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If all the engineers who have a sense of ethic refuse to work for military projects, it implies that military projects will be performed by less ethical than av
by reacweb 9y ago
If all the engineers who have a sense of ethic refuse to work for military projects, it implies that military projects will be performed by less ethical than average people. It is frightening. IMHO, avoiding military projects because of ethic is counterproductive.
- bantunes 9y agoDamned if we do and damned if we don't?
- idlewords 9y agoYou can talk yourself into working on anything at all with this rationalization.
- reacweb 9y agoYes, even if you are completely against something. For example, if you are against GMO and work on this subject, you may give valuable insights (outside of NDA) to other GMO opponents to help their fight to stop GMO. Of course, you risk your job.
- iron0013 9y ago"Hey, somebody's gotta help kill all these people, might as well be me--wouldn't want it to be a bad guy!"
- kevinmchugh 9y agoRichard Gatling thought his most famous invention would cause wars to be shorter and less brutal. More deaths faster would mean faster surrenders, he thought. He is a weapons inventor who thought he was doing something ethical. Instead, he made war and death cheaper. He made it more likely. In his lifetime, machine guns were deployed asymmetrically, making it cheaper for colonial empires to kill large numbers of the colonized.
- supertrope 9y agoAlfred Nobel thought so too with dynamite. "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops."
- sangnoir 9y agoIt appears this is repeating trope- these inventors of highly effective killing machines did not consider that the increased rate of killing would be matched by an increase in mobilizing cannon-fodder. Some genius in the near-future will probably make the same inaccurate prediction about autonomous killerbots, or more likely realistically, cyber-warfare (I hate that term): "Shutting down hospitals, power plants and other critical infrastructure will make wars shorter"
- kevinmchugh 9y agoThis is essentially the argument for targetting the Iranian nuclear program with stuxnet.
- spdionis 9y agoIsn't that what is kinda happening with nuclear weapons though? I would argue we have less armed conflict nowadays exactly for the reasoning in that quote. Dynamite did not really allow for two army corps to mutually annihilate each other in a second, nuclear weapons actually do.
- crpatino 9y agoNuclear weapons did not do that. The fact that several competing countries came up with nuclear weapons roughly at the same time did. The posible results were either MAD or World domination. Also, it could be argued that what MAD achieved was not to stop wars, but to have nucler powers wage their wars through proxies. It is a grim fate, to kill and die for an stated purpose that's nothing but a smoke screen for other people's interests.
- ionised 9y agoYou are not going to change the military from the inside anymore than Snowden could change the NSA from the inside. Thinking you can is naive at best.
- reacweb 9y agoSnowden was inside and his actions have an impact on NSA. I hope these kinds of organisations will understand that if they want to avoid similar whistleblowers, they need to have a better management that listen to their "halflings".
- ionised 9y agoSnowden didn't change anything from the inside. He tried and failed before realising a public-interest leak was the only way.