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Comment by mips_avatar | Hacker News Reader

I think the Google outrage is misplaced. The US government gave google the chance to save a lot of civillian lives by detecting truck bombs and evacuating civilians using AI. Like who knows how well this program would have worked if Google committed to it. But now those lives are definitely not going to be saved. The surveillance videos are just going to be watched after a horrific attack and used to find the perpetrators. Which might help track down the killers, but won’t bring back the people killed in the attacks.

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Your argument is only valid if you believe that military applications of technology can be compartmentalized and limited in a way that one can always find a way to contribute to “good life saving military use cases” only.

But where the contradiction lies comes from the fact that the fundamental objective of any military is ultimately in increasing its ability to wage war and defeat other existing militaries. Such an objective is necessarily orthogonal to “saving civilian lives” unless you define only a subset of humanity to be the civilian lives you wish to save treating those outside as expendable. Disregarding how illogical and frankly inhumane in my opinion it is in arbitrarily choosing to delineate people like this, even in purely pragmatic and economic terms, it makes no sense. War is a zero sum game no matter how much you can optimize it such that the least amount of lives are taken in doing so.

The result of a use in military force is always ultimately the destruction of something which if not treated through other diplomatic means will escalate to larger and larger conflicts until at some point, nothing is left. Be very wary of those who tell you that the work you are doing is only to decrease casualty rates and save lives because that same reduction can and will be used to justify an increased usage of military force because of that very newly lowered rate.

Instead of working to increase the effectiveness and lethality of militaries, why not choose to spend your energy on trying to find ways to make it easier and more effective to resolving conflict by other diplomatic means? If such a belief is idealistic in today’s world, perhaps it is. But I believe there exists a future where such a world is possible if we only choose to not immediately give in to the cynicism of that other belief.

I think you need study history.

Civilian casualties in current conflicts are at an all time low because of advancements in military technology and capabilities.

We used to wipe whole cities, we don’t do that today.

The effectiveness and lethality of a military dies directly to its ability to maintain peace, we have had the ability to blow each other up 10000 times over yet are living in the most peaceful time in history.

Yes there is a bunch of crap going on that ideally should not be, but that is a matter of policy not capabilities.

We used to wipe whole cities, we don’t do that today.

Have you seen Aleppo?

During the Second World War, the English air force was in a bad situation because the Germans were too effective in destroying military factories and defending their own. Churchill then decided to bomb German cities. The Germans did the same in London, which allowed the British to rebuild their aviation. That is what my history teacher, who was a student at the time of these events, told me.

It's concerning that you are being taught this.

The British didn't bomb Germany in any significant way until after the Battle of Britain. This wasn't some moral decision or anything - they didn't have a bomber with the range to attack Germany until the Lancaster[1] which flew in 1941. The Germans occupied France and the Netherlands which let them attack Britain much easier.

The Battle of Britain (when the Germans were bombing Britain) finished in 1940[2].

It's true that the German campaign against factories (and airfields) was effective and their switch to bombing cities allowed the RAAF to survive as a fighting force.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain

> Your argument is only valid if you believe that military applications of technology can be compartmentalized and limited in a way that one can always find a way to contribute to “good life saving military use cases” only.

Precision is a numbers game. It doesn't feature human selective bias.

You're definitely right that war is bad, and a war fought well is still worse than a war not fought at all. However if a violent conflict is going to happen, you want to keep as many people out of harms way as possible. In this case the taliban is setting up truck bombs in downtown Kabul to kill as many people indiscriminately as possible. The US military has drones that capture video full-time of every part of kabul. But the data is too huge to go through manually. If maven had succeeded in it's goal suspicious truck bombs could be intercepted and lives of everyday people just trying to live their lives in Kabul would be saved. Sometimes the line between combatants and civilians gets blurry, but in this case it's quite clear.

Perhaps additional usage of military force isn’t the right way to solve our problems in the Middle East? Have you considered that there might be other ways of resolving this conflict other than just resorting to taking out humans and replacing them with an autonomous counterpart?

People always seem so resigned and certain in their beliefs that warfare and killing are inevitable and impossible to avoid. It always strikes me as almost irrational in a way, or perhaps it’s a sort of sunk cost fallacy wherein once you’ve committed to military conflict, it’s extremely difficult to go back on it as that would require admitting the already existing destruction and death that has accumulated was all for nothing. And so to protect themselves from such a truth, they continue the cycle of death and destruction knowingly or unknowingly acting to condemn their children to the same fate.

There’s probably some debate we could be having about the Tao of action in general. And you’re right that the best intended use of force reverberates back in unintended ways. Your second paragraph sounds like a mix of concerns about Vietnam and Iraq, but it’s mostly just vague.

The second paragraph is somewhat directed at you, as you would be in this subset that believes violent conflict and warfare is inevitable, which you then used to argue in your comments that if it really is inevitable, you might as well aim to come out on top by contributing whatever you can.

Thus the resignation of fate, giving up, and falling into an endless cycle of destruction with which the second paragraph consists of. What parts do you find vague?

I guess you’re right that I think that there are some people in some situations who you can’t talk out of violence. But being so generic and vague doesn’t help you understand the situation better. If you want to understand a situation you need to look at specific situations. Like I think by cycle of destruction you’re talking about something like how after the Iraq invasion a lot of Iraqi ex-soldiers had nothing to do and became a force for ISIS. That specific situation is a lot more of an interesting discussion to be had, and I think you can learn more from it than you can learn from a discussion about vague ideas.

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