A couple decades ago, when I was talking with the inventor of some aviation safety stuff, about working with them, he said some of their work involves the milit

A couple decades ago, when I was talking with the inventor of some aviation safety stuff, about working with them, he said some of their work involves the military, and asked whether I'd be OK with that. I (thinking of some of the better ideals) said something favorable about the sense of honor/duty/etc., and that I just didn't work on weapons systems nor domestic surveillance. I'd actually thought of it before, and those two spaces seemed problematic. Earlier, I'd actually worked (on non-mil things) with someone who at previous company had been a manager for a defensive military system. Which system everyone had seen on CNN, shooting down conventional missiles that some aggressor was launching at civilians. Which was great (albeit, CNN sometimes strayed into propaganda, and maybe not all the great stories were true). But, thinking of that great defensive use, I also thought that I wouldn't want to someday see on CNN something I worked on being used for something terrible. It wouldn't be sufficient to claim that I thought the Slaughtertron 3000 would only ever be used for good. Even a purely defensive system (Shieldtron 4000) could be used to shield an aggressor -- leaving the victims less able to defend themselves, and making aggression more viable. We'd all do well to read things like this article, and think about what we choose to work on, and how we do it. Then follow through on our better thoughts, in our behavior. In particular, the tech industry overall has become a festival of sociopathy. With many techbros, in moments of reflection, rationalizing, "but I gotta feed my family", while pulling down quite a lot more money than we need to do that. That wasn't very defensible when coders were regularly hopping jobs with 5-6 figure pay bumps each time, or doing startups that essentially involved selling out users and oftentimes later investors, ignoring regulations, etc. Even now that jobs are looking a lot less certain for most people, we still need to be very skeptical of ourselves every time we grasp for rationale.