Thanks to DARPA we have things such as the internet, GPS, Siri, and autonomous vehicles. Not to mention the DoD provides us with the security to pursue private ventures.
You don't even have to get 1/4 of the way through the article to see that 3,000 Google employees disagree with you about that. Do you think you can find 2,999 other people to share your "go pound sand" argument, or do you think you're an outlier?
Are Google employees an unbiased sample now? Also, regardless of what authority / stature they may have, the "call to authority" fallacy would apply if you use that data-point as the crux of your argument.
Lastly, accuracy <> popularity - an argument can be right or wrong regardless of how many people agree with you.
I'll agree with him. Our industry was created by men like Alan Turing and John von Neumann who contributed their effort and intellect to the preservation of democracy against totalitarianism. When free people refuse to weaponize technology, tyrants will, and free people will be at a disadvantage.
> When free people refuse to weaponize technology, tyrants will, and free people will be at a disadvantage.
There is no guarantee that the Department of State will not use said technology in a non-tyrannical fashion. In fact, we have decades of evidence that it will use it in a tyrannical fashion (And then lie their pants off about it), whenever it serves their interests.
> preservation of democracy against totalitarianism
I don't think I will ever understand this sentiment. At the time of WW2, the US still legally discriminated against colored people. The UK had a sprawling empire whose colored citizens were not given full rights or representation. France was also similar; in fact France tried to claw its empire back which led to some ugly wars in IndoChina (Vietnam) and Algeria.
Let me say that Nazism and Fascism were surely forces that needed to be defeated and put down. But the Allies were hardly the perfect coalition of "free people" or the "free world" that people today glorify them to be. They were at best a "better side that was moving in the right direction".
> They were at best a "better side that was moving in the right direction".
That is democracy. Fascism and communism were the worse sides that were moving in the wrong direction, and allowing those factions to gain a military advantage would have been morally indefensible. The UK and France abandoned their empires in the 20th century; the Soviets expanded theirs.
I think it's wonderful that liberal democracies have a rich culture of self-criticism when it comes to their flaws and imperfections. That's what makes it so important to preserve them.
Weapon inventors usually have no control once the weapon is sold. Richard Gatling thought he was making war more decisive and thus more necessary to avoid. He didn't anticipate machine guns being deployed against indigenous people defending against colonizers, nor did he anticipate the New York Times turning his gun on a riot.
Precisely. Also: Alfred Nobel, and many physicists who worked on the atomic bomb, including Oppenheimer.
Its a difficult question and its sad to see how technology created originally for benefiting humanity can sometimes be re purposed for its destruction. In a world where sovereign nations are not bound by arms restrictions though, its hard to see how this endless march of destruction can be stopped.
The SALT and other arms-reduction treaties b/w the US and erstwhile USSR where, IMO, a very good compromise. I find it hard to do something similar in the future if we continue to have dysfunctional administrations governing the US though.
> and many physicists who worked on the atomic bomb, including Oppenheimer
After 1945 (arguably 1953 at the latest), there were absolutely no direct wars between any two major powers. Nuclear weapons did make war too destructive to ever risk.
Count me as one who agrees with the parent comment. Maybe that makes a difference for your popularity-based reasoning?
Nation-states require people working on real problems, especially if we are continuing to shoulder the burden of securing the rest of the western world. We cannot run on maintenance-mode without a technical team.
If we are to do something we should do it well. Otherwise we should own the alternative of turning inward, reducing our obligations to NATO and the UN, and shrinking the size/scope of the federal government.
I also agree with the parent. It is the United States Military that defends American interests including the corporate interests of Silicon Valley, polices the seas and keeps a big enough stack of big enough sticks to make anything remotely resembling an invasion of American territory look like a suicide note of nation-sized proportions.
It isn't Peace Corps. keeping the world at relative peace.
As others noted, it takes little effort to verify that DARPA is part of the DoD.
I'm also not sure what point you're trying to make, because of course the DoD is also civilian run. That's been fundamental to the Department of Defense since its founding.
There's only one United States Department of Defense, one sitting President of the United States, one Joint Chiefs of Staff, and one sitting session of the United States Congress.
You might not support American Imperialism, but a lot of Americans do and you take the good with the bad.
Most policy changes do not go through the public. The public has a very small amount of impact on this - both major parties, despite rhetoric to the contrary, are imperialists. They quibble over the details of how the empire should run.
> Not to mention the DoD provides us with the security to pursue private ventures.
Citation needed, because there have been a lot of injuries and deaths they have failed to prevent (domestic violence, poor healthcare, etc) and even many cases of them causing death for US citizens (wars on vague ideas like "drugs", "terrorism", etc).
