9 ms·

Big Tech and Silicon Valley are transforming the military-industrial complex

67 points by qp11 2y ago

giraffe_lady 2y ago
[flagged]
- hikingsimulator 2y ago
  It's a rather clear example of how the concept of neutrality in addressing various, rather important, topics falls on its face.
- 762236 2y ago
  Security is important. Hopefully Israel will be able to secure their nation without suffering any more Israeli deaths.
  - cyclecount 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - notaustinpowers 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dralley 2y ago
      It's not for lack of opportunities. 1948, 1949, 1967... a half dozen others. At some point, you can't keep turning down every deal that would provide a state and then complain that there's no state.
      - dunekid 2y ago
        Which of the said deals makes it legal for settlements in West Bank?
        dralley 2y ago
        Note: I dislike settlements in the West Bank. I think it makes the problem needlessly more intractable than it already is. I especially dislike the nigh-terroristic behavior of a portion of the settlers and the seeming inability or unwillingness of the state to properly apply rule of law against them. Nonetheless. Legally speaking, if a deal isn't signed by both sides, then it's a worthless piece of paper. Settlements in the West Bank are only possible because the Palestinian side refuses to ever say "these are the borders of our state, that which is outside these borders is Israel". There's no sense in talking about "deals" that never happened, or were immediately violated by e.g. 1973 invasion, as though they have a bearing on current reality. My entire point when I first commented is that there have multiple opportunities for proper long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies.
        notaustinpowers 2y ago
        > ...there have been multiple opportunities for long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies. Palestine is occupied and has been losing more and more land to Israel for decades. Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Israel needs to allow Palestine to operate as an independent nation in control of their own borders, energy, trade, etc. The Palestinians refuse to be served dog food to then be told by their oppressors to appreciate it or they won't be getting any more.
        dralley 2y ago
        >Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Who broke the peace after the 1967 agreement? What happened in 1973? You can't accept a peace agreement, then declare a new war, lose it, and then call it a slap in the face if you aren't given the exact same deal you were already given before you started and lost a war. The 1967 agreement gives the West Bank to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt. The fact that Egypt doesn't want Gaza anymore and Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore is a rather material roadblock to implementing the 1967 agreement in 2024, don't you think? I don't pretend to have an answer here, I just reject the notion that Israel should be solely blamed for the lack of a Palestinian state, as the initial person I responded to implied. And also, the use of colonization rhetoric is absolutely fucking crazy to me. Nearly all people who "settled" in Israel are refugees in the exact same sense as Palestinians, and half of Israeli Jews are literally ethnically from elsewhere in the middle east - "settling" in Israel after being forced out of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc. You also said that Palestinian "history" has been "colonized" by Israeli "settlers". Do you understand what a cruel joke that sounds like considering the particular bit of land we're talking about? Was 1948 unfair to Palestinians? Yes. That decade was unfair to literally everyone involved, including the people who became Israelis. It was also unfair when Czechoslovakia kicked out (and worse) hundreds of thousands of native ethnic Germans, but we're not still having wars over that 75 years later.
- qp11 2y ago
  Agree it creates misunderstanding of the relationship between Technology and Politics. How certain tools are used fully depends on the Politics of the person using the tool.
zdw 2y ago
This combination should be unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Stanford.
- jwoq9118 2y ago
  Enlighten me. Looking for some weekend reading.
  - rapsey 2y ago
    I'm sure there are lots of reading options but this is a very good presentation on the topic (of Silicon Valley and Stanford). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
  - emodendroket 2y ago
    Perhaps ambitious for a weekend but Chris Miller’s Chip War will enlighten you quite a bit about both Silicon Valley’s history and the current politics around semiconductors.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Steve Blank's "Secret History" gives a pretty good overview, starting with Terman and WWII, and going heavy on Cold War R&D. <https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/> Something of an HN favourite as well: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsecret%2Dhistory%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>
  - nkh 2y ago
    The best book on this is: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Desc: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/surveillance-valley/9781610398039/ https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/survei...
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    San Fran and the greater bay area were huge Naval installations and grew massively in WW2, and much of the early silicon valley was directly funded by US Fed'Gov R&D efforts. ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA
JustifyContent 2y ago
[flagged]
cyclecount 2y ago
[flagged]
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - cyclecount 2y ago
    huh?
xyst 2y ago
need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Even just good ole stalling at project management levels can work wonders. Need a “jia tan”
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Out of curiosity, how do you see that playing out if the U.S. ends up relying on these technologies for its national defense? Would you still be okay with sabotaging them? I think you're bumping into a more fundamental problem: it's not clear how to enable the military for highly effective defensive missions, without also making it useful for offensive military adventures.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain. It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. And ocean based threats are also probably obsolete. Send a bunch of carriers and destroyers against any modern nation, and they're going to go pop. This, famously, is exactly what happened in a wargame over a hypothetical war with Iran! [1] So if another country ever attacks the US, it's going to be in the form of a massive nuclear strike. Conventional military forces have been largely relegated to invading non-nuclear nations, or engaging in proxy wars against other nations. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      > It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. For what it's worth, I agree with your argument, but I want to point out that the only reason we have the luxury of never allowing a neighboring nation to join alliances is because we have such massive military and technological advantages that aren't being sabotaged from within.
slowhadoken 2y ago
It’s been happening for a long time. Meredith Whittaker left Google over their drone contracts five years ago. But I thought the kings of encroaching consolidated doom these days were private equity firms and the medical industrial complex.
jeffbee 2y ago
It would be a bad story if the DoD was trying to, for example, host their own email. I'm happy that they spend a bazillion dollars on first-in-class cloud services.
- imperialdrive 2y ago
  Can't tell if you're kidding bc my first thought was that if DoD can't host their own email, how can they do anything else correctly?
  - michelsedgh 2y ago
    Hosting their own email is just a headache and adds overhead and takes resources away from the actual real stuff they are doing?!
