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I completely support the employees but it is criminal that this NYT article does not mention the extensive roots of Silicon Valley in Pentagon funding. SV as a

I completely support the employees but it is criminal that this NYT article does not mention the extensive roots of Silicon Valley in Pentagon funding. SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. Just recently in the AI space: - Siri was spun out of a Pentagon project -- look up SRI International and CALO. Its purpose: a "soldier’s servant".[1] - Autonomous driving is a direct evolution of Pentagon-funded efforts -- see DARPA Grand Challenge. And it's not just funding the early research, it's procurement like this too. Military procurement has also supported the development of technologies when the commercial market couldn't. Again, I support the employees and hate the fact that in order to develop medical lasers we first have to figure out how to shoot down missiles with them. It's hugely inefficient, could spell our doom, and if you think about it, fundamentally undemocratic. (Gives elites more power to direct taxpayer dollars under the rubric of defense.) But this should be a basic part of any story on how Silicon Valley works. And to think that SV has a large population of supposedly "small government" Libertarian Capitalists... oh, the mental gymnastics in that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO

almost_usual 9y ago
It starts well before Silicon Valley, Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center. http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html
- lliamander 9y ago
  "Engineering" as a concept itself has roots in military application. The term "civil engineer" was coined precisely to distinguish the application of engineering techniques outside of the native context of military works.
  - pteredactyl 9y ago
    Yea, Leonardo da Vinci was a military engineer at one point.
- drawnwren 9y ago
  I bet that number gets a lot bigger if you're willing to consider donations from the defense industry as well. I seem to remember Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's logos displayed on the donors wall in the Huang Engineering Building at Stanford.
bigjimslade 9y ago
While you are certainly correct that the military has provided the genesis of various valuable technologies, it doesn't have to continue to be that way. We could choose to expend our limited resources on more meaningful, and socially responsible, outlets. This move by Google employees is to me a welcome tug against the hopelessly chaotic military machine, and a push back against continued military involvement in SV affairs. I'm happy to see individuals taking this position.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  I'd give such a political movement a 75% chance of being able to disrupt research funding from DARPA and a 5% chance of being able to replace it.
- pteredactyl 9y ago
  I think that's a great idea. And I support it. But something inside me says it's idealistic and not in touch with a baser human nature of something akin to a 'dog-eat-dog' mentality.
guelo 9y ago
Just because the United States has decided in the past that the only way we are allowed to fund tech R&D is through the military budget doesn't mean that it is the only way it could possibly be done.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  No one said it's the only way, but it also doesn't mean military funding should be shunned. As long as it's handled responsibly and has well defined limits.
  - russdpale 9y ago
    But the problem is that is cannot be handled responsibly and in well defined limits.
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      But it has many times in the past.
manigandham 9y ago
Steve Blank has a great presentation on the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" and the military roots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uA2bLrl_9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uA2bLrl_9Q
ajross 9y ago
> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. That's true, but not really in the general way you argue. Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. It exists, sure, but it's not driving meaningful revenue for any of the big players. Silicon Valley since the mid 90's has been a consumer thing only. And even in the genesis of the valley, it was just one serendipitous application (missile guidance systems, which were willing to pay huge sums for early transistors which were literally 100x lighter than vacuum tubes).
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  > Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. This is ridiculously false. SV receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon, the CIA, and a variety of other government agencies annually. Here is just one example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...
  - rieter 9y ago
    Palantir is just a minuscule part of SV ecosystem, entirely insignificant in the overall picture.
  - ajross 9y ago
    You're having a Dr. Evil moment. "Billions of dollars" doesn't go very far in this context. Apple Computer's revenue alone was two orders of magnitude higher than that. Military spending is noise relative to consumer revenue in the valley.
    - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
      Sorry, you just aren't informed on the matter. Not only does the military, CIA and other agencies pour billions in R&D development to SV, the CIA has run a hedge fund for almost 20 years that has significant ownership in hundreds of SV companies. Here is a list of 219 tech companies owned in whole or part by the CIA hedge fund (just the ones they let us know about): https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ Here is their logo, which speaks for itself: https://www.iqt.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/About-venn-diagram-300x279.png https://www.iqt.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/About-venn-di... The CIA hedge fund and billions in R&D money are in addition to an unknown portion of the "black budget" controlled by various spy agencies, which is over $80 billion dollars this year. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-administration-requests-811-billion-toward-b/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin... The truth is that the tech industry is brimming with money from the military and spy agencies - and this is just what we know about.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
>And to think that SV has a large population of supposedly "small government" Libertarian Capitalists Not only that, but when Youtube and Google block content, censor people, or otherwise prevent free speech, the common rejoinder is "they are private companies, they don't have to abide by the 1st amendment". Any company that is received taxpayer money, whether through direct subsidies, grants, partnerership, or any other avenue, ceases to be a "private company". I believe strongly that if you are truly private, and you operate entirely with your own private funds, and wholly-owned, privately purchased infrastructure, you are free to say and do what you want - silence any voice or opinion that you don't like. But once you receive public funds, in any context, along with that comes with the responsibility to the public. Despite being "the way it works" currently, this system is incredibly corrupt and logically inconsistent. In a world where the Constitution was respected, enforced and held inviolate, a company that received public funds (like Google) would not be allowed to declare themselves a private company with total autonomy on one hand, and grab countless millions in taxpayer money in the other.