> Thanks to DARPA we have things such as the internet, GPS, Siri, and autonomous vehicles.
Internet and GPS originated from ARPA-funded research. That might seem like a minor difference in nomenclature but a person feeling ecstatic about DoD involvement in research might want to look at how much bang for their buck the government got as the defense establishment's involvement increased and increased over the years.
Is it far fetched to think that the top technologists / developers in Russia / EU / China / etc. are working for their respective governments & Defense agencies?
From a pure game theory perspective, if you accept the premise above, then SV should absolutely work with the Pentagon so that the US doesn't fall behind competitively. Unless there was such a strong coalition of cooperation among the entire community globally to not contribute towards Defense initiatives - but even the most optimistic would say this is fantasy.
As one example, I've been warming up to supporting stronger collaboration between the US Tech Industry (because it's bigger than just Silicon Valley) and the NSA purely for the cybersecurity benefits that are going to be needed more and more over time. Cooperating with the best in the industry in the US is the only way to execute well.
Exactly. These 3000 engineers that protested in Google don't seem to live in reality. In the real world, China and Russia are doing government sponsored hacking against Western government/companies all the time, stealing IPs, strategies and bankrupting companies. I wonder how these engineers would respond when Google is hacked and its business is down, and engineers fired.
Case in point:
"Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years..."
"It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?"
Americans are generally pro-military, save for ultra left-leaning types. The fact that only 3000 people signed out of a population of ~100k(which already clearly trends leftwards), tells me that most people did not actually have a problem with that project.
The majority of people on either side also probably recognize that signing your name to an open letter opposing your employer’s policies and decisions is a career-limiting move.
I'm speaking specifically about this situation, not about signing open letters in general. And James wasn't fired for signing a letter, he was fired for writing it in the first place.
> Americans are generally pro-military, save for ultra left-leaning types.
That depends a lot on what "pro-military" means. Do most Americans wish success and well-being for our military service members? Yes. Do most Americans approve of how large our military has become, affecting both government budgets and culture, or of the foreign policy that puts so many of those service members in harm's way? I doubt it. It's not "ultra-left" to oppose militarism. You know what is ultra-left? Having a decent social safety net that enables veterans to integrate back into society, instead of abandoning them like the ultra-right does.
Couldn't agree more. This peacenik virtue signaling bullshit is the naive privilege of spoiled children. "I want my freedom, but I don't want my hands to get dirty". Maintaining and propagating the liberal, enlightenment values we all know and love takes military dominance, whether you like it or not. The USG and military have lots of flaws, but I can assure you you will like its replacement a whole lot less.
Sure. But everything in the real world is about tradeoffs. It's not "is everything perfect" its "what are our alternatives?" and our alternatives are Russia and China. Which represent a substantial decline in enlightenment values.
> This peacenik virtue signaling bullshit is the naive privilege of spoiled children. "I want my freedom, but I don't want my hands to get dirty".
Deliberately belittling people who conscientiously object to having their labor used for the purpose of war making is dangerous. I'm very glad that Young Americans (at the time) protested the Vietnam War making it clear to the US Military that they couldn't willy-nilly start wars whenever they want to.
You cannot, and should not, be forcing people to do what they do not want. If you want to convince others of the benefits of having a superior armed forces, belittling them as spoiled children is not the way to do so.
> I'm very glad that Young Americans (at the time) protested the Vietnam War making it clear to the US Military that they couldn't willy-nilly start wars whenever they want to.
As am I. I'm not criticizing war protest. I'm criticizing not contributing to military technology.
> You cannot, and should not, be forcing people to do what they do not want.
No one is forcing anyone to do anything. I'm criticizing them for making their choice. They remain free to make it.
How much collaboration from private tech does the US military need to maintain global dominance? Where does this line of reasoning end? How much of your day, specifically, should you instead be spending supporting the armed forces?
There's no reason to make that calculation. The military does it for us, and then they offer to pay people to do the work they deem important. My point is that refusing to do that work out of some sense of principle is misguided, naive, and wrong.
Of course there's a need to make that calculation. The military's calculation is based on people's willingness and reluctance to work for them, and they offer to pay because they have to. The military would be happy to have you work for them for free, if you think what they do is so important.
Your point is that working with the military is good, because being ruled by China would be worse than the current situation. So the moral benefit you're proposing extends insofar as we prevent China from taking over the US. How much do you think Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with the military to prevent replacement by the Chinese?
> So the moral benefit you're proposing extends insofar as we prevent China from taking over the US. How much do you think Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with the military to prevent replacement by the Chinese?
A lot. Whether or not we like it, automation, AI and autonomous weapons are going to become a huge part of the modern battlefield. Silicon Valley needs to be a big part of that process. If you abdicate your role in technology like this, you don't just make it go away. All you do is cede control of it to someone who is willing to do it. Who doesn't share your sense of morality. How, exactly, is that better?
