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“I just woke up one morning and it struck me that I was a murderer. so I quit.”
- TheRealJu4n 6y agoThis is an extreme example on how we are at risk for creating the very systems they use to put people at risk. There's no "ey, i'm one of the good guys, i'm on the right side", one day you wake up just to find yourself as the target.
- Gibbon1 6y agoMy dad used to work on personal carriers during the Vietnam war. In 67 FMC sent him with a group of other engineer to Vietnam to figure out why the M113 wasn't performing as well as advertised. Short answer when you hit a M113 with a tank rocket it turns into an oven. My dad came home and quit. Since then I've been kinda aware that a lot of engineers work is on the balance is a net negative. Especially true in the US and getting worse.
- Gibbon1 6y agoStay especially classy today HN
- hartator 6y agoQuit but still happily deposited these last checks and got a job because of his experience at IBM. Sorry to not shed a tear.
- DJBunnies 6y agoIt does not sound as if you are sorry.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIs the teacher supposed to pretend his job at IBM never happened?
- ardit33 6y agoI don't agree with this mentality. If you are helping a dictator or authoritarian regime, sure. I think it is in the wrong side of the story. But helping out the US in developing high-precission weapons does the opposite. 1. It might save lifes, as the alternative is dumb carpet bombing. As we know during WW2, carpet bombing killed mostly civilians and destroyed cities. 2. Most weapons that the US has, are there for deterrence, and not necessary meant to be used, and in the long run hopefully they are never used. 3. The US is the better greater power by a long stretch. I know it gets a lot of flak here, but while it has done many mistakes, the US has done more good that usually gets forgotten. The alternative is China (in the Pacific) or Russian hegemony in half of Europe. I am talking as someone born in a former communist country. And almost all former communist countries in Europe are staunch US supporters/allies as they have lived first hand communism, and experienced its rotten system.
- Volundr 6y agoI don't necessarily disagree with your points, though I might debate most of them. #2 however strikes me as pretty darn optimistic. Recent history suggests that the US doesn't have much hesitation about using their weapons.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoVery few of the US’s weapons have been used. They have the capacity to blow up the whole world many times over, and end up attacking a minuscule portion of the population.
- cycomanic 6y agoCompared to all the other recent and present superpowers the US has actually used their weapons the most.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoThe US, USSR, China, Japan, and Germany are all the superpowers from the past century, and they all got in some wars with each other, sometimes via client states. In the recent decades after Germany and Japan exited the scene, the wars have been relatively small.
- hirundo 6y agoAs a former writer of telemarketing software it's nice to have missile guidance software developers that I can feel somewhat morally superior to. But in their defense at least missiles can be used in a non-evil way, but I'm not so sure about telemarketing software.
- ewi_ 6y agoI am curious as to how missiles (or any weapon for that matter) could be used in "non-evil" way
- Ygg2 6y agoPoint them at the stars. Satelites and missile run very similar software.
- heartbeats 6y agoTo blow up the evil people, of course.
- icebraining 6y agoAnti-ballistic missiles seem fairly non-evil.
- Litmus2336 6y agoAlthough if one side in the cold war had good anti-ballistic missile tech they would be incentivised to first strike. That's the reason for the ABM limitation treaties https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treat...
- mandelken 6y agoI think he's referring to putting satellites into space for civilian use, but I could be mistaken.
- masklinn 6y ago
- 243462 6y ago>i don't remember what it was exactly that he said after that but he explained to us the value of considering the ethics of the software you're writing prior to writing it, and it was one of the most impactful things i ever learned in school, period How is the US having accurate weapons unethical? These hypocrites never seem all that concerned about the war-making capacity of China, Russia, Iran, or other rogue states.
- OpticalWindows 6y agoIt's rather unfortunate that you have to sacrifice your HN score by recieving downvotes to fight propaganda.
- geofft 6y agoWhat does "rogue states" mean, in your view? (Also, what does "hypocrite" mean, in your view? I'm used to it meaning "one who denounces behavior in others while engaging in the same behavior themselves," which doesn't seem to apply here, I think, since the person in question ceased engaging the behavior he denounces, and as you point out, we have no record of him denouncing anyone else doing it.)
- tpxl 6y agoIt's ethical to do unethical things because other "worse" people do unethical things?
- hnracer 6y agoNo, it is ethical to have weapons because it's a bulwark and disincentive against countries with even more tyrannical objectives. This is not to defend the extent to which weapons systems are being invested in. But they need to be invested in. The race is not optional.
- lumost 6y agoIt's a bit more nuanced than that. From a practical perspective, China and Russia's possession of nuclear weapons has been a sufficient deterrent to US or NATO action for nearly a century. By contrast, The advent of smarter bombs, stealth technology, and drones has largely freed the US from the negative consequences of large scale bombing campaigns and ground invasions. The result has been 3 decades of near continuous warfare in countries of little strategic threat to US interests. As a peer competitor to the US, do you fear a smarter drone or an ICBM?
- jamestimmins 6y agoSimply as an observation, it’s interesting that serving in the military is usually treated as honorable, but working at a defense contractor is viewed as unethical. I wonder why that is?
- hinkley 6y agoWhen defense contractors make too much money on contracts, it's called profiteering. If the difference between criminal and lawful is just a matter of profit margins, I suspect it's hard for people think of you as being dirty, and the only question is how dirty.