justonepost 9y ago
The internet itself is an evolution of darpa net.
- hannasanarion 9y ago
  And that means that I have to make anything that DARPA asks for from now until the end of time?
robertkrahn01 9y ago
I can really recommend Waldrop's The Dream Machine [1]. It is a pretty detailed description of the different driving forces that let to the Internet, personal computers, AI research etc. Yes, a lot was influenced by the US military and DARPA, starting with RADAR systems and the need for computation in WW2 and continuing with the cold war, the Sputnik shock and increased research spending afterwards. On the other hand, a lot of the folks involved certainly had no militaristic attitude or intentions. A lot of government funding early on sparked an amazing development, the foundations of the things we work with today. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/0670899763/ref=pd_sim_14_31?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0670899763&pd_rd_r=W27BZ5PQ7S99Q84QE99B&pd_rd_w=weGNx&pd_rd_wg=H8Vet&psc=1&refRID=W27BZ5PQ7S99Q84QE99B https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...
microcolonel 9y ago
ORACLE was a CIA contract, and you can imagine what they did with that probably would make your stomach turn if you knew every detail.
random4369 9y ago
> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation. This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded. We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.
- TuringNYC 9y ago
  Doesn't the recent (last 10yrs) VC splash do that? Hard to tell numbers since military spending has so many routes, but i'd love to see numbers on the two channels.
  - abalone 9y ago
    No, they are not parallel channels. Generally speaking high tech develops over a multi decade timeframe. Govt agencies like DARPA play a lead role in the earliest phase (often measured in double digit years). VCs pick outputs that have commercial potential and pour money into the sector. That’s why it’s wrong to just compare the absolute amounts invested — it’s when it’s invested.
- hueving 9y ago
  >This is a national budget problem Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley. It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.
drtz 9y ago
Nazis gave us Volkswagen. I don't have to support Nazis to own a Porsche in 2018.
- dx034 9y ago
  Because no part of the product was developed during that time. Just the root of the parent company is from that time. For SV it's different. The product itself was funded by the military.
deft 9y ago
Libertarianism is an ideology that relies on mental gymnastics.
- hueving 9y ago
  Every ideology oversimplifies the world. Economics are complex and humans can't reason about emergent behavior from societies of other humans very accurately. However, if you think an ideology is has logical errors and requires mental gymnastics, you likely don't understand it well enough to intelligently criticize it.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It leads to generic flamewars which are basically all the same and therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dba7dba 9y ago
Internet was a creation of DARPA. And that D stands for Defense. I believe the silicon research/production that started Silicon Valley was for military needs. Military paid for it. First Computer of US and Britain? It was funded and created during war for military purposes. And what about China and Russia? Will THEY stop AI research just because Google employees demand it?
- richardw 9y ago
  Neither Ford nor the Right Brothers were military. Xerox PARC wasn't. Tesla isn't. Innovation doesn't need defense support, innovation will come anyway. We just choose to allocate much of our resources to the military so that's where it gets spent. Later we can claim it as a win for defense. A happy surprise benefit of trying to kill each other. All you need is people, time and money. Profit. Many years ago I choose not to work on a local defense project. I found out that the project had ties to Chinese defense. I'm fine with my choice because I find their leadership somewhat oppressive. Another time I saw Iranians on the campus. Another awesome opportunity for interesting work that some might not want to get involved in. I know someone who did work for Mugabe. Hey, cool project. It's easy when you justify it.
  - pteredactyl 9y ago
    To your knowledge. Yes, you need time money and profit. Agreed. But if those things go against the military's goals, or you're unable to convince them otherwise, you're in trouble. At a certain scale you need to have the nod of those in power. It's a fact of reality on this earth. I'm not saying it's good or bad. And I don't know how millions being lifted out of poverty, 10000 miles of high-speed rail in ten years, and so on, in China is necessarily oppressive. Or how the sheer virtue of someone being Iranian makes the project bad. I'm getting a lot of black and white vibes.
    - richardw 9y ago
      > to your knowledge Well yeah but good luck proving PARC was a secret defense contractor. We can cherry pick examples of tech or benefits all day. A few good defense ones doesn't mean defense is good. You can have an oppressive government and still have a lot of good come out of it. China is amazing. Their people still aren't free. In fact you can have a murderous military and still have benefits to humanity emerge. The military is still there to kill people and I'd rather not be part of that. Projects were chosen as examples of countries that are American rivals, for effect and the benefit of US readers. Fun well-funded Chinese research projects might one day kill you. I would be as unhappy working on a defense project for any country, including my own. the point was "someone on the other side might have the same justifications". We'd all be better off if the world sent more defense money to other parts of our lives. It's not the defense aspect that makes the projects good or possible, it's that defense has our money. Send the money directly to tech or research, same benefits would emerge. We can't change our countries' budgets but we can stop idolising the military as funder. Sure DARPA but they hooked up a few universities. Pics of cats and porn (probably not military but good luck proving otherwise) took us the rest of the way. > Black and white vibes Play the ball not the man
pteredactyl 9y ago
Agreed. NYT is drivel, table scraps us plebes get to the actual game that is being played. I've called SV the military's generalized R&D department.
tnecniv 9y ago
I mean, if you want to go back far enough, many major results in optimization theory and operations research started in one form or another as a project to aid with military logistics. Now those are fundamental tools inside and outside SV.