Call me naive but how is this not a self-fulfilling prophesy? If we parade around with our chest out, perpetual looking for a dust up, is that not what we're going to find? When you can engage in multiple simultaneous "conflicts" and that becomes the status quo, how exactly more of the same a wise decision for going forward?
Given the USA's history, the better question is: why wouldn't Russia and China do that?
Put another way: If you were the Native Americans wouldn't you still be wishing you embraced the gun sooner rather than later?
When the expected outcomes are the probabilities of, say, China or Russia knocking out our power grid - yes I think so.
Rather than looking at which leads to a better "positive" outcome (as some have done elsewhere in the thread re: DARPA), I would also consider which leads to a better "floor" (Max-Min type of strategy, where you find the best of the worst-case scenarios.)
Just an aside that some east coast liberals ignore. Because of DARPA we have literally every successful technological innovation in the Valley.
Silicon Valley pompous, egotistical, man child billionaires mainly mine user data, advertise, and sell and improve products created by someone else. And how do they get market share? A fair percentage do due to laws and regulation loopholes making other companies unable to compete.
You think publically traded or privately backed VC companies will spend billions on R&D on a moonshot or just try to maximize profits as they should.
Silicon Valley today seems most interested in addicting people through cheap psychological tricks and owning/tracking/influencing every part of their lives, and then selling that information. Silicon Valley is what we in the Valley thought Wall Street was two decades ago. I would trust Wall Street, the Pentagon, and The Military before the holier than thou hypocracy prevalent everywhere in the Valley today
I think the first thing Silicon Valley should do is to stop building total surveillance systems that can be used for advertising but also for controlling a population. The East Germany Stasi or Stalin would have loved to have Facebook data for finding their opposition and it's just a matter of time that their data is falling into the wrong hands.
Not working with the Pentagon would be just a symbolic action that doesn't address any real issues.
At least Surveillance Valley's technology adopted by the government and military is nominally subject to the Constitution and judicial review, whereas the autocratic de facto government being built out by "private" companies is not even constrained by those traditions.
> Yet we shouldn’t forget that civil-military antagonism and the deep American tradition of distrusting the state have been crucial to the United States’ ability to innovate. There are good reasons why defense-tech giants of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s like Raytheon and Grumman missed out on such major tech advances as Web protocols, the smartphone, personal computers and various types of encryption — all of which would eventually have great military significance. The biggest reason was that none of these advances were directed at waging war; indeed, many aimed at transcending the power of the state.
This is a fairly cherry picked story to match a narrative that frankly does not really exist. Silicon valley is not a partner of the defense world, it's derivative of it. The vast majority of technological disruption has come from technologies emerging from the state, that are then popularized by Silicon Valley. Most of these came from the space race, and in many ways Silicon Valley is still "behind" the Pentagon.
Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley, not the other way around.
The Pentagon doesn't need Silicon Valley, it's quite the opposite.
> "Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley"
Yes. That's factually correct. But at what cost? How many wars? How many lives lost due to our infatuation with the MIC?
The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD?
Put another way:
What might the societal perks have been if the deep pockets' lens was not military-centric?
For example, is there an alt-earth in an alt-universe with no mobile phones, but also no poverty?
The things you've mentioned are nice. They certainly are shiny. But just because we made them doesn't mean we should have.
Mine was a hypothetical about priorities, as well as some social commentary. That is, the more we look down at our shiny objects and drool, the less likely we are to see how a handheld mobile device is relatively low hanging fruit.
Perhaps just correlation / coincidence but adoption of modern technology tracks well with the loss of the middle class, at least in the USA. Yes, a stretch. I'm not going to the mat for this idea. Just a simple observation; worth pondering?
I agree with you, but in the end, I think that pitting an imagined austere but socially developed society against our actual supposedly-profligate but socially underdeveloped society misses reality to repeat a myth: the myth of decadence. This myth lets people pretend society is too productive and too good at meeting needs, leaving nothing but petty status disputes, covering up the reality of a society that's running dramatically below peak efficiency precisely because it doggedly dedicates so much of its resource base to status disputes.
> But at what cost? How many wars? How many lives lost due to our infatuation with the MIC?
I'm not implying the military industrial complex is good (or bad). I'm simply saying the narrative that silicon valley gave the military smart phones and not vice versa severely misunderstands the way things in that sector happen. To the extent that Silicon Valley works with the military it is because SV effectively is a branch of the military.
> The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD?
Is there really a huge difference between Pentagon and DoD when talking about the MID?
