> "Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war"
Someone is lacking in perspective. The modern US military cannot operate without Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, Internet Explorer, Office, and most importantly, PowerPoint. It's both frustrating and sad.
The modern world is also powered by technologies invented because of various wars. Duct tape / super glue / rockets / radars which led to the microwave over / ..
Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?
> Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?
Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems.
Many if not all of those could have been discovered in any other circumstances, or equivalents would have been found. I mean that anything we find useful now could have been discovered for their sheer usefulness. War accelerated the process, and prioritised some kind of discoveries, but it's not a source of discovery in itself.
But I think it's fair to say that our current technological progress would at least lag a couple of centuries behind without armed conflict and the resulting need to be faster/more destructive/better protected/better armed/... than your respective enemy.
I see your point, but we had tremendous progress in the last half of the 20th century that was not a consequence of direct armed conflicts.
I agree that political tension and the threat of conflict (in particular the whole Cold War dynamic) helped push a lot of innovations, but it's only tension, not bombing or killing of whole populations (it also happened, but I can't see any huge progress coming directly from that)
I don't think either of these are directly used in combat situations.
Personally I feel there's a difference between using hard/software for planning and logistics, and directly in combat - I know it might not be logical, but ethics rarely is.
It's definitely not "logical", because while a better gun can give a man advantage over another man, an army gains advantage over other armies via logistics. If you oppose the military as an instrument of violence and death, then it's important to realize that this instrument is built on JP-8 and paper forms and SharePoint, not on guns and ships.
I'm not sure how you're using the term "directly" but I can assure you that those are as necessary and utilized in combat, as hellfire missiles and 5.56 ammunition.
I remember reading that the U.S. Army is the single largest installed base for Red Hat Linux. Guess it only covers a little part of the infrastructure.
Red Hat is pretty much the only Linux distro used in military systems. Purpose-built military information systems, like the Distributed Common Ground System (Army/Air Force) and (parts of the) SPY-1D radar system (Navy), generally use Linux for any purpose that does not require hard real-time guarantees.
Of course, they never really used Windows for this purpose at any point; Linux is gradually taking over for Solaris on operator consoles and AIX on the heavy processing machines.
This effort, especially PowerPoint, may have saved many lives by slowing everything down a bit.
To be less blase, that list is far more pencil manufacturer than it is bomb sight manufacturer, whereas holo-lens sales to the military definitely seem bit more like a bomb sight than they do a pencil.
Is it? Did you see the hololens promo of the lift engineer getting augmented reality advice to change components. The amount of deployed specialist equipment that could benefit from that is certainly more pencil than sword.
Saying that the purchase is intended to increase lethality, right at the top of the report, might make me suspect that the army aren't buying these to investigate the great strides they can accomplish in repairing municipal infrastructure.
Though it will admittedly make plenty of jobs for the people that do.
Count me in the "don't care" department -- the company needs to do business to survive and thrive. I like that things are going well for the company at the moment.
Some of these people complaining about it are likely the same sort that, when given a chance to ask Satya a question during a Q&A session, ask about getting free food in Redmond.
It reminds me of Black Mirror episode where using Augmented Reality, the face of enemies is morphed into the face of monsters so the soldiers would not hesitate to kill the enemies. May we live in interesting times!
It’s a pretty good idea. Post-battle investigations show that only like 15-30% of soldiers actually shoot their weapons (the percentage increases along with the distance). So, a commander could effectively double or triple their force with a small change.
I used a hololens recently and I was super excited but was disappointed in the end. The technology is definitely cool but the limited field of vision really kills it. The built in hand gestures detection is nice though.
This seems to be a typical case of someone in charge of a budget having to spend it otherwise it will be allocated elsewhere.
Either they have access to a completely improved device or expect a lot of devices being chucked out by aggravated servicemen. The current gen HoloLens is not much more than a toy.
>the Army said it wanted to incorporate night vision and thermal sensing, measure vital signs like breathing and “readiness,” monitor for concussions and offer hearing protection.
Maybe a little ambitious, but if it does half of those things it might be quite useful, no?
It definitely would be I suppose. However the current gen HoloLens is not much more then a tech demo for use in a controlled environment, pretty much the opposite from the envisaged use case.
This is almost humorous in a sad kind of way. If Google is not able to fulfill contracts for the Defense Department, then the government will simply go to the next source. I think Amazon, with its new HQ2 a mile from the Pentagon, and less problems of employees walking out, is going to dominate in this area.
Props to Microsoft biz dev for finding someone to buy those things, but wow - that is a lot of money to spend on HMDs that will never get anywhere near actual combat. At least I hope they don’t, for the safety of our troops. Can you even imagine wearing one of those monstrosities in a hostile environment requiring agility and situational awareness?
Not that I agree with, or support war in any way, and it always makes me a little sick to my stomach to see brilliant people coming up with technology to make killing people simpler - but...
HoloLens has sure better improve by orders of magnitude before I'd ever want to see it used in any sort of field.
It's like looking into a postage stamp of reality.
Where is the outrage from Microsoft employees? Take a stand like your Google counterparts have! You can make money and not have to sell away your soul at the same time. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Take self-driving vehicles. Every single piece of technology used in its development could be used with some minor tweaking in a military application to massively increase the lethality of existing weapons and allow for an unprecedented level of increased killing and destruction. But instead of selling themselves out to a future that will be remarkably more dystopian if given in to military application, Google has chosen to make commercial self-driving vehicles which not only will likely save an innumerable amount of lives by preventing fatal driving accidents, but also will be making boatloads of money at the same time!