almost_usual 9y ago

It starts well before Silicon Valley, Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center. http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html

lliamander 9y ago
"Engineering" as a concept itself has roots in military application. The term "civil engineer" was coined precisely to distinguish the application of engineering techniques outside of the native context of military works.
- pteredactyl 9y ago
  Yea, Leonardo da Vinci was a military engineer at one point.
drawnwren 9y ago
I bet that number gets a lot bigger if you're willing to consider donations from the defense industry as well. I seem to remember Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's logos displayed on the donors wall in the Huang Engineering Building at Stanford.

bigjimslade 9y ago

While you are certainly correct that the military has provided the genesis of various valuable technologies, it doesn't have to continue to be that way. We could choose to expend our limited resources on more meaningful, and socially responsible, outlets. This move by Google employees is to me a welcome tug against the hopelessly chaotic military machine, and a push back against continued military involvement in SV affairs. I'm happy to see individuals taking this position.

jjoonathan 9y ago
I'd give such a political movement a 75% chance of being able to disrupt research funding from DARPA and a 5% chance of being able to replace it.
pteredactyl 9y ago
I think that's a great idea. And I support it. But something inside me says it's idealistic and not in touch with a baser human nature of something akin to a 'dog-eat-dog' mentality.

guelo 9y ago

Just because the United States has decided in the past that the only way we are allowed to fund tech R&D is through the military budget doesn't mean that it is the only way it could possibly be done.

