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The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep
- chriselles 8y agoSteve Blank has probably done the best job yet of conveying the historical and intergenerational connections between Silicon Valley and the military: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ The video and slide set do a great job of covering it comprehensively. I had a chance to learn directly from Steve and his Hacking 4 Defense team. BIG changes since WWII when military R&D was nearly all R&D. Today, most R&D is commercial with a lot of duel use potential for Defense(hence the desired ties). It’s quite interesting that military/commercial R&D proportional parity was achieved the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War paused. Here’s an article I wrote that borrows a bit from Steve Blank’s presentation and blog posts. https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect/ https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect... The military is utterly dependent on commercial off the shelf technology modified to suit its needs. How the tables have turned in R&D.
- gumby 8y ago> Today, most R&D is commercial with a lot of duel use potential... I am sure "duel" was a typo but too wonderful not to point out
- chriselles 8y agoGood catch! My bad.....I wasn’t intentionally trying to be cheeky. :)
- cmndrkeen 8y agoEveryone acts like military research is obviously evil. Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe?
- xtian 8y ago> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If that’s all that was going on, maybe not. But when armaments and enterprise become intertwined, the idea of safety becomes subservient to economic growth. We are well past the point that any reasonable person would consider “preserving safety” and have been for some time.
- JetSpiegel 8y ago> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? Does this apply to Iranians doing the same thing for their country?
- jdietrich 8y ago>Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? At best, it's a zero-sum trap. We need to research new weapons because they are researching new weapons because we are researching new weapons.
- v_lisivka 8y agoWe (in Ukraine) need to research new weapons because Russians kills us, and USA and Britain forgot(?) about their promises.
- sametmax 8y ago"evil" assume we attach a moral judgment to the people in the military. But personally I don't. I understand why they do it. I understand the cost. I know the pros and the cons. I don't have a hate for people in the military. I'm not even against weapons, after all I go to the shooting range. I just don't want to have anything to do with the activity of war and I'm lucky enough to have life currently giving me the freedom to do so.
- rumcajz 8y agoIt's nice that in addition to the compulsory Google-bashing this article explicitly points out the other companies involved. Specifically, it mentions Amazon and Microsoft who did much less yet ethics-wise than Google did and yet are rarely called out in the press. Anyone working for Amazon or Microsoft here? Is this just a skewed press coverage? Or is there any dissent going on there?
- adventured 8y agoMicrosoft and Amazon are both less liberal cultures than Google. Microsoft particularly historically has skewed much closer to centrist politically, in its culture, business operations and ideology. Microsoft is more like old IBM in that regard, which makes sense given how old its cultural foundation is (dating to the 1970s) and its history of working with more conservative old-line enterprise businesses. As are Oracle, Cisco, Intel, etc. All will very happily serve the military industrial complex. You won't find any serious dissent in Redmond.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ItsMe000001 8y agoThe deep history of Silicon Valley is the history of WWII and unrestrained debt-based government spending on R&D. Only after that foundation was laid did the private businesses grow on that fertile ground. "Secret History of Silicon Valley" (Computer History Museum, Mountain View) https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo > Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency. > In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today. Since the American public (and not just the American one) considers such kinds of unrestricted government spending as a waste of resources the way left to fund basic research apart from the little bit that doesn't lead to cries of "government waste" - because let's face it, a lot of it is, that's just what happens when you do very basic research with no immediate goal in mind - is military spending. If the role of military research is considered bad I think there has to be a culture shift coming from all voters. As long as they allow such government actions as long as it's "for defense" but not for anything else (at least not even close to the scale) then stuff will get done through the military. Apparently the demand (pull factor) is there, so if the only path is spending through military channels this is what happens. EDIT: Also see @chriselles's comment
- bshepard 8y agoHave the armed forces of the United States subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law? Yes (unanimously). Is the United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam? Yes (unanimously). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal#Conclusions_and_Verdicts_of_the_Tribunal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal#Conclusions_a...)
- _trampeltier 8y agoTodays war are different than WW2. Today is more like the US military needs a country to play with (also NSA, ...). Today is more like let's bomb a random country in the middle east.
- bshepard 8y agoww2 was more like that than you think. Check out Nicholson Baker's "HUMAN SMOKE"
- isuckatcoding 8y agoSurprised that Palantir wasn't mentioned
- lizardskull 8y agoIs it true without the atomic bomb you do not have the chrome browser?
- leroy_masochist 8y agoFrom the title, I thought this was going to be a story about the HP garage, Fairchild Semiconductor, and DOD dollars flooding the Valley with talented engineers in the 60s and 70s.
- huffmsa 8y agoIt's seems like more than a coincidence that the first and most primary AWS installation was built at Dulles Airport in 2002-2003. Right down the road from the newly formed and growing DHS alphabet soup of agencies.
- hodgesrm 8y agoI always figured it was because of Internet connectivity, as Dulles is near the original MAE-East network access point (NAP). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
- DonHopkins 8y agoI haven't been able to dig up a copy, but I remember there was a file named something like AI: HUMOR; LOGO TURTLES that was a grant proposal written by some people in the LOGO group at the MIT-AI Lab, in response to a military request for proposals, about how they could hatch thousands of LOGO turtles to swarm around the battlefield in geometric patterns to confuse and bewilder the enemy. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/llogo.lisp.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/llogo.lisp.txt ;;HATCH CREATES A NEW TURTLE WITH THE SPECIFIED NAME. ALL PROPERTIES OF THAT ;;PARTICULAR TURTLE ARE AS INITIALLY WHEN A STARTDISPLAY IS DONE. (DEFINE HATCH (TURTLE-NAME) (PUTPROP TURTLE-NAME (FILLARRAY (*ARRAY NIL T TURTLE-PROPERTIES) 'HATCH-PROPERTY) 'TURTLE) (OR (MEMQ TURTLE-NAME :TURTLES) (PUSH TURTLE-NAME :TURTLES)) (USETURTLE TURTLE-NAME) (SHOWTURTLE) TURTLE-NAME)
- ruricolist 8y agoWhat Lisp is this? I can understand what it's doing but it's clearly pre-CL.
- lispm 8y agoThat's MACLISP. http://www.maclisp.info http://www.maclisp.info Common Lisp was later a joint successor to MACLISP
- DonHopkins 8y agoNot to be confused with Mac Common Lisp! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Common_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Common_Lisp
- joshe 8y agoIt's weird to put their Darpa funding together with this decision and then lump the whole thing as Google being confused or hypocritical. Darpa funds fundamental research. They try to look ahead to what the military could use in 15 years, but it funds open and fundamental projects. They funded Google when it was 2 graduate students trying to search web pages. It was part of the "Digital Libraries" project to make libraries more usable. They funded research that led to the internet and self driving cars (Darpa Grand Challenge). Right now they are funding exoskeletons and implantable health sensors. This project was to deploy tech to the military that could search drone footage for targets to bomb. It is a purely offensive technology that leads directly to killing people. They chose to draw a line at not using artificial intelligence for weapons that target human beings or for surveillance that violates human rights. Amazon is drawing a different line, something like it's ok to use our AI to target human beings as long as it's legal. It all seems pretty straightforward, they hadn't drawn that line before or needed to and now they did.
- nitwit005 8y agoI guess you can be a "Silicon Valley" company and be located anywhere now? This article lists exactly 3 companies, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Two of those are headquartered in Washington.