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Meanwhile, China and Russia don't give a crap. It's nice to dream of a utopia where weapons of death and destruction aren't necessary, but we don't live in that
by jplayer01 8y ago
Meanwhile, China and Russia don't give a crap. It's nice to dream of a utopia where weapons of death and destruction aren't necessary, but we don't live in that world. We, the West, have real enemies with real weapons and plenty of money going into R&D and military spending and qualms about killing people if necessary isn't stopping them.
- nickpinkston 8y agoYea, this is what people on the Left (which I am myself) turn a blind eye. Sure, the US has done plenty of awful shit with our military, but would you prefer the West to not be the dominant block in the world? That's going to end liberalism way faster. The military / real politik foreign affairs are dirty parts of life that we'd prefer not to have, but we live in a world where we must have them.
- YJR 8y agoI'd prefer to not having a dominant block at all .
- mc32 8y agoSo how do you get the other actors to concede and play nice?
- nickpinkston 8y agoRemember that multi-polar worlds tend to have far more wars. Even the bi-polar Cold War was highly dangerous. Having a good single block is preferable.
- vasac 8y agoYeah, right. Almost no wars in the last 30 years. Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.
- nickpinkston 8y agoI'm not denying there aren't still huge conflicts with high loss of life, however defined, but I'm glad we don't have many true state on state open wars like the past few millennia where large percentages of the population were killed.
- CamperBob2 8y agoThat's not an option that you have.
- eibrahim 8y agoWell said. It’s definitly a tough position but that is reality. I am an immigrant and lean more to the left of center but we got have common sense. I would rather have America be dominant than any other nation. With all our faults, we excercise incredible restraint with our immense powers. This of course could change if we end up electing more leaders like Trump. We need to stay strong militarily but also need good and intelligent leaders which unfortunately we don’t currently have.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoHow many wars has Trump started? I haven't kept count.
- king_magic 8y agoLiterally... zero?
- quakeguy 8y agoHow many has he ended?
- pnw_hazor 8y agoIt seems like he is trying to end at least a couple. However, entrenched interests and Trump haters (both Dem and GOP) can't let that happen.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- eibrahim 8y agoFair question, it's not just about the wars he starts/ends. It's about the rhetorics and the planting of seeds of conflict and hate and what becomes of it in 4 years or 10 years or 20 years. Simple words by a country's leader could ruin relationships between nations for decades or between different parts of society. You don't just start hating {insert favorite target jews|blacks|muslims|christians|whites} overnight, it takes time. You plant the seeds of hate and let them flourish into ethnic cleansing|holocaust|interment camps|etc. It's our duty to nip that shit in bud right now :). We have come so far to let that sort of shit take us back. I apologize for taking this discussion in a political direction. In any case, I think it's important for us to have a strong military and Microsoft helping our military build better weapons/systems/tools is a good thing. A strong America is a good thing - as long as we have no Trumps :)
- whytaka 8y agoBut surely, people who want to work for defence contractors can and will. And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor, but is becoming one, you can yell and shout if you think it might deter the company and let you stay where you like staying.
- CapricornNoble 8y ago"And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor...." Do you have any idea how many decades Microsoft has been getting millions in income from the Pentagon? The whole DoD runs on Microsoft products. Windows. Office. Outlook. Sharepoint. Access. All of that stuff has expensive licenses and enterprise support contracts. Any employee who joined Microsoft after, say, 1995 and thinks they weren't joining a "defense contractor" is just willfully ignorant.
- remarkEon 8y agoIf liberalism surviving is defined as “western military hegemony” then I think there’s a problem with liberalism, but the military tools used to enforce it.
- oh_sigh 8y agoHow should liberalism respond if 100 liberals can be silenced by 1 authoritarian with a machine gun, and the ratio of authoritarians to liberals is 1:99?
- remarkEon 8y agoI don't think liberalism has an answer to this question. It appears to me that as liberal democracies become more democratic the likelihood that an authoritarian can take power, from the left or right, increases. So it's somewhat of a paradox.
- mindslight 8y agoTo support this goal, you really need to figure out how the military can be prevented from engaging in further elective wars. In recent history, the main result of contributing to the military has been creating war to benefit private business interests at the expense of our domestic and diplomatic wellbeing, and it's not surprising that enthusiasm for doing so has waned.
- jopsen 8y agoThese conflicts are unlikely to become hot. Maybe some cyber security is worth doing. But, winning over China as only Trump would say, is more about economics than anything else, isn't it? Ie. a big thriving economy and by implication a high quality of life gives power and influence -- how does military R&D factor into that?
- manigandham 8y agoUnlikely does not mean impossible. There are global tensions with 2 world powers that are now both led by dictators and smaller conflicts happening everywhere. Hoping that another major war won't happen isn't a good plan.
