It’s a shame the article fails to mention the history of Silicon Valley and the foundation of the tech sector being built almost entirely on Military R&D:<p>Steve Blank “Secret History of Silicon Valley”
<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo</a><p>Post WWII, 90%+ of R&D was military, a shockingly high number.<p>Coinciding with the year the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 saw that military R&D proportion fall to rough parity:<p><a href="https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect...</a><p>Today, Military R&D has inverted compared to that post WWII, early Cold War environment making it only about 10% of R&D.<p>But that raises the problem of duel use commercial technology.<p>Commercial tech being combined or adapted for military purposes.<p>Personally, I’m far more concerned with the export of commercial off the shelf tech modified for mass surveillance and control than I’m worried about kinetic weapon systems.<p>Defence/Military money helped found Silicon Valley/Tech.<p>In-Q-Tel(CIA) has been in the Valley funding startups for 2 decades:
<a href="https://www.iqt.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.iqt.org</a><p>Hacking 4 Defense at Stanford is a more recent addition that leverages the increasing reliance of the military on commercial off this shelf tech(disclosure: I have had some involvement in H4D with their educator’s course).<p>What’s OK and what isn’t for modifying commercial off the shelf tech for Defence/military use?<p>What are the perceived black/white/grey delineations working in this space?
I don't blame them, some of the stats in this article are astounding.<p>"The US is militarily involved in 76 countries."*<p>"The U.S. spends more on arms and armies than the next seven biggest spenders combined"<p>"U.S. and allied airstrikes in Syria and Iraq killed 6,000 civilians"<p>*7 countries with drone strikes, 15 countries with combat troops (?!), 44 with military bases, and 58 with with counterterroism training programs, 2015-2017
I don't think it's anti-war per se, just anti-current-US-MIC-activities. Given an enemy worth fighting, I don't think the sentiment would be that strong. Who really wants to work on tech focused on bombing brown people far away?<p>No matter, the budget is vast to train up people in house, plenty of young people will relish the tech for the tech's sake.
The tech community as a whole has always been anti-war from time immemorial, but in the past the vast majority of tech funding came from the govt and so tech companies were always involved in one way and another in building war machines so as to make money, but in recent times with the vc in tech funding more tech companies, they no longer really need to build war machines to make money, I mean the top five tech companies in the world presently are majorly consumer tech, so tech companies and the workers who make them up can say fuck you to the government sponsored tech contracts and fuck you to war in general.
Are companies like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics not tech companies?<p>Why do people think DARPA funds those challenges?
Of the two systems they list, there is a nuance and a difference between the two, one is an <i>facilitating</i> technology which just makes the DoD work better and another directly helps them kill better. A similar difference is the difference between someone who say designs bombs vs designs bomb hard armor that lessens soldier deaths on our sides. It's similar to what anti-war people have done for years during drafts, which was to volunteer for medical service as opposed to fighting.<p>It's a hard decision to make, and an easy thing to say is just if you do anything for the DoD, you're making it easier for them to kill people and hence it's wrong. Blanket statements like these however put people like janitors and paper pushers in the same bucket as those who manufacture arms that are shipped to Saudi Arabia.
This is a pretty interesting shift.<p>Is it a general trend such as it happening in Engineering, and/or sciences or is it localised to just tech?<p>Perhaps the younger generation is more anti war?<p>Thoughts?
what do you think our rivals are doing right now? Sitting on their hands refusing to develop advanced threats?<p>We <i>must</i> protect our country. Let’s not be naive to the fact that we have enemies who want to destroy us, or overtake us in power and influence if we’re weak.<p>Personally I want the smartest people in the industry working on protecting our country and developing this tech.<p>Which do you trust more, a self-flying UAV with deadly cargo developed by Google or some random government contractor?
Computers are war machines. They arguably won WWII, eh? Code-breaking and modeling physics of nuclear bombs.<p>And today, of course, WWIII is playing out on the Internet and the screens of our phones.<p>In the general case, from first principles, we have the automation of human intentions. If those intentions are harmonious and ecological, all is presumably well. If those intentions conflict, however, we have automated war: drones and IEDs, and eventually Skynet and Terminators, and then just vast robot wars.<p>I don't think there's a a stable equilibrium between these two strange attractors.<p>(FWIW we have technology for harmonizing human intentions. We just have to use it.)