You know how the U.S. (and its Allies) beat Russia in the Cold War because they gradually developed a stronger electronics and high-tech sector, which became more and more important as e.g. precision weapons showed their worth? And as we started testing nukes in computers rather than in underground tests? The Russians’ state-dominated model simply couldn’t produce the kinds of innovations made by the Western commercial sector. It’s a similar thing with Silicon Valley and the US govt.
The days where the govt seeded tech in the US are long gone. This is not to say there’s no contribution, but when was the last time someone cared about govt or defense contractor involvement? Not many who are alive and still working in the Bay Area today.
The article is correct and there is a fear of being co-opted by the state. There is a question whether there is some middle ground. Traditionally that middle ground was held by defense contractors. Today there are tech-like companies that are increasingly filling that niche. Examples of such companies are Pivotal (which recently filed its S-1) and Palantir (which might never file its S-1). I would argue that Amazon and Google are getting into these DoD contracts because Pivotal, Redhat, etc. failed to build a compelling-enough PAAS solution that the government can deploy on its own. The government would love to own its own datacenters, but apparently that isn’t working out, or there’s still some need for agility that’s not being fulfilled.
Given how much space Palantir leases in downtown Palo Alto (and the fact that they seem to have no need or responsibility to ever exit or behave like any other tech company), I think the fear of being consumed by the government is not at all unfounded. Now you can argue that Pivotal and Palantir are nice companies (for vastly different reasons) but when you really take stock of it, no one can say they’re really tech companies (and, that is fine). To Silicon Valley, they represent something else, something bureaucratic.
On one hand Silicon Valley needs to be a bit more realistic about geopolitics. The government isn’t going away. In practice, it's just the simple fact that we are more beholden to political stability than we think, and we tend to take it for granted. On the other hand, the government represents that side of society that forces things and pretty much can’t get free-spirited commercial innovation right. And again, in practice, it's like trying to do anything interesting when you have your nanny mother (who has no real fiscal or creative responsibility) watching over your shoulder. The reality is more boring than people realize, but the tension is there and the problem is real.
There's a lot in here I agree with. I am not discounting the private sector's value in bringing state sponsored tech to market. This is huge. But what I am saying is that the state leads. Innovation has not traditionally been led by the private market, and again, the narrative that tech has flown from private markets to the military is just not correct, except maybe I guess when you consider the PAAS market bounded in the last 10 years? It really depends on where you draw your boundaries though: PAAS ultimately sits on 65 years of private sector innovation built on top of...a network created to monitor nuclear silos originally deployed by the military.
> The days where the govt seeded tech in the US are long gone. This is not to say there’s no contribution, but when was the last time someone cared about govt or defense contractor involvement?
The entire self-driving car industry is build on top of DARPA experiments from the 90s.
I think this is a very balanced comment; I hope that more people develop a more realistic understanding of the relationship between a countries armed forces and its civil society. SV engineers do have rather anti-military tendencies and they should be free to do so; but I do think it would be better overall to have more engagement between the two.
As you say, the Government and Military aren't going away, and shouldn't be. But they can be reformed and that's where SV can be helpful.
> Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley, not the other way around.
While the low level protocols like TCP came out of DARPA, the web protocols like HTTP were all civilian. Neither personal computers or smartphones were military inventions. Modern encryption is sometimes traced to WW2, but cryptography is thousands of years old.
I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed.
We are very behind in terms of cyber warfare, and our position is incredibly weak in a post Snowden world, where all our defense strategies were leaked.
Our critical infrastructure is sorely in need of software updates - many devices don’t have authentication so one can just shut down a power plant if they get onto the same network.
China has been slowly pulling ahead by installing black doors in all the hardware manufactured there. Russia is flexing their muscles with excursions against neighbors critical infrastructure. The US is falling behind rapidly.
Despite incessant talk about ‘impact’ and ‘saving the world’, Silicon Valley engineers build glorified slot machines for phones. Refusing to work with the Military sounds like something the ultra privileged would say - they don’t care about the people in this country. When the lights go out because China has taken out power across the US, and Google is no longer working, I wonder then if those ‘3000’ engineers will think twice about the importance of national defense, or if they will continue to sit in their ivory towers and lecture the rest of the world about how they are making the world a better place for selling digital cigarettes. If engineers want REAL impact, there is no where better than cyber defense.
This idea of 'post Snowden' world makes little sense. The idea that you have to agree to everything your government does smacks of jingoism and is inherently anti democratic.
It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'.
This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.
Nothing the GP said implies having to agree or blindly follow but no one with any shred of sense can argue that Snowden's leaks have not caused significant harm to US (and to an extent 5-Eye/NATO/western) SIGINT/Cyber operations.
Whether our society would benefit more from the exposure than the potential damages form exposing intelligence operations and crippling both defensive and offensive capacity is a completely separate argument.
