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How much sleep would he lose when you realize the very educational institutions which he attended were designed by large to benefit the military's R&D? Anythin

How much sleep would he lose when you realize the very educational institutions which he attended were designed by large to benefit the military's R&D? Anything we invent or discover can and will be used by the military or intelligence agencies and even law enforcement agencies who are doing real human right violations. Hell, there are graduates that go work for the government because it's stable, or even unwittingly be writing RAT or researching zero days. The truth is, as researchers, engineers, our guesses are as good as touching a part of the elephant. Everyone thinks the part they hold are the whole, and make the claim, this is what an elephant should be. When in fact, if you follow the authors logic, we are all complicit. Every walk of life is influenced by the military and for the military. Internet? Designed for resilient military comm against nuclear attacks. Microwave? TV? Radio? So the genie is out of the bag and now is going to work for the military. Should we feel outraged? Should we stop all AI research because of the authors view that the military kills people so its automatically evil? What about the people who are ready to give their lives so these researchers can continue living and doing great work? It seems to me that beggars can't be choosers. It's good to have a strong sense of morality so you don't end up writing a RAT tool for a corrupt government that ends up torturing dissidents. But rarely will you even know who is using it and where it's being applied. It's simply designed so you don't have to be burdened with the moral dillemma of how a state should think and behave. By large, a state is not a person, no conscious, no morals only national interests dictated by the few in power. This skewed power dynamics will remove the decision makers from the burden of making immoral decisions to further "national" agenda. ex) Do we torture an alleged terrorist to extract information that can stop an imminent attack on hundreds? It's certainly not the call of the people who wrote the software to manage torture and it's not the call of those who follow orders. We are ruled by ideology, the one that sells to us constantly of an unknown, unpredictable threat. If the author has anything to blame, it is that people by far and large have already voted with their money and hearts-ignorance is bliss, gathering material wealth is priority.

FakeComments 8y ago
There’s also a cohort who simply believe that working for the government is a good thing. That the violence they inflict — particularly if it means RATs-not-missiles — is justified. For two reasons: If we look at human history, we’ve collectively tried a lot of things — and short of getting rid of technology and going back to tribes that can’t broadly interact, I’m not sure there’s really a better solution than something akin to Western style democracies and the world order built around them. That’s not to say they’re infallible or perfect, just that empirically they lead to a human and cultural flourishing that’s hard to compete with. There are many real dangers out there, and many people feel it’s worth defending — classmates who become soldiers, classmates who became politicians, etc. Is it really so surprising some programmers or other STEM people feel the same way? Secondly, many of us have friends in the military. It’s a hard sell to imply that we shouldn’t help them maintain military dominance, for a number of reasons.

FakeComments 8y ago

There’s also a cohort who simply believe that working for the government is a good thing. That the violence they inflict — particularly if it means RATs-not-missiles — is justified. For two reasons: If we look at human history, we’ve collectively tried a lot of things — and short of getting rid of technology and going back to tribes that can’t broadly interact, I’m not sure there’s really a better solution than something akin to Western style democracies and the world order built around them. That’s not to say they’re infallible or perfect, just that empirically they lead to a human and cultural flourishing that’s hard to compete with. There are many real dangers out there, and many people feel it’s worth defending — classmates who become soldiers, classmates who became politicians, etc. Is it really so surprising some programmers or other STEM people feel the same way? Secondly, many of us have friends in the military. It’s a hard sell to imply that we shouldn’t help them maintain military dominance, for a number of reasons.