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Comment by noelsusman | Hacker News Reader

When did private businesses ever not assist the state in killing people?

I think the abhorrent trend is the outsourcing of the people who should be assassinated, and that those people on the kill list will be selected by an ML model.

Google will just a be a processor in a long chain of steps, the actual killing will get passed to a drone team in Las Vegas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creech_Air_Force_Base

If Google does a better job of defining who should be killed, and it siphons money into the Bay Area, why shouldn’t we be supportive of google’s involvement?

I agree that perhaps we shouldn’t blow people up overseas, but at least while we are at it, why not make the best decisions to avoid killing the wrong people?

>I agree that perhaps we shouldn’t blow people up overseas, but at least while we are at it, why not make the best decisions to avoid killing the wrong people?

I think you have to begin a little further back in the logic train than that state-sponsored murder for hire with the help of closed-source algorithms is legitimate or acceptable.

Just don't forget to implement the counting of false positives. The current system doesn't work well, given that US still counts al-Mansoura as 30 ISIS fighters killed and not 150 IDPs as per the independent UN commission investigation.

Or. You know. Stop killing people for oil?

I think that oil was the main cause of wars in world during the last decades. And it is one of the rare subjects where people can act with their wallet: choose EV each time you can, do not use oil for heating.

We're not talking about killing imminent threats for self-defense. We're not talking about bombing military targets in a legal war. We're talking about remote drone strikes against poorly defined "non state actors", typically in civilian areas.

Maybe we shouldn't try to legitimise it and abdicate the moral responsibility to a computer. Maybe we shouldn't mislead drone operators by showing them a popup stat "this blob you're looking at has been identified as a valid target with 90% confidence" so they feel better when pushing the button.

If we were talking about space lasers that make an individual person's head explode and high res camera footage you might have a point. But we're literally talking about lobbing bombs at people in public spaces and doing so based on grainy low res data.

The last thing we need is more talking points to justify this.

Extrajudicial killings are cool, as long as they are profitable for the Bay Area because the one thing the Bay Area is missing is.. money? Jesus..

I remember hearing stories about how the British hired toy makers to make guns and furniture makers to make planes back in world war 1.

IBM was put to work manufacturing rifles during World War II. That's not a product I would have expected from IBM. https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1940.html

IBM sure must've been spread thin during WW2. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

Well the products you'd expect from IBM, during that period, have also had a rather controversial use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

World War 1 ended. The entire premise of free society is that war comes to an end, there is a such a thing as peacetime. Somehow that idea has died, and with it morality and social conscience. Comparing our spat with a few mountain dwelling cavemen on cellphones with a global War to threatened the existence of civilization itself is beyond ignorant. It's criminal intellectual negligence.

You could argue that the US has done a great job protecting us. Hence why you view it as a non threat.

We shouldnt be as naive as the Romans.

Please don't post ideological rants to Hacker News. Whatever your point is intended to be, flamebait drowns it out and has the side effect of wrecking this place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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