And it's not just Snowden, Vault7 which included public source code disclosure and The Shadow Broker / Equation Group leaks also did quite a bit of harm.
Like it or not the digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare and maintaining superiority in it is just as important as maintaining all those fancy carrier strike groups.
"The digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare" is one of those things that DoD-types like to say, and that the consulting industry likes to echo, that doesn't really mean anything. In the airless vacuum of message board reasoning, everything is a domain of modern warfare.
I'm not going to argue with you I know who you are (I don't mean it in a negative way).
But at least from my previous experience beyond intelligence gathering and information warfare "cyber" has been a key component of military operations.
Anything from SEAD to hacking into civilian and critical infrastructure for direct support of an operation is a common place, it was in so about a decade ago which is my last privileged exposure to such activities and it so still now.
Tracking enemy combatants via their mobile devices, breaking into mobile carriers disturbing C&C/C4/C3I networks and kinetic payloads to disrupt both temporary/field deployed (I have a few anecdotes about Mitsubishi generators and their TELYS control panels) and permanent infrastructure are not limited to the presale decks that Lockheed Martin presents to the DoD.
My exposure is also completely devoid of any contact with any US defense contractors or an other US organization but rather through an MNNA.
> However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed.
That is jingoism. If despite spending half trillion dollars if US military is behind something that many people should get fired.
Pentagon is hostile to US interests at the moment because how they work is under wraps, they dont pay price of their wrong decisions and they have a limitless credit card paid by taxpayers.
Working with military is not same as "caring about people of country". That veteran in wheelchair at local walmart might be an ordinary person but these Generals and highers up are not and must be treated as s*ums.
This is silly. Silicon Valley doesn't need to team up with the DoD to resolve insecurity, and, in fact, the DoD has very few capabilities to improve the security of Silicon Valley products.
Based on what we know, along with pretty straightforward logical extrapolations, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the offensive CS capabilities of the DoD are a specialized subset of what the industry already has. The people staffing offensive operations at NSA are generally working their first job out of college. What we've seen of the quality of their tooling after leaks suggests mediocre software engineering and, if there's an edge to be found at NSA over the best industry offensive teams, it's in router, firewall, and middlebox security --- a consequence of the fact that industry doesn't spend much time working on these targets.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that foreign adversaries outclass us on any of this. The most elaborate, technically sophisticated computer attacks in the last 20 years have all been carried out either by the US or by allies (in other words: largely by US defense contractors).
What is the case is that the median target --- in the US or anywhere else in the world --- is so poorly secured that none of this matters. We are still working in an era where you can send someone an email with a blue-underlined link in it, and if a receptionist clicks that link, their entire network is owned up.
Despite the indisputably grave state of the US's computer security --- let's be clear, of everyone's computer security, here and abroad --- the US is at little risk of "destruction". Our adversaries also have the ability to conduct kinetic attacks anywhere in the country. Every adversary of ours worth of that name could blow up a US power plant. They don't, because the cost of attribution to them is essentially infinite.
People in Silicon Valley aren't great about computer security, but they know at least as much about it as the DoD does, and nobody should pretend they can spook the industry with the specter of "cyber warfare".
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[ 23.1 ms ] story [ 1791 ms ] threadGo pound sand.
Are Google employees an unbiased sample now? Also, regardless of what authority / stature they may have, the "call to authority" fallacy would apply if you use that data-point as the crux of your argument.
Lastly, accuracy <> popularity - an argument can be right or wrong regardless of how many people agree with you.
There is no guarantee that the Department of State will not use said technology in a non-tyrannical fashion. In fact, we have decades of evidence that it will use it in a tyrannical fashion (And then lie their pants off about it), whenever it serves their interests.
I don't think I will ever understand this sentiment. At the time of WW2, the US still legally discriminated against colored people. The UK had a sprawling empire whose colored citizens were not given full rights or representation. France was also similar; in fact France tried to claw its empire back which led to some ugly wars in IndoChina (Vietnam) and Algeria.
Let me say that Nazism and Fascism were surely forces that needed to be defeated and put down. But the Allies were hardly the perfect coalition of "free people" or the "free world" that people today glorify them to be. They were at best a "better side that was moving in the right direction".
That is democracy. Fascism and communism were the worse sides that were moving in the wrong direction, and allowing those factions to gain a military advantage would have been morally indefensible. The UK and France abandoned their empires in the 20th century; the Soviets expanded theirs.
I think it's wonderful that liberal democracies have a rich culture of self-criticism when it comes to their flaws and imperfections. That's what makes it so important to preserve them.