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    92% of what the DoD does is normal business junk like ordering pencils.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I knew a guy who worked on a VR war the room for the DoD. Not like a VR battlefield simulator, but like... simulated folders being passes across simulated desks. The point being that they're innovating away from the pencils. The future is digital pencils.
nextstep 2y ago
[flagged]
- kurthr 2y ago
  Is there only one ongoing genocide?
hodgesrm 2y ago
> The Pentagon also quietly launched Project Maven in 2017, an effort to use machine learning (a form of AI) for analyzing massive datasets consisting of surveillance images taken by drones in the Middle East and other locations. I see a lot of huge contracts for big initiatives listed here. Maven and similar projects have had problems adapting to conditions on the ground in Ukraine at least according to a recent NYT article. [0] It would be comforting to see more ground-up projects that start from actual battlefield conditions and work from there to the tech solutions. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-american-technology.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-a... Edit: added source.
objektif 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
smashah 2y ago
[flagged]
zitterbewegung 2y ago
Arguably the government was doing VC investment before he concept existed . DARPA even has the same concepts in their competitions at Defcon . Fail fast and evaluate many solutions at once.
createdapril24 2y ago
I clicked through to the article. I think the title is inaccurate. The paper primarily goes into detail about the Department of Defense heavily investing in startups, incubators and silicon valley. That's the vast majority of the paper. The paper has significantly less in the way of laying out how that's been successful, or how that's transformed the MIC. This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn't yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets). I think a more accurate headline might be, "how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI"?
latentcall 2y ago
Big money in MIC. Temptation hard to avoid.
- dralley 2y ago
  I'm somehow unconvinced of the moral superiority of (basically) advancing deepfake technology for money, or selling lootboxes to 12 year old boys.
joejohnson 2y ago
Apparently this is the closest a post can get to discussing the in-progress genocide without being instantly removed from the front page. A few other comments here are saying the Brown study is rather sparse on details or recent examples. Have a quick peak into the [flagged] graveyard and there’s plenty of examples of Amazon and Google’s projects in support of the IDF.
declan_roberts 2y ago
Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.
- cyclecount 2y ago
  Fascism won
- ParetoOptimal 2y ago
  > we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. Nope. I'll be doing neither.
- linearrust 2y ago
  > Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. The US is the largest weapons manufacturer already with the largest military-industrial complex. How many more drones and bombs do we need? > All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war. You act like we do. Doesn't the US already spend more on military than all our rivals and allies combined?
  - nradov 2y ago
    We need a lot more. Actual US manufacturing capacity is very low. We can't even supply Ukraine with enough regular artillery shells https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-she... The Navy's fleet is actually shrinking because we lack shipyard capacity, and can't even maintain the ships we already have. https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbuilding-plan-sketches-2-paths-for-future-manned-ship-fleet/ https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbu...
    - linearrust 2y ago
alephnerd 2y ago
I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC as they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries, specifically by analyzing the impact of mobile penetration in the poorer regions of Mexico. González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world. I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper). There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it. [0] - https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security-Tour-Rethinking-Warfare-Economies/Pemberton/p/book/9780367257675 https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...
- avs733 2y ago
  >I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC ... > they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations? is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.
michelsedgh 2y ago
I strongly believe that all computers and phones and social media have been engineered as weapons more than anything else and they are some of the strongest weapons everyone carries around. Its crazy that 20-25 years ago no one had any of these and now if you don’t have one that’s somehow crazy. Most of the tech in phones comes from military from wifi to gps etc. they just gave everyone a powerful weapon and made us want to have it.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I most phones are weaponized against the people who carry them, not weapons in service of the people who carry them.
Run_DOS_Run 2y ago
Technological advances in the military sector are always very interesting and research into them is to be welcomed. From ARPANet to GPS, we have benefited greatly from this and despite the moral concerns of some, AI-controlled drone swarms and fully automated target acquisition are also very interesting and important developments that future armies will need for its defense.
RecycledEle 2y ago
This reminds me of the stories of industrial improvisation in WW2. Casablanca-class escort carriers and hundreds of other successful kludges changed history. A few lines from the paper stand out to me: * "A lack of transparency." How much transparency do you expect from military R&D, since that would give away US military secrets? I recall stories of the Soviets copying the US AIM-9 Sidewinder to create their K-13 Atoll. Military secrets need to be secret. * "Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector" The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors. * "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence" I suspect AI will change warfare forever. Humans freak out under fire, AIs may not. A semi-competent person under fire is a rare gem that you treasure. * "overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities" I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake. * "the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies" The deployment of the US Military in the last century has mostly been to protect other countries. We can debate how democratic many of those countries were, but protecting other countries is the most common use case of the US Military. The last two times we let someone bomb US territory was either 911 or WW2 in the Pacific. If you have to fight, it may be preferable to defend Taiwan rather than Hawaii. * "a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs" A strong economy that could not be bombed by the enemy won WW2 for the US. A strong economy won the Cold War for the US. If anyone has counter-examples, I'd like to see them. I'm no fan of the US Military; I'd disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps. But this author is just anti-American. Let's look this guy up..."Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California." He's strongly linked to https://equaljusticesociety.org https://equaljusticesociety.org "The Equal Justice Society (EJS), California Black Power Network (CBPN), and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force ... formed a new collaboration called the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth." I will not elaborate on the FARA implications.
johnea 2y ago
I think that giant leap in Vulture Capital is just an indication that the wealthiest people are pretty sure we're heading into war, and they want to make sure to make money from it... And are even fine with encouraging it...
- maxglute 2y ago
  Cheap money dried up -> move to defense pork.