ehsankia 9y ago
No one said it's the only way, but it also doesn't mean military funding should be shunned. As long as it's handled responsibly and has well defined limits.
- russdpale 9y ago
  But the problem is that is cannot be handled responsibly and in well defined limits.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    But it has many times in the past.

manigandham 9y ago

Steve Blank has a great presentation on the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" and the military roots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uA2bLrl_9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uA2bLrl_9Q

ajross 9y ago

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. That's true, but not really in the general way you argue. Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. It exists, sure, but it's not driving meaningful revenue for any of the big players. Silicon Valley since the mid 90's has been a consumer thing only. And even in the genesis of the valley, it was just one serendipitous application (missile guidance systems, which were willing to pay huge sums for early transistors which were literally 100x lighter than vacuum tubes).

StanislavPetrov 9y ago
> Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. This is ridiculously false. SV receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon, the CIA, and a variety of other government agencies annually. Here is just one example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...
- rieter 9y ago
  Palantir is just a minuscule part of SV ecosystem, entirely insignificant in the overall picture.
- ajross 9y ago
  You're having a Dr. Evil moment. "Billions of dollars" doesn't go very far in this context. Apple Computer's revenue alone was two orders of magnitude higher than that. Military spending is noise relative to consumer revenue in the valley.
  - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
    Sorry, you just aren't informed on the matter. Not only does the military, CIA and other agencies pour billions in R&D development to SV, the CIA has run a hedge fund for almost 20 years that has significant ownership in hundreds of SV companies. Here is a list of 219 tech companies owned in whole or part by the CIA hedge fund (just the ones they let us know about): https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ Here is their logo, which speaks for itself: https://www.iqt.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/About-venn-diagram-300x279.png https://www.iqt.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/About-venn-di... The CIA hedge fund and billions in R&D money are in addition to an unknown portion of the "black budget" controlled by various spy agencies, which is over $80 billion dollars this year. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-administration-requests-811-billion-toward-b/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin... The truth is that the tech industry is brimming with money from the military and spy agencies - and this is just what we know about.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago

>And to think that SV has a large population of supposedly "small government" Libertarian Capitalists Not only that, but when Youtube and Google block content, censor people, or otherwise prevent free speech, the common rejoinder is "they are private companies, they don't have to abide by the 1st amendment". Any company that is received taxpayer money, whether through direct subsidies, grants, partnerership, or any other avenue, ceases to be a "private company". I believe strongly that if you are truly private, and you operate entirely with your own private funds, and wholly-owned, privately purchased infrastructure, you are free to say and do what you want - silence any voice or opinion that you don't like. But once you receive public funds, in any context, along with that comes with the responsibility to the public. Despite being "the way it works" currently, this system is incredibly corrupt and logically inconsistent. In a world where the Constitution was respected, enforced and held inviolate, a company that received public funds (like Google) would not be allowed to declare themselves a private company with total autonomy on one hand, and grab countless millions in taxpayer money in the other.

justonepost 9y ago

The internet itself is an evolution of darpa net.

hannasanarion 9y ago
And that means that I have to make anything that DARPA asks for from now until the end of time?

robertkrahn01 9y ago

I can really recommend Waldrop's The Dream Machine [1]. It is a pretty detailed description of the different driving forces that let to the Internet, personal computers, AI research etc. Yes, a lot was influenced by the US military and DARPA, starting with RADAR systems and the need for computation in WW2 and continuing with the cold war, the Sputnik shock and increased research spending afterwards. On the other hand, a lot of the folks involved certainly had no militaristic attitude or intentions. A lot of government funding early on sparked an amazing development, the foundations of the things we work with today. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/0670899763/ref=pd_sim_14_31?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0670899763&pd_rd_r=W27BZ5PQ7S99Q84QE99B&pd_rd_w=weGNx&pd_rd_wg=H8Vet&psc=1&refRID=W27BZ5PQ7S99Q84QE99B https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...

microcolonel 9y ago

ORACLE was a CIA contract, and you can imagine what they did with that probably would make your stomach turn if you knew every detail.

random4369 9y ago

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation. This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded. We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.

