>"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

>"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.