7 ms·

A lot of great tech has came out of military projects like GPS and virtually all of space technology. Arguably, a lot of these tech would not have been develope

A lot of great tech has came out of military projects like GPS and virtually all of space technology. Arguably, a lot of these tech would not have been developed otherwise because either there was no commercial use case or capital requirements would have been too high. A lot of research is funded by programs like DARPA. There are several military projects that can actually prevent wars and save lives (drone surveillance in war zone being one). I think companies need to take balanced look.

amarant 8y ago
don't forget ARPANET, which later evolved to a little something we call the internet. I see the temptation in avoiding military contracts, but "optics" aside, it's not all bad. that said we probably shouldn't give the armies too many autonomous killer-bots. I mean it would almost definitely drive some cool technologies being developed for eventual civilian use that would be very difficult to fund privately..but also SkyNet.. basically, I agree with everything you just said, but wanted to elaborate a bit further :)
- ataturk 8y ago
  Granted, but we also got the stuff like backscatter x-ray machines, which I still don't think are safe. War is a racket. I have avoided working for the MIC mainly because of the huge amount of waste. My second reason is because I don't like the idea of building things that kill people on purpose even though I know sometimes some people need killing.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Cute comments about SkyNet aside, real people are killed every day in military conflicts around the world, often by US weapons. It’s grotesque to me to muse about the cool tech we could get at the expense of other people’s lives.
  - amarant 8y ago
    on the other hand, I'm fairly sure that the knowledge spreading enabled by the internet has (indirectly) saved quite a few lives too! Military technology doesn't necessarily mean "tech to kill". it could also be tech to save (from natural disasters, horrors induced by already-existing-weapons, etc.) i agree that we should avoid developing tech that has the exclusive intent of killing, which is what I was trying to imply with my cute SkyNet comment. edit to clarify: for any given military tech, one needs to consider the possible ramifications. If a given technology is deemed benign, I see no harm in developing it, even if it is for the military. on the other hand, if it has a big potential for destruction, it's not worth developing it for the military, even if it does come with the upside of enabling cool tech to be developed. autonomous killbots is a perfect example, which would probably advance the robotics field at a accelerated rate, but it provides such a huge potential for destruction that it's simply not worth it.
    - extralego 8y ago
      Not seeing the harm and there being no harm are two very different things. The latest episode of Citations Needed Podcast (http://citationpod.com/ http://citationpod.com/) does a good short review of some particularly agregious situations in which the US military bombs countries then the same or related parties praise themselves for their humanitarian response to the aftermath. Worse, when you bomb a country, for example, it should be obvious that this sets back all of humanity to some degree. Apparently, it’s not obvious. But Earth and humanity are systems, and this analogy is such that we can look at any other system and find the same outcome. Damage one part, and effects will be felt in the others; often not at simultaneously. Some parts will be stimulated only to be depleted later (like the immune systems in our bodies) and require attention. The US is experiencing this sort of reversal right now, though some are in denial or haven’t caught on to that yet.
      - amarant 8y ago
        i mean, sure, but that's hardly unique to military contracts though, is it? look at self-driving cars for example. we had that uber-crash recently, that cost a woman her life. does this show us that tech development in the private sector is obviously bad? it's a little more case by case than that. which is why, as op so nicely put it, "companies need to take a balanced look".
furyg3 8y ago
I don't find this line of argumentation ("But the military builds great stuff, too!"), not to be very convincing. They also build a lot of really, really horrible stuff, and most of the good stuff was actually built to support the horrible stuff. > According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as Deputy Director and Director of DARPA (1967–1974) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development": > The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making. I love me some internet, but would I trade it for the possible annihilation of humankind? I'm being facetious, but only slightly; the fact that we wouldn't end up wiping humanity from the face of the earth was far from evident at the time (and still looms). You can probably run a calculation on how many lives military tech has saved (GPS, drones, evac helicopters), and it may come out as a net benefit, but I'm not sure you'd be able to convince an Afghani that his family's lives were worth an incremental technology improvement. I choose to believe that we are capable of taking on large experimental projects without them being connected to aggression.
- afarrell 8y ago
  Wouldn't an increase to the survivability of the command-and-control structure of the US nuclear forces mean that it would be harder for another power to think they could succeed in a nuclear attack on the US? Wouldn't that tend to decrease the likelihood of war?
  - sdkjskf 8y ago
    Only if strategic balance is maintained. Otherwise there is a huge incentive for the stronger party to strike and win all The MAD equilibrium is very fragile!
- torstenvl 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but you're disregarding even the most rudimentary rigor in coming to these conclusions. Survivability is exactly what it sounds like. It isn't some conspiracy-theory euphemism for the "annihilation of humankind." It's a key component of MAD and is the one and only reason the Soviets didn't destroy the Western world from Cuba. This is well-documented. An Afghani is a unit of currency and has neither convictions nor family. I wouldn't be so pedantic usually, but since your very point seems to be the alleged dehumanization of such people, it seemed appropriate to point out that maybe we shouldn't refer to people as inanimate objects. As far as a civilian Afghan family's lives? That's what the DoD is trying to protect. Explain to me why you think more civilians should die, rather than developing better technology to help distinguish them. The Reuters journalists in the famous "Collateral Murder" video should not have been killed. I suspect you and I are in agreement on that. What I absolutely fail to comprehend is how you seem to think Google et al. have a moral obligation not to help keep that from happening again.
jonbarker 8y ago
A lot of economic growth also came out of World War II, but this isn't something we want to repeat.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  I'd beg to differ with this; it made the US a superpower because it completely decimated everyone else. Broken window fallacy-- Europe would have continued being more of a world producer if not for the lost lives, scientists, and manufacturing which could have more quickly made more advances. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)
  - jacobush 8y ago
    First time I have heard the broken window thing used like that, on that scale ... but it might work!
    - LanceH 8y ago
      Yea, all we need to so is kill off tens of millions of the most able people in the developed worlds to spur economic growth. It just doesn't work like that. WWII was value destruction at a massive scale. All that industry could have been building industry and we'd have had the 50's and 60's a decade earlier but not just for the US.
      - jacobush 8y ago
        To be fair I read the broken-window comment so as so mean exactly what you said? A lot of broken windows in Europe, so people there were less keen on keeping things intact and more likely to litter and ... stuff.
  - jonbarker 8y ago
    I don't think the winner matters; if the US had lost, economic growth would have resulted anyway, just elsewhere.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I disagree with your sentiment. While I appreciate the technology that military investment has given us, I’d trade it all to get back the lives lost by the other technology the military has developed.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
That's not because the military technology was intrinsically good though, but rather a side effect of the massive budgets that governments will give towards military R&D. If the government threw just as much money into civilian research, we'd likely get just as much good, without finding more efficient ways to kill each other. For instance, Australia has CSIRO [1], which is sort of like DARPA, but without the military bent. They've managed to invent all sorts of cool new stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO
- ajdlinux 8y ago
  And the US has the NSF, while Australia also has DSTO... (I agree though that public civilian R&D funding is woeful)
- ryacko 8y ago
  Intel corporation is still larger than DARPA and DARPA is much more diffuse. The impact shouldn't be that great.
  - jackpirate 8y ago
    A better comparison would be Intel Research and DARPA or Intel and the whole DOD. By either of those measures the military budget is much bigger.
- mmirate 8y ago
  > If the government threw just as much money into civilian research, we'd likely get just as much good, without finding more efficient ways to kill each other. Do I understand correctly, then, that if we continue throwing that money into military research, we not only gain the same civilian benefits, but also prevent the occurrence wherein someone else finds an efficient way to kill us before we find an efficient way to defend ourselves from it?