Its a difficult question and its sad to see how technology created originally for benefiting humanity can sometimes be re purposed for its destruction. In a world where sovereign nations are not bound by arms restrictions though, its hard to see how this endless march of destruction can be stopped.
The SALT and other arms-reduction treaties b/w the US and erstwhile USSR where, IMO, a very good compromise. I find it hard to do something similar in the future if we continue to have dysfunctional administrations governing the US though.
After 1945 (arguably 1953 at the latest), there were absolutely no direct wars between any two major powers. Nuclear weapons did make war too destructive to ever risk.
Nation-states require people working on real problems, especially if we are continuing to shoulder the burden of securing the rest of the western world. We cannot run on maintenance-mode without a technical team.
If we are to do something we should do it well. Otherwise we should own the alternative of turning inward, reducing our obligations to NATO and the UN, and shrinking the size/scope of the federal government.
And I agree with OP's statement.
It isn't Peace Corps. keeping the world at relative peace.
What would happen if the US government poured as much money/effort into keeping the peace as they did towards disrupting the peace?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...
If you doubt Wikipedia, here's a DOD org chart from inside government: http://dcmo.defense.gov/Portals/47/Documents/PDSD/201509_DoD...
I'm also not sure what point you're trying to make, because of course the DoD is also civilian run. That's been fundamental to the Department of Defense since its founding.
The controversial part of the DoD is not national defense, its imperialism.
You might not support American Imperialism, but a lot of Americans do and you take the good with the bad.
Citation needed, because there have been a lot of injuries and deaths they have failed to prevent (domestic violence, poor healthcare, etc) and even many cases of them causing death for US citizens (wars on vague ideas like "drugs", "terrorism", etc).
Internet and GPS originated from ARPA-funded research. That might seem like a minor difference in nomenclature but a person feeling ecstatic about DoD involvement in research might want to look at how much bang for their buck the government got as the defense establishment's involvement increased and increased over the years.
From a pure game theory perspective, if you accept the premise above, then SV should absolutely work with the Pentagon so that the US doesn't fall behind competitively. Unless there was such a strong coalition of cooperation among the entire community globally to not contribute towards Defense initiatives - but even the most optimistic would say this is fantasy.
As one example, I've been warming up to supporting stronger collaboration between the US Tech Industry (because it's bigger than just Silicon Valley) and the NSA purely for the cybersecurity benefits that are going to be needed more and more over time. Cooperating with the best in the industry in the US is the only way to execute well.
Case in point:
"Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years..."
"It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-aga...
This smells like FUD.
> This smells like FUD.
you let your personal bias get to you. I'm guessing you're Chinese.
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.
Could you please stop?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
BUT, why would they NOT work on interesting projects for the gov? Projects are projects.
from us, 50 Cent Army/Chinese Government AI who is imitating an American
That depends a lot on what "pro-military" means. Do most Americans wish success and well-being for our military service members? Yes. Do most Americans approve of how large our military has become, affecting both government budgets and culture, or of the foreign policy that puts so many of those service members in harm's way? I doubt it. It's not "ultra-left" to oppose militarism. You know what is ultra-left? Having a decent social safety net that enables veterans to integrate back into society, instead of abandoning them like the ultra-right does.
Deliberately belittling people who conscientiously object to having their labor used for the purpose of war making is dangerous. I'm very glad that Young Americans (at the time) protested the Vietnam War making it clear to the US Military that they couldn't willy-nilly start wars whenever they want to.
You cannot, and should not, be forcing people to do what they do not want. If you want to convince others of the benefits of having a superior armed forces, belittling them as spoiled children is not the way to do so.
As am I. I'm not criticizing war protest. I'm criticizing not contributing to military technology.
> You cannot, and should not, be forcing people to do what they do not want.
No one is forcing anyone to do anything. I'm criticizing them for making their choice. They remain free to make it.
Your point is that working with the military is good, because being ruled by China would be worse than the current situation. So the moral benefit you're proposing extends insofar as we prevent China from taking over the US. How much do you think Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with the military to prevent replacement by the Chinese?
A lot. Whether or not we like it, automation, AI and autonomous weapons are going to become a huge part of the modern battlefield. Silicon Valley needs to be a big part of that process. If you abdicate your role in technology like this, you don't just make it go away. All you do is cede control of it to someone who is willing to do it. Who doesn't share your sense of morality. How, exactly, is that better?
It's easy to find examples of how to make this sort of argument civilly and substantively; you replied to one.
Also edited my comment to reflect that.
Given the USA's history, the better question is: why wouldn't Russia and China do that?
Put another way: If you were the Native Americans wouldn't you still be wishing you embraced the gun sooner rather than later?
Is this necessarily/automatic enough of a Good Thing as to be assumed as such by fiat?