67 points by qp11 2y ago

giraffe_lady 2y ago

[flagged]

hikingsimulator 2y ago
It's a rather clear example of how the concept of neutrality in addressing various, rather important, topics falls on its face.
762236 2y ago
Security is important. Hopefully Israel will be able to secure their nation without suffering any more Israeli deaths.
- cyclecount 2y ago
  [deleted]
- notaustinpowers 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dralley 2y ago
    It's not for lack of opportunities. 1948, 1949, 1967... a half dozen others. At some point, you can't keep turning down every deal that would provide a state and then complain that there's no state.
    - dunekid 2y ago
      Which of the said deals makes it legal for settlements in West Bank?
      - dralley 2y ago
        Note: I dislike settlements in the West Bank. I think it makes the problem needlessly more intractable than it already is. I especially dislike the nigh-terroristic behavior of a portion of the settlers and the seeming inability or unwillingness of the state to properly apply rule of law against them. Nonetheless. Legally speaking, if a deal isn't signed by both sides, then it's a worthless piece of paper. Settlements in the West Bank are only possible because the Palestinian side refuses to ever say "these are the borders of our state, that which is outside these borders is Israel". There's no sense in talking about "deals" that never happened, or were immediately violated by e.g. 1973 invasion, as though they have a bearing on current reality. My entire point when I first commented is that there have multiple opportunities for proper long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies.
        notaustinpowers 2y ago
        > ...there have been multiple opportunities for long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies. Palestine is occupied and has been losing more and more land to Israel for decades. Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Israel needs to allow Palestine to operate as an independent nation in control of their own borders, energy, trade, etc. The Palestinians refuse to be served dog food to then be told by their oppressors to appreciate it or they won't be getting any more.
        dralley 2y ago
        >Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Who broke the peace after the 1967 agreement? What happened in 1973? You can't accept a peace agreement, then declare a new war, lose it, and then call it a slap in the face if you aren't given the exact same deal you were already given before you started and lost a war. The 1967 agreement gives the West Bank to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt. The fact that Egypt doesn't want Gaza anymore and Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore is a rather material roadblock to implementing the 1967 agreement in 2024, don't you think? I don't pretend to have an answer here, I just reject the notion that Israel should be solely blamed for the lack of a Palestinian state, as the initial person I responded to implied. And also, the use of colonization rhetoric is absolutely fucking crazy to me. Nearly all people who "settled" in Israel are refugees in the exact same sense as Palestinians, and half of Israeli Jews are literally ethnically from elsewhere in the middle east - "settling" in Israel after being forced out of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc. You also said that Palestinian "history" has been "colonized" by Israeli "settlers". Do you understand what a cruel joke that sounds like considering the particular bit of land we're talking about? Was 1948 unfair to Palestinians? Yes. That decade was unfair to literally everyone involved, including the people who became Israelis. It was also unfair when Czechoslovakia kicked out (and worse) hundreds of thousands of native ethnic Germans, but we're not still having wars over that 75 years later.
qp11 2y ago
Agree it creates misunderstanding of the relationship between Technology and Politics. How certain tools are used fully depends on the Politics of the person using the tool.

