution... That's what is happening. Both are run by greedy people with a dinosaur mentality.
> One thing I find strange about this is why Google is so keen to get this government business in the first place. They’re amazingly profitable already, one of the most successful companies of all time; is defense work really something that could become another major revenue stream?
Why bother with any new products when search and ads are extremely profitable?
I think it makes sense to look at this from the perspective of Google Cloud since I imagine that's where the contracts are. Google Cloud isn't a leader in this space. In cloud, having more customers is a competitive advantage both because of marketing and also because of technology/cost.
With more users, you can share costs more and have better forecasting since any given customer's specific usage will should not affect your total usage assuming customers are fairly similar in size (not true in reality..). Then hopefully you can run closer to capacity, lower prices, and then gain even more customers.
> Given the obvious conflicts with their company culture (obvious to rank and file employees, anyway) it doesn’t seem like a very appealing trade-off.
I don't agree with this to be honest. At least, I certainly wouldn't consider it "obvious". I'm a rank and file employee and I was surprised at the outrage. I still don't really see anything wrong with supporting the government or military but I can understand how this makes some people uncomfortable, especially if they are not US citizens.
> still don't really see anything wrong with supporting the government or military
As a non-American(but citizen of an allied nation), the fact that the US is currently involved in something like 12 regional conflicts(that we know of), some of which could be considered illegal wars of aggression if the US wasn't on the UN security council, in places who's combined wealth is a fraction of just one US state is very worrying to me, and the fact that few, if any Americans share that concern is certainly very disappointing. I had thought Americans better than that in my younger years, apparently not.
> the fact that few, if any Americans share that concern is certainly very disappointing. I had thought Americans better than that in my younger years, apparently not.
I would not be surprised to know that this is correct, but the only thing I can do is speak to my own opinion.
That I see nothing inherently wrong with supporting the government or military does not mean I agree with everything they do.
Perhaps my beliefs are mistaken, but as far as I know the military does not act on its own accord but from orders of elected officials. This being the case, the correct action to me doesn't appear to be weakening the military but to elect people who you think will act in ways you agree with.
Developing military strength is a long term effort, and given the people I vote for likely will not win every time, I don't think going back and forth between supporting or not supporting the military makes sense.
Perhaps this is very naive of me, but I also think that it's entirely possible I don't have the context to know better than those who make these decisions, or I could frankly just be wrong. This being the case I trust that others are still working to the common good even if they do it through means different than I.
To be completely honest, I do not understand why we keep fighting wars or why we want to behave like we are the world police. Nevertheless this behavior seems to continue no matter which party is in office, so I can only assume there's a good reason for it.
Most americans don't know or don't care. I don't know if you've seen the news in our country but it is horrifying. They are more focused on what Trump tweeted or what Melania is wearing than actual geopolitics.
It can be not to leave all of that cake to its main competitors: if Google takes a slice from Amazon and Microsoft, they will grow a little less faster. This applies to every sector, not only government and military.
If you ever played boardgames (especially German style) maybe you'll remember some games when only one player developed some resource unchecked by the other ones. This usually leads to an easy win for that player. Not easy to notice it in the earlier turns but then the differential in income (whatever it is in that game) is so obvious that everybody understands the game is over well before the end.
This makes absolute sense actually. But in one sense it's a game, and in another sense we mostly accept that war is a travesty, and generally very bad news for a civilian population. Analog to this is society, customers, employess etc. why are we tolerating an approach to business that is destructive for all but a few?
This comment taken along with the parent makes it so much more clear to me why everything has to be a competition between world powers... especially in far, far away lands.
Google isn’t “Google”. It is a series of siloed business units. One of those units is encentivised to win government/doj contracts. Google as a whole is wildly profitable. It’s ad platform ensures that. But the unit that is required to win multi-million dollar contracts from the government is less profitable. And that unit needs to justify its overhead just like any business does.
I worked for a company who lost money on their government contracts or at the most broke even. The CEO said that no matter what happened, they'd keep the Government business side moving because large companies need the Government of their city/state/country to look favorably on them. So Google might not make any money on the contract, but it is a pretty great lobbying tool the next time say some radio spectrum comes up for sale by the government. Way back in 2007, Google was bidding $4.6 billion for 22MHz block in the 700MHz range. I can't imagine what 22MHz of bandwidth is going for these days.