amarant 8y ago

don't forget ARPANET, which later evolved to a little something we call the internet. I see the temptation in avoiding military contracts, but "optics" aside, it's not all bad. that said we probably shouldn't give the armies too many autonomous killer-bots. I mean it would almost definitely drive some cool technologies being developed for eventual civilian use that would be very difficult to fund privately..but also SkyNet.. basically, I agree with everything you just said, but wanted to elaborate a bit further :)

ataturk 8y ago
Granted, but we also got the stuff like backscatter x-ray machines, which I still don't think are safe. War is a racket. I have avoided working for the MIC mainly because of the huge amount of waste. My second reason is because I don't like the idea of building things that kill people on purpose even though I know sometimes some people need killing.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
Cute comments about SkyNet aside, real people are killed every day in military conflicts around the world, often by US weapons. It’s grotesque to me to muse about the cool tech we could get at the expense of other people’s lives.
- amarant 8y ago
  on the other hand, I'm fairly sure that the knowledge spreading enabled by the internet has (indirectly) saved quite a few lives too! Military technology doesn't necessarily mean "tech to kill". it could also be tech to save (from natural disasters, horrors induced by already-existing-weapons, etc.) i agree that we should avoid developing tech that has the exclusive intent of killing, which is what I was trying to imply with my cute SkyNet comment. edit to clarify: for any given military tech, one needs to consider the possible ramifications. If a given technology is deemed benign, I see no harm in developing it, even if it is for the military. on the other hand, if it has a big potential for destruction, it's not worth developing it for the military, even if it does come with the upside of enabling cool tech to be developed. autonomous killbots is a perfect example, which would probably advance the robotics field at a accelerated rate, but it provides such a huge potential for destruction that it's simply not worth it.
  - extralego 8y ago
    Not seeing the harm and there being no harm are two very different things. The latest episode of Citations Needed Podcast (http://citationpod.com/ http://citationpod.com/) does a good short review of some particularly agregious situations in which the US military bombs countries then the same or related parties praise themselves for their humanitarian response to the aftermath. Worse, when you bomb a country, for example, it should be obvious that this sets back all of humanity to some degree. Apparently, it’s not obvious. But Earth and humanity are systems, and this analogy is such that we can look at any other system and find the same outcome. Damage one part, and effects will be felt in the others; often not at simultaneously. Some parts will be stimulated only to be depleted later (like the immune systems in our bodies) and require attention. The US is experiencing this sort of reversal right now, though some are in denial or haven’t caught on to that yet.
    - amarant 8y ago
      i mean, sure, but that's hardly unique to military contracts though, is it? look at self-driving cars for example. we had that uber-crash recently, that cost a woman her life. does this show us that tech development in the private sector is obviously bad? it's a little more case by case than that. which is why, as op so nicely put it, "companies need to take a balanced look".