Technology is a force multiplier for better or worse, and it’s up to us as the future engineers and scientists who will be creating this technology to choose the right path. For those sociopathic leaning people who could care less about avoiding a future of death on an unprecedented massive and automated scale, luckily that path will be no less lucrative.
There should be outrage from Russia, Syria, Iran, ISIS, etc., but not US employees. This enhances _our_ army, rather than others' armies. We have some indirect control over what our army does, but none over those other armies.
Sometimes idealists become like pacifists who would rather die than confront someone who is going to annihilate you. That your PoV, but it certainly isn't the majority PoV even amongst Democrats.
The world isn't a dreamy place; you have to make dirty choices, given what's available.
Of course, if you want to see western influence wane, then sure, and allow other less progressive influence wax. That's the realpolitik.
These decisions should be left to the democratic process rather then the province of unelected idealists.
Your viewpoint makes sense if you see the US Armed Forces as a incorruptible benevolent force.
Take a look at police forces who claim to "serve and protect" while summarily executing random citizens (sorry, wrong house SWATTING) or racially motivated (black kid with toy = imminent threat).
Not at all. His viewpoint makes sense simply by understanding that US military superiority over countries like Russia and China is significantly better, to the entire western world, than any realistic alternative.
Possibly because quite a few police departments throughout the country like to model themselves after the military, particularly with the equipment they use.
"This is especially true in cases where, much to the chagrin of civil liberty advocates, police departments have employed their newly acquired military weaponry not only to combat terrorism but also for everyday patrolling. Before 9/11, the usual heavy weaponry available to a small-town police officer consisted of a standard pump-action shot gun, perhaps a high power rifle, and possibly a surplus M-16, which would usually have been kept in the trunk of the supervising officer's vehicle. Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle — the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America's big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, "special" has quietly become "routine.""
Sounds like you have issue with SWAT. What does that have to do with the military? The military is not a local police force. See Posse Comitatus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
That had more to do with ambivalent citizens being lackadaisical about their oversight duties. But, on the other hand, it’s freaking hard to be politically active when one comes home mentally exhausted everyday. I’m just as bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
How does that change anything? It’s like saying because NASA was funded primarily due to the advent of the Cold War, that NASA should only work on researching and building ICBMs because that’s the type of stuff they originated from. The logic doesn’t make any sense.
On the other hand, Google has been on the record saying they won't develop military AI, that an autonomous weapons race is dangerous and unwanted, and that they want to organize the world's information to keep it accessible to anyone.
Microsoft employees knew what they signed up for and have moral authority to make that decision. Google employees thought they signed up to "do no evil" and their efforts were used by a secret project that violates all but one of their safe AI guidelines (the one about delivering technical excellence).
I myself am a bit more agnostic/apathetic about creating technology that could be used for bad: I just want to create and focus on the best possible (gun turret, data mining, missile tech), that will deliver on its promise of what it said out to do with utmost accuracy and robustness. That's why I find it really important to work for companies and governments that I can trust to not abuse my technology once it is out of my hands, and are transparent about its usage. But I don't find any damage to my soul if the decision makers make an evil usage decision: That is fully on them. I am not going to handicap or refuse to work on something interesting, because their morals are out of whack.
> If people have qualms with how the weapons are used they should take effort in the political process
War and politics are very much the same thing, if we would have have managed to "fix" politics by now I'm pretty sure war would have also been "fixed" instantly. But "fixing" politics is an elusive (and I personally think impossible) job, we've been having a go at it for at least 2,400 years (think Plato) but apparently it still seems that people in power like to promise the impossible to the multitudes who believe them just because (think the propaganda lies told to the Athenians just before the ill-fated expidition to Sicily [1]).
Politics is an inseparable part of human existence,
and yes, war is an extension of politics. That's why you can't get rid of it.
The cornerstone of the sovereignty of a polity is the credible capability to project force within their territory. To put in another words, the zeroth rule of existence of the state, is that the state is the entity with the potential for instrumenting most violence within the territory over which they claim dominion.
As an example failed states can have various factions claiming sovereignty over mini-fiefdoms of their own, mainly due to their superior force projection capability. See the fragmentation in Libya, or the warlords of Somalia, etc.
That's what I meant about fixing the political process. Over a specific territory there is always an entity with the most force projection capability, and that entity likely has the most political power over that specific area.
You can't have a state without capability for violence. That's why military service is an honorable profession, (and not a crime against humanity) and absolute pacifists are completely delusional about the current state of human existence.
I would like to have a world without war as well, but that's not the world we live in right now.
Like in large software projects, you can't rewrite the world. You just have to try to maintain it and make it a little better, while learning to live with the quirks and the bugs of history. Currently war is hard coded to the political structure of the world.
Two different situations. Google is making a tool designed for immediate oppression. Microsoft is making a tool for a defense force. Of course that defense force has been used immorally in the recent past, but it is a necessity of life and will remain one in perpetuity.
What was so bad about Maven? I only had heard about the part of it using AI to detect bombs being placed in Kabul. It sounded like a great opportunity to protect civillians.
People are currently mad at google for helping to censor Chinese internet more than anything else. That is what I was referring to. I didn't really have anything against project Maven, but then again I wasn't working on it so I don't know it's true scope or goals.
"mainly for security ... also for economic reasons."
Given how powerful the military-industrial complex is I'm not sure if those should be reversed to "mainly for economic reasons... also for security". US military from one point of view is a huge state subsidy not only to capital owners, but to the people employed there as well.
Someone is lacking in perspective. The modern US military cannot operate without Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, Internet Explorer, Office, and most importantly, PowerPoint. It's both frustrating and sad.