Amazon and Microsoft are certainly pursuing the defense market for their computing products. Defense is a half trillion dollar market. It's surprising that anyone is confused why a company would want to be in it.
The air gap itself is so that the military can use Google cloud to run computations that require a higher level of clearance. Those high clearance level computations are more likely to be directly related to combat and AI for drones. Air gap itself is no biggie, but the only reason they're building it is to enable the use of Google cloud for drone AI.
Those high clearance level computations are more likely to be directly related to combat and AI for drones.
No. The closer you are to a bullet the further you are from JWICS.
Aside from the most compartmentalized of special operations, which typically will fall within the purview of an IC member, the majority of the military works either in the open or at the "Secret" level.
There's nothing wrong with Google wanting as many people as possible to use their cloud offering. I suspect the engineers would be happy for most government agencies to use their offering and it makes sense for Google to pursue government contracts. Governments are the ideal cloud consumers, needing to operate at scale and happy with generic solutions as they're not so interested in squeezing out some competitive advantage. Clouds can save governments a lot of money and this is indisputably a good thing. (Even in those case where they might not be happy with a particular agency using the offering they may at least know that they're not implicated as the cloud offering is a general solution that likely does more good than harm.)
Where the balance tips and they become complicit is when they offer customized and specialized solutions that further a particular mission. Here I think good engineers will draw the line as a matter of conscience.
Just a guess, but perhaps being extremely rich and extremely powerful gives you a relatively small social circle, considering the grand scheme of humanity at almost 7.5 billion people. Consider also the allegations of Google being a de facto branch of the state department in When Google Met Wikileaks (2011).
It may be the case these people are all friends or acquaintances and enjoy the opportunity to work with each other.
I still get a bit tense when I remember reading The New Digital Age. (Written, not coincidentally, by Schmidt and Jared Cohen - ex State Department staffer, current Google visionary.)
It is, to an impressive degree, a love letter to the US government. It shows absolute faith in the ability of technology experts to help remake the world, spreading information worldwide for the benefit of all - but only the right information. As Assange put it in a cutting review: "...this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances."
I don't think it's particularly hard to understand Google's high-level engagement with the US government; it represents a chance to diversify revenue while supporting ideological positions Schmidt has openly embraced for years. Nor is it surprising that government-aligned leadership is facing dissent in a professional that's historically been somewhere between suspicious of and allergic to government and surveillance.
Jared Cohen is the driver behind YouTube censorship and making Google/Internet an arm of the US government's propaganda effort. Schmidt has been trying to push his way into world politics as an unelected guru for about a decade.
I want them to have these contracts because I want the smartest people on the planet working to defend our country. This is such a weird and controversial concept to so many people here.
Maybe "many people here" feel that what our military does has little to nothing to do with defending our country, and often puts us at more risk and/or makes the world a worse place.
This is such a weird and controversial concept to so many people here.
The one time our country was attacked in recent memory was on 9/11/2001 and despite our ridiculously large "defense" we couldn't even get a F-16 or two scrambled to protect our biggest and richest city after the first plane hit? It was like 45 minutes later, and <<crickets>> .... Our military is simply not lined up around the border defending our country one bit, it is much too busy building and defending an empire around the world that, honestly, doesn't do that much for Main Street, USA.
And I suppose you think that our invading soveriegn nations and causing civilian deaths in the 6-figures doesn't piss off the next generation and lead to more terrorists? Oh, and we have a bad habit of losing weaponry in countries all over the world too...what happens to all that, whose hands does it fall into? I could go on. and on. and on. and on.
Why would a defense force put you more at risk? The world is not a gentle place and it takes less than 30 seconds of browsing international headlines to see that. The chaos is kept in check through violence and the military has a direct impact on the peace and freedoms enjoyed by the populace.
Two major nations are rapidly growing powerful tyrants with Putin and Xinping. Do you think these situations just magically go away? Military action has already been brewing in recent years and you either have an answer when it comes to blows or prepare for a lot of misery.
I've come to find that most people (in the US anyway) who think that the military only does harm have never really witnessed or experienced any violence or unrest to see how bad things can be, which is good for them and proof that it works, but it does lead to a strange disconnection as evidenced by the comments and votes.
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but to play devil’s advocate: do you think invading Afghanistan and Iraq, destabilising the Middle East, and declaring “war on terror” has really made the world safer for Americans? I think the ideal you appeal to has been corrupted by commercial interests overriding security concerns.