zdw 2y ago

This combination should be unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Stanford.

jwoq9118 2y ago
Enlighten me. Looking for some weekend reading.
- rapsey 2y ago
  I'm sure there are lots of reading options but this is a very good presentation on the topic (of Silicon Valley and Stanford). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
- emodendroket 2y ago
  Perhaps ambitious for a weekend but Chris Miller’s Chip War will enlighten you quite a bit about both Silicon Valley’s history and the current politics around semiconductors.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Steve Blank's "Secret History" gives a pretty good overview, starting with Terman and WWII, and going heavy on Cold War R&D. <https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/> Something of an HN favourite as well: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsecret%2Dhistory%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>
- nkh 2y ago
  The best book on this is: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Desc: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/surveillance-valley/9781610398039/ https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/survei...
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  San Fran and the greater bay area were huge Naval installations and grew massively in WW2, and much of the early silicon valley was directly funded by US Fed'Gov R&D efforts. ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA

JustifyContent 2y ago

[flagged]

cyclecount 2y ago

[flagged]

BenFranklin100 2y ago
[flagged]
- cyclecount 2y ago
  huh?

xyst 2y ago

need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Even just good ole stalling at project management levels can work wonders. Need a “jia tan”

CoastalCoder 2y ago
> need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Out of curiosity, how do you see that playing out if the U.S. ends up relying on these technologies for its national defense? Would you still be okay with sabotaging them? I think you're bumping into a more fundamental problem: it's not clear how to enable the military for highly effective defensive missions, without also making it useful for offensive military adventures.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain. It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. And ocean based threats are also probably obsolete. Send a bunch of carriers and destroyers against any modern nation, and they're going to go pop. This, famously, is exactly what happened in a wargame over a hypothetical war with Iran! [1] So if another country ever attacks the US, it's going to be in the form of a massive nuclear strike. Conventional military forces have been largely relegated to invading non-nuclear nations, or engaging in proxy wars against other nations. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    > It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. For what it's worth, I agree with your argument, but I want to point out that the only reason we have the luxury of never allowing a neighboring nation to join alliances is because we have such massive military and technological advantages that aren't being sabotaged from within.

slowhadoken 2y ago

It’s been happening for a long time. Meredith Whittaker left Google over their drone contracts five years ago. But I thought the kings of encroaching consolidated doom these days were private equity firms and the medical industrial complex.

jeffbee 2y ago

It would be a bad story if the DoD was trying to, for example, host their own email. I'm happy that they spend a bazillion dollars on first-in-class cloud services.

imperialdrive 2y ago
Can't tell if you're kidding bc my first thought was that if DoD can't host their own email, how can they do anything else correctly?
- michelsedgh 2y ago
  Hosting their own email is just a headache and adds overhead and takes resources away from the actual real stuff they are doing?!
- jeffbee 2y ago
  92% of what the DoD does is normal business junk like ordering pencils.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I knew a guy who worked on a VR war the room for the DoD. Not like a VR battlefield simulator, but like... simulated folders being passes across simulated desks. The point being that they're innovating away from the pencils. The future is digital pencils.

nextstep 2y ago

[flagged]

kurthr 2y ago
Is there only one ongoing genocide?

hodgesrm 2y ago

> The Pentagon also quietly launched Project Maven in 2017, an effort to use machine learning (a form of AI) for analyzing massive datasets consisting of surveillance images taken by drones in the Middle East and other locations. I see a lot of huge contracts for big initiatives listed here. Maven and similar projects have had problems adapting to conditions on the ground in Ukraine at least according to a recent NYT article. [0] It would be comforting to see more ground-up projects that start from actual battlefield conditions and work from there to the tech solutions. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-american-technology.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-a... Edit: added source.