furyg3 8y ago

I don't find this line of argumentation ("But the military builds great stuff, too!"), not to be very convincing. They also build a lot of really, really horrible stuff, and most of the good stuff was actually built to support the horrible stuff. > According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as Deputy Director and Director of DARPA (1967–1974) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development": > The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making. I love me some internet, but would I trade it for the possible annihilation of humankind? I'm being facetious, but only slightly; the fact that we wouldn't end up wiping humanity from the face of the earth was far from evident at the time (and still looms). You can probably run a calculation on how many lives military tech has saved (GPS, drones, evac helicopters), and it may come out as a net benefit, but I'm not sure you'd be able to convince an Afghani that his family's lives were worth an incremental technology improvement. I choose to believe that we are capable of taking on large experimental projects without them being connected to aggression.

afarrell 8y ago
Wouldn't an increase to the survivability of the command-and-control structure of the US nuclear forces mean that it would be harder for another power to think they could succeed in a nuclear attack on the US? Wouldn't that tend to decrease the likelihood of war?
- sdkjskf 8y ago
  Only if strategic balance is maintained. Otherwise there is a huge incentive for the stronger party to strike and win all The MAD equilibrium is very fragile!
torstenvl 8y ago
I'm sorry, but you're disregarding even the most rudimentary rigor in coming to these conclusions. Survivability is exactly what it sounds like. It isn't some conspiracy-theory euphemism for the "annihilation of humankind." It's a key component of MAD and is the one and only reason the Soviets didn't destroy the Western world from Cuba. This is well-documented. An Afghani is a unit of currency and has neither convictions nor family. I wouldn't be so pedantic usually, but since your very point seems to be the alleged dehumanization of such people, it seemed appropriate to point out that maybe we shouldn't refer to people as inanimate objects. As far as a civilian Afghan family's lives? That's what the DoD is trying to protect. Explain to me why you think more civilians should die, rather than developing better technology to help distinguish them. The Reuters journalists in the famous "Collateral Murder" video should not have been killed. I suspect you and I are in agreement on that. What I absolutely fail to comprehend is how you seem to think Google et al. have a moral obligation not to help keep that from happening again.

jonbarker 8y ago

A lot of economic growth also came out of World War II, but this isn't something we want to repeat.

brobdingnagians 8y ago
I'd beg to differ with this; it made the US a superpower because it completely decimated everyone else. Broken window fallacy-- Europe would have continued being more of a world producer if not for the lost lives, scientists, and manufacturing which could have more quickly made more advances. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)
- jacobush 8y ago
  First time I have heard the broken window thing used like that, on that scale ... but it might work!
  - LanceH 8y ago
    Yea, all we need to so is kill off tens of millions of the most able people in the developed worlds to spur economic growth. It just doesn't work like that. WWII was value destruction at a massive scale. All that industry could have been building industry and we'd have had the 50's and 60's a decade earlier but not just for the US.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      To be fair I read the broken-window comment so as so mean exactly what you said? A lot of broken windows in Europe, so people there were less keen on keeping things intact and more likely to litter and ... stuff.
- jonbarker 8y ago
  I don't think the winner matters; if the US had lost, economic growth would have resulted anyway, just elsewhere.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

I disagree with your sentiment. While I appreciate the technology that military investment has given us, I’d trade it all to get back the lives lost by the other technology the military has developed.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

That's not because the military technology was intrinsically good though, but rather a side effect of the massive budgets that governments will give towards military R&D. If the government threw just as much money into civilian research, we'd likely get just as much good, without finding more efficient ways to kill each other. For instance, Australia has CSIRO [1], which is sort of like DARPA, but without the military bent. They've managed to invent all sorts of cool new stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO

ajdlinux 8y ago
And the US has the NSF, while Australia also has DSTO... (I agree though that public civilian R&D funding is woeful)
ryacko 8y ago
Intel corporation is still larger than DARPA and DARPA is much more diffuse. The impact shouldn't be that great.
- jackpirate 8y ago
  A better comparison would be Intel Research and DARPA or Intel and the whole DOD. By either of those measures the military budget is much bigger.
mmirate 8y ago
> If the government threw just as much money into civilian research, we'd likely get just as much good, without finding more efficient ways to kill each other. Do I understand correctly, then, that if we continue throwing that money into military research, we not only gain the same civilian benefits, but also prevent the occurrence wherein someone else finds an efficient way to kill us before we find an efficient way to defend ourselves from it?