TuringNYC 9y ago
Doesn't the recent (last 10yrs) VC splash do that? Hard to tell numbers since military spending has so many routes, but i'd love to see numbers on the two channels.
- abalone 9y ago
  No, they are not parallel channels. Generally speaking high tech develops over a multi decade timeframe. Govt agencies like DARPA play a lead role in the earliest phase (often measured in double digit years). VCs pick outputs that have commercial potential and pour money into the sector. That’s why it’s wrong to just compare the absolute amounts invested — it’s when it’s invested.
hueving 9y ago
>This is a national budget problem Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley. It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.

drtz 9y ago

Nazis gave us Volkswagen. I don't have to support Nazis to own a Porsche in 2018.

dx034 9y ago
Because no part of the product was developed during that time. Just the root of the parent company is from that time. For SV it's different. The product itself was funded by the military.

deft 9y ago

Libertarianism is an ideology that relies on mental gymnastics.

hueving 9y ago
Every ideology oversimplifies the world. Economics are complex and humans can't reason about emergent behavior from societies of other humans very accurately. However, if you think an ideology is has logical errors and requires mental gymnastics, you likely don't understand it well enough to intelligently criticize it.
dang 9y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It leads to generic flamewars which are basically all the same and therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dba7dba 9y ago

Internet was a creation of DARPA. And that D stands for Defense. I believe the silicon research/production that started Silicon Valley was for military needs. Military paid for it. First Computer of US and Britain? It was funded and created during war for military purposes. And what about China and Russia? Will THEY stop AI research just because Google employees demand it?

richardw 9y ago
Neither Ford nor the Right Brothers were military. Xerox PARC wasn't. Tesla isn't. Innovation doesn't need defense support, innovation will come anyway. We just choose to allocate much of our resources to the military so that's where it gets spent. Later we can claim it as a win for defense. A happy surprise benefit of trying to kill each other. All you need is people, time and money. Profit. Many years ago I choose not to work on a local defense project. I found out that the project had ties to Chinese defense. I'm fine with my choice because I find their leadership somewhat oppressive. Another time I saw Iranians on the campus. Another awesome opportunity for interesting work that some might not want to get involved in. I know someone who did work for Mugabe. Hey, cool project. It's easy when you justify it.
- pteredactyl 9y ago
  To your knowledge. Yes, you need time money and profit. Agreed. But if those things go against the military's goals, or you're unable to convince them otherwise, you're in trouble. At a certain scale you need to have the nod of those in power. It's a fact of reality on this earth. I'm not saying it's good or bad. And I don't know how millions being lifted out of poverty, 10000 miles of high-speed rail in ten years, and so on, in China is necessarily oppressive. Or how the sheer virtue of someone being Iranian makes the project bad. I'm getting a lot of black and white vibes.
  - richardw 9y ago
    > to your knowledge Well yeah but good luck proving PARC was a secret defense contractor. We can cherry pick examples of tech or benefits all day. A few good defense ones doesn't mean defense is good. You can have an oppressive government and still have a lot of good come out of it. China is amazing. Their people still aren't free. In fact you can have a murderous military and still have benefits to humanity emerge. The military is still there to kill people and I'd rather not be part of that. Projects were chosen as examples of countries that are American rivals, for effect and the benefit of US readers. Fun well-funded Chinese research projects might one day kill you. I would be as unhappy working on a defense project for any country, including my own. the point was "someone on the other side might have the same justifications". We'd all be better off if the world sent more defense money to other parts of our lives. It's not the defense aspect that makes the projects good or possible, it's that defense has our money. Send the money directly to tech or research, same benefits would emerge. We can't change our countries' budgets but we can stop idolising the military as funder. Sure DARPA but they hooked up a few universities. Pics of cats and porn (probably not military but good luck proving otherwise) took us the rest of the way. > Black and white vibes Play the ball not the man

pteredactyl 9y ago

Agreed. NYT is drivel, table scraps us plebes get to the actual game that is being played. I've called SV the military's generalized R&D department.

tnecniv 9y ago

I mean, if you want to go back far enough, many major results in optimization theory and operations research started in one form or another as a project to aid with military logistics. Now those are fundamental tools inside and outside SV.