This seems largely equivalent to "From a pure game theory perspective, everybody who could should work to advance nuclear missile design".
Rather than looking at which leads to a better "positive" outcome (as some have done elsewhere in the thread re: DARPA), I would also consider which leads to a better "floor" (Max-Min type of strategy, where you find the best of the worst-case scenarios.)
Silicon Valley pompous, egotistical, man child billionaires mainly mine user data, advertise, and sell and improve products created by someone else. And how do they get market share? A fair percentage do due to laws and regulation loopholes making other companies unable to compete.
You think publically traded or privately backed VC companies will spend billions on R&D on a moonshot or just try to maximize profits as they should.
Silicon Valley today seems most interested in addicting people through cheap psychological tricks and owning/tracking/influencing every part of their lives, and then selling that information. Silicon Valley is what we in the Valley thought Wall Street was two decades ago. I would trust Wall Street, the Pentagon, and The Military before the holier than thou hypocracy prevalent everywhere in the Valley today
Not working with the Pentagon would be just a symbolic action that doesn't address any real issues.
This is a fairly cherry picked story to match a narrative that frankly does not really exist. Silicon valley is not a partner of the defense world, it's derivative of it. The vast majority of technological disruption has come from technologies emerging from the state, that are then popularized by Silicon Valley. Most of these came from the space race, and in many ways Silicon Valley is still "behind" the Pentagon.
Web protocols, smartphones, personal computers, encryption etc., all of this came from the military into Silicon Valley, not the other way around.
The Pentagon doesn't need Silicon Valley, it's quite the opposite.
Yes. That's factually correct. But at what cost? How many wars? How many lives lost due to our infatuation with the MIC?
The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD?
Put another way:
What might the societal perks have been if the deep pockets' lens was not military-centric?
For example, is there an alt-earth in an alt-universe with no mobile phones, but also no poverty?
The things you've mentioned are nice. They certainly are shiny. But just because we made them doesn't mean we should have.
Probably not. A society with no poverty would be so much more productive than ours that it would invent fun things like mobile phones pretty quickly.
Mine was a hypothetical about priorities, as well as some social commentary. That is, the more we look down at our shiny objects and drool, the less likely we are to see how a handheld mobile device is relatively low hanging fruit.
Perhaps just correlation / coincidence but adoption of modern technology tracks well with the loss of the middle class, at least in the USA. Yes, a stretch. I'm not going to the mat for this idea. Just a simple observation; worth pondering?
I'm not implying the military industrial complex is good (or bad). I'm simply saying the narrative that silicon valley gave the military smart phones and not vice versa severely misunderstands the way things in that sector happen. To the extent that Silicon Valley works with the military it is because SV effectively is a branch of the military.
> The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD?
Is there really a huge difference between Pentagon and DoD when talking about the MID?
This is glossing over an incredible amount of history. Is the entire physics field a branch of the military as well?
The days where the govt seeded tech in the US are long gone. This is not to say there’s no contribution, but when was the last time someone cared about govt or defense contractor involvement? Not many who are alive and still working in the Bay Area today.
The article is correct and there is a fear of being co-opted by the state. There is a question whether there is some middle ground. Traditionally that middle ground was held by defense contractors. Today there are tech-like companies that are increasingly filling that niche. Examples of such companies are Pivotal (which recently filed its S-1) and Palantir (which might never file its S-1). I would argue that Amazon and Google are getting into these DoD contracts because Pivotal, Redhat, etc. failed to build a compelling-enough PAAS solution that the government can deploy on its own. The government would love to own its own datacenters, but apparently that isn’t working out, or there’s still some need for agility that’s not being fulfilled.
Given how much space Palantir leases in downtown Palo Alto (and the fact that they seem to have no need or responsibility to ever exit or behave like any other tech company), I think the fear of being consumed by the government is not at all unfounded. Now you can argue that Pivotal and Palantir are nice companies (for vastly different reasons) but when you really take stock of it, no one can say they’re really tech companies (and, that is fine). To Silicon Valley, they represent something else, something bureaucratic.
On one hand Silicon Valley needs to be a bit more realistic about geopolitics. The government isn’t going away. In practice, it's just the simple fact that we are more beholden to political stability than we think, and we tend to take it for granted. On the other hand, the government represents that side of society that forces things and pretty much can’t get free-spirited commercial innovation right. And again, in practice, it's like trying to do anything interesting when you have your nanny mother (who has no real fiscal or creative responsibility) watching over your shoulder. The reality is more boring than people realize, but the tension is there and the problem is real.
> The days where the govt seeded tech in the US are long gone. This is not to say there’s no contribution, but when was the last time someone cared about govt or defense contractor involvement?
The entire self-driving car industry is build on top of DARPA experiments from the 90s.