- hnracer 6y agoMy guess is that some people view defense contractors as being responsible for lobbying/corruption that encourages more wars in order to earn profit (they're the corrupting part of the military-industrial complex). I don't know to what extent this actually occurs though. The military is mostly reacting to the executive branch and doesn't have the same perceived corrupting influence.
- trynumber9 6y agoPresumably because soldiers are at putting themselves at risk while defense contractors are generally not.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoIf you haven’t seen the precautions around building munitions, you might think that :)
- serjester 6y agoSkin in the game. A defense contractor shifts the risks of his job, excessive wars, to the public. A soldier does the exact opposite.
- robin_reala 6y agoShifts the risk onto the public in other countries? Edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/06/middleeast/us-collateral-damage-history/ https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/06/middleeast/us-collateral-... has some more info.
- dtrailin 6y agoFor me the thorny ethical issue is not so much working on directly evil stuff like missile targeting software for the military but software that has both military and civilian use. For example, consider a company that develops and RTOS that is used in both cars and missiles, where does that stand morally? Even the most benign technology can be used for evil so it's worth asking the question to what culpability individual bear for who their company sells their software to. In the case of SpaceX, I’m sure much of the code is the same between the military and the NASA use cases.
- geofft 6y agoI've asked myself this question about even more abstracted/lower-level things, like - is it good to improve Kubernetes, knowing that this makes things better for big businesses and the military (cf. https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/ https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...) and not really directly for individual people? While it's tempting to say that there's no moral dimension this far out, I think that's not quite true - there is a moral dimension to making technology work more smoothly. It increases the ability of anyone with some power to do things at scale. On the one hand, it gives ability for anyone with tiny amounts of power to make use of it (consider the effect of, say, typewriters in the Soviet Union, or even farther back, the printing press in the hands of Luther's supporters). On the other hand, it absolutely increases the ability of people with massive amounts of power to use that power more efficiently (like the "war cloud"). My own view here is that, for those of us whose day job is in improving infrastructure / technical leverage, this increases how important it is for us as members of society to make sure that power is distributed equitably and justly. Since it's indirect, we don't have to advocate for this through what we choose to be directly employed on (the way we would if we were literally working on missile targeting software), and it's often difficult to do so, but we should advocate for this through how we engage with the political process (broadly defined) in the rest of our lives. There's also a question of what sort of improvements you make to it. Security improvements are generally a thing you can feel good about: people with small amounts of power are much more likely to have security flaws exploited than to use security flaws offensively, so even if there's an argument that hardening some software makes it harder to attack evil businesses or evil governments, it also has the much more practical effect of making it harder for those entities to attack dissidents' personal devices. And similarly for what you choose to do: working on Signal helps the low-power individual much more than working on SELinux, even though both are conceivably dual-use.
- speedgoose 6y agoNote for the HN reader: if you are not into online verbal fights, you may not want to read the comments in this thread.
- unwiredben 6y agoHighly recommend this talk by Mitch Altman from 2019's Hackaday Supercon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSjYx2O_-bI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSjYx2O_-bI
- akudha 6y ago7500 miles per hour Woah! It is insane that they are able to do this. Does anyone know how much money/effort is going into achieving this? Might be interesting to compare such insane investments into destructive stuff vs investments in fighting poverty and such.
- lumost 6y agoInvestments unfortunately don't work that way, just because you have an opportunity to build a Tech company or a fancier weapon doesn't mean you have an opportunity to reduce poverty. ( although if you're financing hundreds of fancy weapon systems you may be irrationally diverting funds from productive ventures like healthcare. )
- akudha 6y agoI get that part. What I don't get is : they have so much money for weaponry but not for healthcare for veterans? A huge percentage of homeless population is veterans btw.
- martythemaniak 6y agoHe shouldn't be bringing politics to work. And we shouldn't be bringing politics to HN.
- kome 6y agoyou can't avoid politics. you just can't. if you are avoiding politics, you are just blindly following some politics.
- drdeca 6y ago[Warning: the following comment of mine likely doesn't take the full context of the conversation into account, and much of what it says is likely not particularly applicable to the situation at hand.] Maybe one can't completely avoid politics, but there are reasonable senses in which the word "politics" is used, such that, in those senses, one can avoid politics to some non-negligible degree. If there is a discussion of one topic which people don't really tend to get upset about much, and then someone makes a big stretch to connect it to some other topic which has a lot of rather heated partisan controversy around it, the person who made the stretch to make the connection is doing the opposite of what might reasonably be called "avoiding politics". Not to say that anything like that happened in any of the relevant cases at hand, just to give an example that I think demonstrates why the concept of "avoiding politics in some sense to some degree" is a sensible concept.
- anotherevan 6y agoWhat about ethics? Can we bring ethics to work? And shouldn't we be bringing ethics to HN? If so, we have to acknowledge that politics and ethics is a Venn diagram with a lot of crossover.
- RickJWagner 6y agoI applaud this action. Not because I agree with the thought behind it. I think national defence is a necessity. I'd have no problems writing the software. But because the coder had the guts to put his money where his mouth is, and leave the job. I respect that. About a million times more than keyboard SJW who type a lot but change not at all.