objektif 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

smashah 2y ago

[flagged]

zitterbewegung 2y ago

Arguably the government was doing VC investment before he concept existed . DARPA even has the same concepts in their competitions at Defcon . Fail fast and evaluate many solutions at once.

createdapril24 2y ago

I clicked through to the article. I think the title is inaccurate. The paper primarily goes into detail about the Department of Defense heavily investing in startups, incubators and silicon valley. That's the vast majority of the paper. The paper has significantly less in the way of laying out how that's been successful, or how that's transformed the MIC. This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn't yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets). I think a more accurate headline might be, "how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI"?

latentcall 2y ago

Big money in MIC. Temptation hard to avoid.

dralley 2y ago
I'm somehow unconvinced of the moral superiority of (basically) advancing deepfake technology for money, or selling lootboxes to 12 year old boys.

joejohnson 2y ago

Apparently this is the closest a post can get to discussing the in-progress genocide without being instantly removed from the front page. A few other comments here are saying the Brown study is rather sparse on details or recent examples. Have a quick peak into the [flagged] graveyard and there’s plenty of examples of Amazon and Google’s projects in support of the IDF.

declan_roberts 2y ago

Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

cyclecount 2y ago
Fascism won
ParetoOptimal 2y ago
> we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. Nope. I'll be doing neither.
linearrust 2y ago
> Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs. The US is the largest weapons manufacturer already with the largest military-industrial complex. How many more drones and bombs do we need? > All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war. You act like we do. Doesn't the US already spend more on military than all our rivals and allies combined?
- nradov 2y ago
  We need a lot more. Actual US manufacturing capacity is very low. We can't even supply Ukraine with enough regular artillery shells https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-she... The Navy's fleet is actually shrinking because we lack shipyard capacity, and can't even maintain the ships we already have. https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbuilding-plan-sketches-2-paths-for-future-manned-ship-fleet/ https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbu...
  - linearrust 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago

I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC as they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries, specifically by analyzing the impact of mobile penetration in the poorer regions of Mexico. González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world. I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper). There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it. [0] - https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security-Tour-Rethinking-Warfare-Economies/Pemberton/p/book/9780367257675 https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...

avs733 2y ago
>I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC ... > they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations? is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.

michelsedgh 2y ago

I strongly believe that all computers and phones and social media have been engineered as weapons more than anything else and they are some of the strongest weapons everyone carries around. Its crazy that 20-25 years ago no one had any of these and now if you don’t have one that’s somehow crazy. Most of the tech in phones comes from military from wifi to gps etc. they just gave everyone a powerful weapon and made us want to have it.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I most phones are weaponized against the people who carry them, not weapons in service of the people who carry them.

Run_DOS_Run 2y ago

Technological advances in the military sector are always very interesting and research into them is to be welcomed. From ARPANet to GPS, we have benefited greatly from this and despite the moral concerns of some, AI-controlled drone swarms and fully automated target acquisition are also very interesting and important developments that future armies will need for its defense.

RecycledEle 2y ago

This reminds me of the stories of industrial improvisation in WW2. Casablanca-class escort carriers and hundreds of other successful kludges changed history. A few lines from the paper stand out to me: * "A lack of transparency." How much transparency do you expect from military R&D, since that would give away US military secrets? I recall stories of the Soviets copying the US AIM-9 Sidewinder to create their K-13 Atoll. Military secrets need to be secret. * "Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector" The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors. * "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence" I suspect AI will change warfare forever. Humans freak out under fire, AIs may not. A semi-competent person under fire is a rare gem that you treasure. * "overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities" I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake. * "the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies" The deployment of the US Military in the last century has mostly been to protect other countries. We can debate how democratic many of those countries were, but protecting other countries is the most common use case of the US Military. The last two times we let someone bomb US territory was either 911 or WW2 in the Pacific. If you have to fight, it may be preferable to defend Taiwan rather than Hawaii. * "a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs" A strong economy that could not be bombed by the enemy won WW2 for the US. A strong economy won the Cold War for the US. If anyone has counter-examples, I'd like to see them. I'm no fan of the US Military; I'd disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps. But this author is just anti-American. Let's look this guy up..."Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California." He's strongly linked to https://equaljusticesociety.org https://equaljusticesociety.org "The Equal Justice Society (EJS), California Black Power Network (CBPN), and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force ... formed a new collaboration called the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth." I will not elaborate on the FARA implications.

johnea 2y ago

I think that giant leap in Vulture Capital is just an indication that the wealthiest people are pretty sure we're heading into war, and they want to make sure to make money from it... And are even fine with encouraging it...

maxglute 2y ago
Cheap money dried up -> move to defense pork.