This is the second time I've recommended this book on HN in as many weeks, but it's really quite good in going into the structure and history of the private market/govt dichotomy: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-S...
As you say, the Government and Military aren't going away, and shouldn't be. But they can be reformed and that's where SV can be helpful.
While the low level protocols like TCP came out of DARPA, the web protocols like HTTP were all civilian. Neither personal computers or smartphones were military inventions. Modern encryption is sometimes traced to WW2, but cryptography is thousands of years old.
I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed.
We are very behind in terms of cyber warfare, and our position is incredibly weak in a post Snowden world, where all our defense strategies were leaked.
Our critical infrastructure is sorely in need of software updates - many devices don’t have authentication so one can just shut down a power plant if they get onto the same network.
China has been slowly pulling ahead by installing black doors in all the hardware manufactured there. Russia is flexing their muscles with excursions against neighbors critical infrastructure. The US is falling behind rapidly.
Despite incessant talk about ‘impact’ and ‘saving the world’, Silicon Valley engineers build glorified slot machines for phones. Refusing to work with the Military sounds like something the ultra privileged would say - they don’t care about the people in this country. When the lights go out because China has taken out power across the US, and Google is no longer working, I wonder then if those ‘3000’ engineers will think twice about the importance of national defense, or if they will continue to sit in their ivory towers and lecture the rest of the world about how they are making the world a better place for selling digital cigarettes. If engineers want REAL impact, there is no where better than cyber defense.
It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'.
This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.
Whether our society would benefit more from the exposure than the potential damages form exposing intelligence operations and crippling both defensive and offensive capacity is a completely separate argument.
And it's not just Snowden, Vault7 which included public source code disclosure and The Shadow Broker / Equation Group leaks also did quite a bit of harm.
Like it or not the digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare and maintaining superiority in it is just as important as maintaining all those fancy carrier strike groups.
But at least from my previous experience beyond intelligence gathering and information warfare "cyber" has been a key component of military operations.
Anything from SEAD to hacking into civilian and critical infrastructure for direct support of an operation is a common place, it was in so about a decade ago which is my last privileged exposure to such activities and it so still now.
Tracking enemy combatants via their mobile devices, breaking into mobile carriers disturbing C&C/C4/C3I networks and kinetic payloads to disrupt both temporary/field deployed (I have a few anecdotes about Mitsubishi generators and their TELYS control panels) and permanent infrastructure are not limited to the presale decks that Lockheed Martin presents to the DoD.
My exposure is also completely devoid of any contact with any US defense contractors or an other US organization but rather through an MNNA.
That is jingoism. If despite spending half trillion dollars if US military is behind something that many people should get fired.
Pentagon is hostile to US interests at the moment because how they work is under wraps, they dont pay price of their wrong decisions and they have a limitless credit card paid by taxpayers.
Working with military is not same as "caring about people of country". That veteran in wheelchair at local walmart might be an ordinary person but these Generals and highers up are not and must be treated as s*ums.
Based on what we know, along with pretty straightforward logical extrapolations, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the offensive CS capabilities of the DoD are a specialized subset of what the industry already has. The people staffing offensive operations at NSA are generally working their first job out of college. What we've seen of the quality of their tooling after leaks suggests mediocre software engineering and, if there's an edge to be found at NSA over the best industry offensive teams, it's in router, firewall, and middlebox security --- a consequence of the fact that industry doesn't spend much time working on these targets.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that foreign adversaries outclass us on any of this. The most elaborate, technically sophisticated computer attacks in the last 20 years have all been carried out either by the US or by allies (in other words: largely by US defense contractors).
What is the case is that the median target --- in the US or anywhere else in the world --- is so poorly secured that none of this matters. We are still working in an era where you can send someone an email with a blue-underlined link in it, and if a receptionist clicks that link, their entire network is owned up.
Despite the indisputably grave state of the US's computer security --- let's be clear, of everyone's computer security, here and abroad --- the US is at little risk of "destruction". Our adversaries also have the ability to conduct kinetic attacks anywhere in the country. Every adversary of ours worth of that name could blow up a US power plant. They don't, because the cost of attribution to them is essentially infinite.
People in Silicon Valley aren't great about computer security, but they know at least as much about it as the DoD does, and nobody should pretend they can spook the industry with the specter of "cyber warfare".
Propaganda can destroy democracies. (And in most or all autocracies, propaganda is central to the regime's power)
Social media, and private data, and disclosure of private emails, and obtaining compromising info by hacking, can all be excellent propaganda tools.
So yes, computer security and hackers can threaten the actual destruction of western society. Via propaganda and 'information warfare'.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democrac... https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/supercharged-dumdums.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017...