- jopsen 8y agoI'm merely arguing that like the cold war, these conflicts are likely to be determined by economic might, rather than armed conflict.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoAlso, it's not like Palantir won't pick up the project if they drop it. Also, LOL if they think Microsoft is going to drop $450M in revenue -- even if was hand-delivered by Satan himself.
- jonnybgood 8y agoPalantir is not in the market of augmented reality headsets.
- Impossible 8y agoMagic Leap on the other hand... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-leap-is-bidding-on-an-army-combat-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-lea...
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoThey can get in the market for $450M...
- rayiner 8y agoSome people seem hellbent on self-destruction. As an Asian person I find it completely impossible to comprehend. I can’t even understand where these people are coming from. Obviously you need the best weapons. Your enemies have weapons, and if they thought they could get away with it, they’d totally use them to dominate you. The only reason they don’t is because for the moment your weapons are bigger than theirs. U.S. prosperity is built on the U.S. military. From our acension to the world stage after WWII, to the spawning of the Internet through military R&D. The pointy end of America is an essential part of what makes your life so fat and comfortable. It’s what allows you to consume a vastly disproportionate share of global resources. To live a life where you can worry about finding dates in Tindr and finding the best avacodo toast place, instead of surviving in a hostile world.
- gbear605 8y agoThe neat thing about nuclear weapons is that if you only care about self defense, you don’t need anything else.
- jonnybgood 8y agoIs a person’s way of life and economic prosperity also worth defending? If so, nuclear weapons are not sufficient. All another country needs to do is cut that person’s country off from the rest of the world. Bring it down from the inside. No invasion or war required.
- ardy42 8y ago> The neat thing about nuclear weapons is that if you only care about self defense, you don’t need anything else. Nuclear weapons have no proportionality, so it's bad to rely on them for defense. If you do rely on them, you're either going to start WWIII over a border skirmish, or your enemy is going to chip away at you because you won't.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mc32 8y agoI hope MS doesn't succumb to this kind of activism, but to put in perspective, this doesn't even deserve an article, from the first parr: >Several Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel … Three employees. Since when do three employees make these kinds of demands and have management take heed? This isn't some Morton Thiokol and an O-ring issue where you need management to listen to a real issue. If I were Russia or China, this is exactly the kind of agitprop I'd like to create for a foe.
- jorblumesea 8y agoYep, and China's authoritarian outlook and lack of privacy concerns might allow them to win a future AI race, because there's no western concept of rights. Sweep up as much data as you want and throw it into models. Track every citizen, every click, every purchase. The US may fall behind simply because we believe in ideas like privacy. Kai-Fu Lee's book goes into this in detail. Although if we're being realistic, less scrupulous companies such as Amazon will step in and take the contracts.
- mindslight 8y agoOr they may fall on their face, like every other attempt at central planning has. The economy is basically a distributed optimization heuristic. If you're talking about "falling behind" in the global sense (using "AI" to centrally plan), then you're hypothesizing that we can essentially port the distributed algorithm into the silicon realm and further optimize it (eg prune destructive adversarial behavior). We certainly have more computing power now than say that past attempt based on fluid flows, but that's still a huge if. If you're talking in the local sense (that "AI" will help companies themselves optimize better), than whatever extra percentage gained from that will not be enough to outrun the State deploying the same technology (as in the above goal), and destroying the individual businesses. One thing I do know is that even if this turns out to be the winning strategy, sacrificing our values in an attempt to compete at it will still only net us second place! -- Having written that, I think this implicit assumption that it will be economically beneficial for AI to be directed at individuals and individual behavior needs to be directly examined. How much individual productivity is actually being left on the table? The US system is quite good at motivating people, so much so that it's common for lower classes to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". There are a few deviants, but for the most part lack of individual productivity is a failing of the larger structure. Heck, most of the US's criminals are in jail for engaging in economic activity! Rather, the narrative seems like the age-old keep-the-plebs-in-line play, not a legitimate approach to economic success. If AI has something to offer for planning the economy, then wouldn't that be properly applied to the government-company interface? That's where the structural gains are actually available to be had!
- 8y ago
- Barrin92 8y agoThe US has done fine until now, in fact much better than China or Russia defending itself without getting into the business of blurring the line between private business and military to the degree that autocratic states do. So honestly I find these sorts of responses misleading, irresponsible and agenda driven. The US does not need to be afraid of China or Russia, it dwarfs their military capacity ten times over. And that American workers in the tech industry are conscious of the risks of having the military seep too closely into consumer facing businesses is a very good thing in a liberal society. US tech workers always had a libertarian streak, be that right or left, and the US wasn't defenseless as a result. We'd be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development.
