Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

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Military technology is a wide and pretty vague term. A lot of technology is implicitly dual use. A nice example of an unexpected military use case for a completely innocent looking technology was a work that explored potential weak spots in a proposed tank design by using real time 3d graphics and order independent transparency in particular to estimate armor strength against attacks from different directions. Originally, OIT was developed for games and 3d data visualizations.

I think that technology that can be used to protect people, especially civilians, should be developed. I know that I personally draw the line at weapoms platforms and weapon systems. You may develop and build them with the best intentions in mind ("we're at peace and this system is only a necessary deterrent"), but recent history tells me that once these systems are built and sold, they will be used by someone, somewhere to shoot at other people. Even the oh so pacifist Germany sells a lot of weapons and I think every type of weapon system sold to another country by Germany since the second world war has seen some action.

I think you've killed less people working on literal sniper rifles for the military than working on the addictive feed dynamics of Facebook, given the Rohingya massacre and other social ills they've supported.

I think a lot of people in tech work on really questionable projects that create huge social ills, then talk about "Well, at least we don't build weapons!" -- ignoring that when measuring human suffering, their unrestrained manipulation and exploitation causes much more than weapons of war do, in practice.

So when unqualified, I tend to hear your argument as simply trying to hide the messiness of what you do, rather than than it's inherently more ethical than building weapons would be.

tl;dr: I don't believe the military is less ethical, I think they're just more honest about what they do.

I never worked on social media; this does not interest me. I will agree that it has caused a lot of change and may have contributed to outbreaks of violence in the recent past. I could compare these conflicts to others in the past that were massively more devastating, but I wom't.

I am not sure of this discussion of social media is framed correctly. At its core, all this social tech tries to satisfy the very basic human need for communication in novel ways. There is nothing bad about trying to achieve that. But somewhere along the way something unintended and bad happened. We need to find out what it is and how to fix it as a society. The underlying tech and concepts will never go away again. It can be used for good. We realized too late that we failed to use it properly.

My point is the double-standard in the tech community making that argument on behalf of one kind of technology, while ignoring that weapons extend from the very basic human need for security and agency.

It's a standard human fallacy, which I've made numerous times: we look at the intentions of ourselves (the tech community) while looking at the results of others (eg, the military). But the question we really need to be asking is if our impact on the world leads to better outcomes than theirs, regardless of what either group intended -- and I'm not sure it's so clear cut, once you account for second order effects of social media.

And it's certainly not as simple a moral calculus as "Well, they work on weapons so they're worse people than me!"

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