Yes, I do think we have problems with certain commercial interests overriding public welfare, in pretty much all industries. Bad actors exist everywhere and unfortunately can cause much chaos in such a powerful force as the modern military.
That being said, yes, the world is safer than ever before. There have been many mishaps and sadly some of them are because of pulling back on military action prematurely, leading to a lack of control and a power vacuum that fills the void with much more turbulence than before. Proper leadership and direction still matters, but when it counts the US military is still capable and willing to keep its citizens and many others out of trouble anywhere on the planet, and there is a lot to be said for that.
Is our military capable? We've failed horrendously at two wars in Iraq and one war in Afghanistan. We like to claim that we defeated ISIS, but let's be real, we defeated ISIS in about the same way we defeated Germany, we let everybody else fight for us, then took the credit.
ISIS? PKK & YPG defeated ISIS, and as a thank you we're about to throw them under the bus to stay in the good graces of the Turkish dictator.
We hear a lot about the great might of the US military, and yes I will concede that we do manage to destroy a lot of countries, but we don't seem to win wars.
You cannot be serious?! PKK & YPG would have gotten absolutely crushed without american airpower. Nevermind that USSOF is on the ground, if I remember correctly there are Rangers and some USMC artillery in Syria as well. There were hundreds of airstrikes in the Siege of Kobane alone. You seem to completely misinformed.
The might of the US military is still beyond any other nation, even though that advantage is being threatened recently.
ISIS was very much defeated, and it was actually the lack of military followthrough that let it grow back, although it is still severely diminished. The citizens of those countries that were ravaged are incredibly thankful for US military assistance, and I advise you actually talk to some of them if you haven't before you pass judgement on what war you think was lost.
The US military is mighty, but not terribly effective. I mean, we're 17 years into the second gulf war. 17 years and we still can't pull-out because we screwed up the first one so royally.
I'm writing this from a refugee community center here in Istanbul, the Ad'Dar Center, where I volunteer a couple of hours every day helping helping kids with their lessons, especially in English and Math, cooking, making music, talking, and listening. (To a lesser extent I help people with paperwork and UN refugee processes, but I don't really have the patience for bureaucracy, so I leave that to the experts).
I'm not a political or military expert, but over the past five years 25% of my life was spent backpacking around the middle-east / balkans / black sea / eastern block regions studying languages and music, while the other 75% has been spent living / studying / working in Istanbul. I say this so that you know my perspective is not that of a SJW sipping $10 lattes while pigging out on $20 avocado toasts in SOMA. I haven't been in a war, but I've been through a coup, bribed my way through checkpoints, volunteered at refugee camps in Bulgaria, Greece & Albania, and have spoken to many hundreds of people who have been privvy 1st-hand to direct and indirect American "wars". Back stateside, I grew up in Michigan and 1/2 of our family friends were Afghani & Iraqi engineers who had fled to the US in the 1980s (the other 1/2 were white-trash patriotic biker gangs. Michigan is a weird place).
As you would expect, the feelings and views about America here are quite varied and diverse, but the two constants that come up in every conversation:
- America should stop policing the middle-east, we do more harm than good.
- Supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia makes us the real financiers of terrorism
- America is using the Kurds, our best allies in the war against terror, and will be stabbing them in the back at the first opportunity for political favor
ISIS isn't defeated, by the way, they've just re-branded.
Your comment history seems to show a made-up version of events where you also claim the US did nothing in WW2. I'm not sure what narrative you're trying to push but your personal history seems suspect on this basis, and the anonymous username doesn't help.
You're also conflating foreign policy with military strength. They are not the same and I'm talking about the latter. How that power is used and whether it's always the best idea can definitely be argued, but the fact that the power is necessary and that having it keeps the peace is most definitely not debatable.
When it comes down to it, there is no other military power willing and able to defend its own and others to such an extent, and that alone set it apart. Trying to weaken that stature will only result in greater harm for both US and foreign citizens.
Ignoring your first two comments because they're boring. The third one, can you give me a good argument as to why it is not possible to be "too mighty"? Does this state not just create a heightened sense of fear amongst those countries who see us for the warmongers we are?
By all means, have a strong national defense, but at some point the rest of the world will decide it's time to join together to destroy the 'murikkkan empire? The rest of the world would be a lot happier without having our freedom forced upon them through violence.
The whole thing is great, but your comment particularly reminded me of 4:
“To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.”
