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As an alum from the ancient days I take issue with many of the companies that YC funds these days. Flock? 9 Mothers? This shit is dystopian and I hate that I’m
by jnovek 5mo ago
As an alum from the ancient days I take issue with many of the companies that YC funds these days. Flock? 9 Mothers? This shit is dystopian and I hate that I’m somehow even tangentially associated with it.
- ianm218 5mo ago9 mothers appears to do defense from drones which seems completely ethical. What is dystopian about that?
- levocardia 5mo agoProbably the worry that the jump from "we defend against slaughterbots" to "we built a better slaughterbot" is just around the corner
- tptacek 5mo ago... so don't defend against the slaughterbots? (I don't know anything about the company we're discussing here, but this is a weird premise.)
- Loughla 5mo agoThat means 18 year olds will get splattered. I'm not for that. The kids who die in the military are just kids, regardless of their job. They aren't personally responsible for the shit orders they get. The problem is that anything made for defense is almost inherently useful for offense, and the US is not the most trustworthy government right now. It's, sadly, not inconceivable that an automatic turret mounted shotgun could be put to use against human people across the globe, or even human people who are citizens of the US.
- kranke155 5mo agoI don’t understand this whole idea that we are going to not having drone and autonomous weapons. Ukraine is being fought with drones. It’s the first drone war. 300k people have died in the Russian side alone. 1 million casualties. How do you suggest we stop the lessons from the first major drone war from spreading? With hope? Prayers? The terrifying thing about it is - the US is actually already behind on this technology, China can build 1000x more drones than the whole West.
- bigyabai 5mo agoMany civilians have seen how drones were used in Lebanon and Gaza, and hesitate to trust Western leadership with that type of kill chain. It's a borderline certainty that 9 Mothers employees will eventually contribute to the death of an innocent protestor or journalist that opposed the state.
- vscode-rest 5mo agoWould you rather everyone except NATO had these capabilities?
- bigyabai 5mo agoI'm saying it is a slippery slope. Look at General Atomics, whose employees are accomplices to war crimes. "My drones are only for killing terrorists" is always the rose-tinted glasses used to frame murder. The pushback is 100% expected.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- vscode-rest 5mo agoyou’re referring to this? https://wilpfus.org/merchants-of-death-war-crimes-tribunal-and-what-we-can-do-next/ https://wilpfus.org/merchants-of-death-war-crimes-tribunal-a...
- akerl_ 5mo agoSorry, so what's your position here? Are you for or against people working on anti-combat-drone technology? The comment you're replying to is pointing out the oddity of being anti-good-thing because somebody might one day invert their company's mission entirely.
- Loughla 5mo agoI missed the sarcasm in OP's post, I guess. I read it as a flat comment to not have the technology.
- gmerc 5mo agoDude we haven’t even solved human manual slaughter in schools so surely adding auto shotguns to schools is a no brainer after the first incident. Terminal society this is.
- varenc 5mo agoThey make a very fast "AI powered" turret shotgun. It automatically selects, aims, and shoots down targets. I imagine this is great for shooting down swarms of small fiber optic or autonomous drones impervious to electronic attacks. But automated weapons like this can easily pivot into uses besides anti-drone. Taking humans out of the loop on deadly kinetic weapons is concerning. But personally, I don't really see any other viable defense against small drone swarms.
- delbronski 5mo agoA company named 9 mothers, which sells a service to stop artificially intelligent machines from falling from sky and blowing up everything… funded by another company that lures smart young men and women with billionaire dreams that wreak havoc on society. Not dystopian at all.
- mediaman 5mo agoIt sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones -- including mitigating their effect -- is therefore dystopian in itself, even if it is combating that dystopia? Sort of a tarring by contextual environment? I suppose by that reasoning a socialist is a capitalist because even though they fight capitalism they live in a capitalist society. I'm not really following.
- delbronski 5mo ago“It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones“ Yes!!! What do you think a dystopia is? The entire world of 1984 is a dystopia. Just cause there’s a company making money to “combat” that dystopia doesn’t make the thing any less dystopian.
- mediaman 5mo agoThat sounds like a fallacy of composition to me. That some element of the world is dystopian means the world is therefore dystopian. And if the world is dystopian, then every element of it is dystopian: no element of the world is not dystopian. It's an interesting "poison the well" type of argument, but it also means that if one accepts that all of human history has had dystopian elements (chemical weapons, slavery, feudalism, etc etc), that therefore the world has always been dystopian, and that then therefore everything in the world has also always been dystopian. And you've created a label that includes everything that has ever existed and excludes none of it, which is meaningless.
- ianm218 5mo agoI mean killer drones are absolutely dystopian but they already exist. This critique is like the common Bay Area tactic of pretending homeless don't exist because they are inconvenient. There is tons of offensive capability companies YC has invested in they seem like a more appropriate target. I feel like most people want there to be protection from drone swarms.
- wrqvrwvq 5mo agoout of all the companies listed, yc would of course choose something like this. "wow you're going to defend american soldiers????" yc and this site are chinese ops run by the scummiest sinotrash on earth. steal millions and deliver vaporware? "oh sounds like a failed business". try to protect soldiers from drones? "oh sounds like you're the terminator highly unethical sar."
- fragmede 5mo agoWhat is dystopian about needing drone defense? It's defense and not making attack drones, but personally, needing to have nets everywhere to protect against drone attacks is dystopian.