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Comment by hugh4life | Hacker News Reader

I personally find the idea that augmented reality headsets are "weapons" to be extremely stupid. Augmented reality doesn't really have much of a market yet and cutting yourself off from the US military also seems really stupid. The entire origins of computing and the internet was about facilitating the US military.

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I think there's a larger and more complex argument here. Technologies like AR dehumanize war. It becomes not that different to dropping some bombs in a video game like Call of Duty.

I believe people who work on these technologies simply don't want to have that "blood" on their hands.

Unfortunately, for every person that don't want to get involved in this, there's probably a few that do. So those $450MM will end in the bank accounts of Raytheon or any of the other usuals suspects.

BS. Good imagery tech will keep the conflict closer and more personal because the shooter can clearly see or identify who he or she is killing.

Compared to carpet bombing from 50,000 ft smart weapons make war very personal.

Yeah. People seem to forget that while technology advances have monotonically increased the potential for collateral damage, they've also in practice broadly lowered the incidence of collateral damage.

Or it could, y'know, simply paint the proposed target with an overlay which makes it easier to kill but not sympathise with.

I don’t know dude. I think there’s a big difference between piloting a B-2 bomber over the Iraq desert, and firing at a target with an Xbox Controller and a Hololens Headset, from an office in a Virginia suburb.

If it doesn’t dehumanize war at the very least is commoditizing warfare.

Uh, PTSD is really common among drone pilots.

Consider that a century ago technology had advanced to the point where artillery could kill people that couldn't be seen. With a map and a slide rule, trajectories over the horizon could be calculated with disturbing lethality.

Of course the psychological impact of such artillery was almost as devastating as the lethal impact. Knowing that at any moment you could be killed without warning by a shell you'd never see coming, by a man over the horizon induced a great deal of PTSD.

>The entire origins of computing and the internet was about facilitating the US military.

Do you have any idea how ignorant that is? Even if we set aside Babbage's vaporware, the first electromechanical programmable binary computer was German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)

* Alan Turing and Thomas Flowers were British, and Colossus (the first electric programmable computer) was built at Bletchley Park in Britain.

* ENIAC was a project at the University of Pennsylvania.

And from there, it's all universities and businesses like DEC. The computer, aside from Britain's contributions during WWII, has largely been an academic pursuit that the US military has had fuck all to do with.

Hell, the Internet was just one of many WAN systems that happened to catch on (networks like ALOHAnet were implemented well before)...and it was mostly due to academic use, culminating in some crazy researcher at CERN in Switzerland developing World Wide Web for it.

Whoopdeedoo... Z1 didn't go anywhere... the UK were allies using the tech for codebreaking... and you can't get more military industrial complex than ENIAC.

You can parse my words however you like, but my general point is that the US military industrial complex was the biggest driver in the creation of silicon valley.

> * ENIAC was a project at the University of Pennsylvania.

This was completely military driven:

> Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[0]

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

So we have to do whatever the army wants based on the principle that we owe them for inventing computers?

You're jumping at the least charitable interpretation of that comment. I'd suggest practicing the opposite: if someone seems to be saying something obviously extreme, stupid, etc... consider that your interpretation is what's wrong.

I'm going to try that with Trump's twitter feed.

That’s not a bad idea. I’ve found that this approach to the world (trying to think of reasons why something makes sense, instead of reasons it doesn’t) makes everything easier to understand and makes life more satisfying. And if you do come to the conclusion that someone is wrong and needs to be opposed, you’ll do a better job at it.

i actually suspect that a failure to do that is one (of many) reasons his political opponents are not remotely as effective as they ostensibly could be.

Both good points, but is the military always bad? They are a great resource as an incubator for tech and they are especially receptive to this industry.

> So we have to do whatever the army wants

using straw-men like this doesn't typically end well, so why use one?

No, the point is that a lot of good things come out of military spending.

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