30 seconds of glancing at the international news is enough to see that the world is a much more peaceful place than it was in the early 20th century, say.
It is definitely necessary to have a military, even if only as a deterrent, but it can also be counter-productive to depend on the military too much. Those aren’t contradictory statements.
Police != military. Those principles don't really apply here as they are different forces both in duty and power.
A military can only act as a deterrent if it has the capability to actually pull off what it claims, otherwise it very quickly loses standing. It's far better to have the ability to defend and never need it then to be wishing you had it when something goes wrong.
There is no such world where you don't depend on the military. The world is literally controlled through violence. Everything comes down to either direct action or the threat of it (backed by the capabilities as mentioned). Sure you can avoid a lot through diplomatic means, and we should always look for peaceful solutions, but reducing military power is only done at your peril.
The US is (or was) often referred to as the world’s policeman. I think it’s a fairly useful analogy.
Police certainly can (and often do) control the populace through violence and intimidation. It’s also possible to reduce crime via cooperation and consent.
On the world stage, you can regard nations as individual actors and think about what those actors can do to coexist peacefully. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a brutal “survival of the fittest” struggle. The same strategies used by individuals could work at the nation state level too. And they do! Look at the role of treaties, trade deals, mutual migration, art and literature, economic interdependence, etc in maintaining the peace.
I am definitely not saying we don’t need a military. We sometimes need armed police too. But not every police officer needs to carry a gun around.
I don't see how it's useful because it assumes the world is 1 country and we're only policing internally. Everything changes when you take away international borders and the idea of separate nations.
Regardless, I'm not sure where you disagree with the rest of my comment because I do say that diplomacy should come first, but it would be denying reality to suggest that the underlying foundation is not built upon military might and the threat of world-ending firepower. That is the real force keeping things civil and any upset to that balance can cause chaos real quick.
Peace never lasts forever, so you either have a strong military and hopefully never have to use it, or you're just counting down the days until pain and suffering are at your doorstep.
A military can only act as a deterrent if it has the capability to actually pull off what it claims
Consider that the US military has lost every war since it was one of the victors of WW2 along with the UK and Russia. And it didn’t make any difference. All those wars were entirely optional and the consequences of losing them were nonexistent. So what’s it all for, really?
I'm not sure what answer you're looking for. The world isn't static so of course there were consequences.
I'm not saying the military is perfect or that everything it does is right (and much of that is due to the whims of leadership), but that having a strong military is an option that most wish they had because they see first-hand what it's like without. There is no substitute for that power and it's easy to overlook in the several decades and generations of relative peace that has endured so far.
When America was defeated in Vietnam, the next thing that happened was not the NVA burning down the White House. In fact there was never any possibility of that happening nor a threat to the US mainland.
So every other country is some tiny 3rd world nation? You do realize there are major superpowers that are currently kept at bay through the promise of force? Or do you think they’re just being nice?
Nuclear arsenals are part of the military, and what campaigns do you think the US is losing? What materially have we actually lost?
Let's not conflate foreign policy and politics with military might. Things can go wrong from bad leadership regardless of what powers are at command, but those powers at the same time guarantee a certain level of safety and capability on behalf of the nation's interests. I don't see how you can deny that with any sense of reality.
what campaigns do you think the US is losing? What materially have we actually lost?
There's no sign of a stable liberal secular democracy emerging anytime soon in Afghanistan or Iraq is there? At the cost of trillions upon trillions of dollars if you only want to focus on material things. But you can point at an American campaign, Somalia, Vietnam as I've mentioned, any adventures in Latin America... And then there's Ukraine, whose territorial integrity America guaranteed in return for giving up its own nuclear weapons, and yet the Russians waltzed in an annexed the Crimea without any trouble at all.
America does all these things when it is in no danger itself, and millions upon millions of innocent people die because of it, and that is why people have misgivings about working on drone targeting.
I'm talking about having the biggest gun to make sure we can defend ourselves against any threat. You're talking about who uses that gun and for what. That's a fine debate to have, but it's not the same topic.
I agree foreign policy needs work, and there is harm caused, but that has nothing to do with military strength. Perhaps this conflation is the real issue with these threads as people can't seem to separate power and capabilities from its application.
I'm talking about having the biggest gun to make sure we can defend ourselves against any threat
Yes that's fine. If America were facing an existential threat. Defence of one's home/property is the fundamental human right that is the basis of all rights. No question from me there.