- solidsnack9000 8y agoWe’d be very wise to listen to the people who want to keep private American businesses out of government weapon development. How is it wise? Most weapons are developed and manufactured in a kind of public-private partnership. During the Second World War, for example, the vast majority of industrial capacity turned towards building war equipment was private, dwarfing the capacity of government arsenals by a fair margin. Much of the design and development occurred in the context of public-private partnership, with national proving grounds and military agencies collaborating with aircraft manufacturers and other manufacturers of heavy equipment to design and develop weapons systems. Boeing, Lockheed, Texas Instruments, Browning — and to go further afield, Supermarine, Marconi, Glock — these are all private names, not the names of government agencies. There are few cases of states where all, or even most, development of weapons systems is in state hands: totalitarian states.
- Barrin92 8y agoYes, but Lockheed has the label on the door. You know that you're going to be building defense technology that is used in (foreign!) wars. Building technology that can just as well used at home at a company that faces consumers and puts funny colored letters on the door is very different. When Amazon develops facial recognition technology that can just as easily be thrown at migrants at the border the line isn't as easy as talking about building aircraft to fight fascism in Europe. In liberal democracies there's a line between civilian technology and military technology, and you generally know what you sign up for. This is also precisely what the engineers here talk about, they did not join Microsoft to build weapons.
- underwater 8y agoWell luckily there are people who do seek peace and diplomacy, because if everyone treated the world like a giant prisoner's dilemma then we'd all be fucked.
- oh_sigh 8y agoAren't you just hoping that people who seek peace and diplomacy are on the Chinese/Russian/etc side when shit hits the fan? What if they aren't? You can have all the peacekeepers and diplomats in the world, but if the other side isn't willing to play by that game, then they wont.
- emberrider 8y agoThey're strongly incentivized to play by the game when the alternative is annihilation. For 70 or so years, that kept everyone safe.
- jlawson 8y agoThe optimal strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit for tat.
- jplayer01 8y agoWe have plenty of diplomacy. But diplomacy only goes so far. Military exists because diplomacy doesn't always work and there are plenty of reasons why it might not work.
- underwater 8y agoYes. But there is a very real difference in escalation as a last resort and as the default. The Prisoner's Dilemma is about operating with zero knowledge from and coordination with the other parties. Diplomacy lets us avoid that in the real world.
- ravenstine 8y agoThis is the key reason why the United States is the financial power of the world that it is. It isn't so much about our freedoms or our GDP, although they play a role. Unlike China and Russia, we have WAY more guns and we're WAY less corrupt. That's a pinnacle of financial security; you can be confident that the United States will honor its treasury securities. China and Russia? Probably, except who knows what internal or external conflicts shake their fragile economies, and maybe they just won't pay out on time or at all. People hate the fact that we spend so much on our military, but the inconvenient truth is that we have the comfortable lives we have now in large part because we have so many god damned weapons, and very advanced ones at that. That goes for those who live in foreign ally nations; deep down, their leaders know we will intervene on their behalf if shit hits the fan. America has had its share of fuckups, but they're still not eclipsed by the fuckups of Russia or China.
- scarface74 8y agoDo we really know that we will intervene for our allies with the current “America First” rants and threatening to leave NATO?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoTrump is just (somewhat justifiably) trying to get Europe to step up to the plate and not leave everything to the US. Remember that we fixed their Yugoslavia ethnic cleansing problem while they twiddled their thumbs waiting for diplomacy to work. When the shit hits the fan the US will participate, if only to keep the MIC chugging along.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoI think one of main things keeping Europe more or less stable, is that Russia's armed forces are probably more broke-dick than the EU's.
- remarkEon 8y agoHonest question: we are almost 30 years away from the fall of the Soviet Union, which NATO was founded to defend against. What specific things in terms of Defense is America responsible for on the European continent?
- _bxg1 8y agoAs a tech worker who doesn't want to do work for the military, I know I'd be much more open to it if our military were primarily focused on defending us from genuine threats (ie., China and Russia) instead of playing imperialism in the Middle East.
- oh_sigh 8y agoBoots on the ground actions certainly aren't targeting China and Russia, but what about capability improvements which will pay off if we have to defend ourselves from 'genuine threats'?
- _bxg1 8y agoThe HoloLens case seems pretty boots-on-the-ground to me, and many of the other tech sector contracts you read about have to do with drones/machine learning/image recognition, i.e. taking humans even further out of the equation when it comes to patrolling third-world countries. I won't be a part of that.
- oh_sigh 8y agoOut of curiosity, how do you view America A-bombing Japan? Do you think that it would have been preferable to go forward with operation downfall? In that case, it was a situation where America weighed massive losses on both sides through brute man-on-man mayhem versus using technology to inflict massive casualties on only one side.
- gdy 8y agoAnd how exactly is Russia threatening the US?
- _bxg1 8y agohttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/inf-treaty-exit-putin-says-hes-ready-to-escalate-to-cuban-missile-crisis-levels/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/inf-treaty-exit-...
- phil248 8y agoWe all know that someone else's bad behavior is not a justification for our own bad behavior. At least I assumed we did. Our duty is to find better ways, not bullshit excuses to indulge in the old, horrific ways.