[archerface]

Thank god, some sense! It was driving me crazy with how many irrational positions that people in this thread are holding without considering their orientation to the product (AI) and their relationship to the employer.

Something I would add is that a lot of people don't understand how fundamental military R&D is to the collective progression of knowledge and technology. Take almost any common technology that we use today (computers, gps, rockets, airplanes, cell phones, radios, the internet, etc) and you will find it came from military R&D and use in war.

Since AI and all its related parts are the new technological hotness, to put it mildly, it only makes sense that Google, one of the companies on the forefront of this technology, would work with the government/military to do research and find ways to apply it with their scope.

[rtpg]

Part of the reason so much stuff comes out of military research is simply that the military has such a huge budget it can spend it on R&D.

There are definitely useful dual use technologies. But there's also a lot of military research that is almost strictly for military. Nuclear weapons research goes beyond the stuff needed for power generation, for example. Money that could have went into research in more stable, safer power generation instead went into how to make nukes small enough to be used by infantry on the battlefield

The military helps a lot by being a huge customer for a lot of this tech, but we can also cut out the middle man and just spend on r&d directly in some cases!

By discussing the morality of weapons research in a world where we already have civilization-ending technology ,we can maybe reorient ourselves to spending directly on progress in more cases. Without needing to have a military application to justify it.

This happened in the past with the neutron bomb, perhaps it can happen again with tech that could be used to help solidify a police state

[barrkel]

There is no logical connective in your implied argument. Just because A is trying to buy from B does not mean that B should sell things to A, even if A's spending would increase the quality of B's product.

[archerface]

Since we live in a market driven economy, the government (A) will always find a way to buy what they want. So if Google (B) doesn't supply the demand, the customer will just go somewhere else. So it is completely illogical for Goolge to move away. They are an extremely powerful business and are subject to the rules of business.