You're talking about who uses that gun and for what. That's a fine debate to have, but it's not the same topic.
I believe they are inextricably linked. I would wager many of those reluctant to work on dronetech right now, in the present circumstances of its use, would be perfectly willing to do so if the enemy really were at the gates.
That's the thing, a strong defense keeps the enemy from ever getting to the gates in the first place. If you wait until they're already there, it's too late. In the age of AI delivering exponential advancements, time is only more important.
Kidding aside:
It has already been shown that every century is less violent than the preceding one. This has nothing to do with military per se, but a lot to do with improvement in social norms helped by technologies. Steven Pinker is a good debater on that topic.
Evidence of what? The American people are safe and sound and the interests of America are still protected, and very few countries even think about threatening us here, thanks to a strong military force.
Those ares you mentioned would be better off if they had a strong military to keep order and protect their citizens.
Strange. I've come to find that most who think the modern military is primarily a "defense force" are wholly deluded about what the history actually does and its history.
Sure, it acts in the interests of the state, and as a citizen of that state, it acts in my interests, one of which is my defense. It's a complex definition but I'm interested in what you think is so deluded?
To be fair, America didn't really win WW2, we hardly even fought, mostly we just supplied Hitler with arms, and when that wasn't fashionable anymore, we supplied the allies with arms.. Then we swooped in at the end to take all the credit and the fat construction contracts.
In the 20s and the early 30s (that is to say, before Hitler rose to power), the US brokered efforts to reduce the burden of WWI reparations, as well as inject loans into Germany to help its moribund economy. FDR was opposed to Hitler, and would have brought the US into the war earlier, but US public opinion was firmly isolationist. Even then, the US was neutral really in name only, as it devised conditions for selling weapons that amounted to "only the UK can buy them." Yes, the US logistical support to the Allies was crucial both to keeping them collapsing and actually decisively winning the war, but the US military did prove superior to both Axis and other Allies in several regards, most notably artillery, amphibious assaults, and carrier operations.
It's a little sad when you have to divert your best and brightest away from advancing the state of civilization, to merely defending what you already have.
Obviously that will still advance the state of the art in some areas.
But there are also people outside of your country. Google is a global company, and I am also their customer... It doesn't feel right to support a company, which in turn supports military of another country than mine.
I'm sure if you dug down a little, you would see that you have supported companies that are involved in building weapons for the US...some of those conglomerates have tentacles in everything, all over the world.
Sure. But if they weren’t doing that they wouldn’t be curing cancer, they’d be working on more adtech, etc. The people making a big moral stand here were all perfectly OK with mass surveillance for commercial interests remember.
This is a very tricky issue. I’m certainly no anti-government Libertarian or Tea Partier. But I think there’s a lot of value in keeping institutions separate, so they can act as checks and balances on each other. Just as the different branches of government are separate, and news organizations are independent, corporations should be independent (including from each other -- competition, not cosy cartels).
Google already does a fantastic job protecting their users from hackers, including those from nation states like China and Russia. Rather than cosying up to the US government, they should keep a wary eye on whether to protect their users from US government hackers too.
Also, I’m pretty sure there are already plenty of exceptionally smart people working at the NSA.
I’ll freely admit I’m not totally consistent on this, as I strongly support some big government-run organizations like the NHS (I’m from the UK).
I am only vaguely familiar with these groups, but it seems they exist to bring influential political and business people together to discuss current issues. This doesn't seem so bad, so why whenever they're brought up is it always suggested it should be shameful?
It's a very weird criticism - the membership list for these things is extensive, and it would honestly have surprised me if Schmidt wasn't a member of some of them. The Bilderberg conspiracies are especially funny, because so many of them amount to whispering darkly about stuff that's
literally posted on the Bilderberg Meeting website. It's an off-the-record meeting of the rich and power to talk about the issues of the day, you say? Well yes, that's the stated intention!
On a related note, the parent comment would be way better off looking at Schmidt's co-author on The New Digital Age. Jared Cohen came out of the Department of State, headed up Google Ideas, and is now looking at technical issues around censorship and "countering extremism". It's hard for me to understand how a vague reference to the Bilderbergs could possibly be more meaningful than the very open "hiring State Department staffers" connection.
Why aren't any representatives from the 99.9% of humanity invited to these meetings? Many (most?) would prefer a more democratic sort of world leadership.
