[cutitout]

> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

[TeMPOraL]

Still, it's a nice way to shift blame to scientists and engineers, away from people who actually use these tools for evil, or commission development of technologies to use in their evil business models.

[cutitout]

All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.

[TeMPOraL]

Responsibility is not a chain, and it absolutely does fade away with enough degrees of separation - otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold that caused him to scream at his wife later that day, and made his wife scream at their kid the next day, for whom it became a formative moment, pushing the kid into a life of crime, and 10 years later someone died because of it.

You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers. And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.

[cutitout]

> Responsibility is not a chain

No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.

> otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold

You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.

Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.

> You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.

There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.

> And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.

That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".

[ufmace]

They're a little unclear about exactly what morality they are advocating for. The nature of weapon technology transforms the way society works.

In the era of sword and shield, for example, combat effectiveness is hugely dependent on raw upper body strength. That means that strong healthy men rule all domains, while women, children, any men not in top physical shape are helpless before them.

In the modern era of mechanized weapons, personal size and physical ability are much less relevant. There's a much greater ability for small groups to make their opinions felt. Victory in large battles tends to go to whoever has the best tech and greatest quantity of it. It's probably a better world overall.

The real question is, exactly how will any "killbots" work, and what effect will they have on society? Maybe they'll be super-expensive and centrally controlled, and nobody better dare to move against whoever ends up in charge of them. Maybe they'll be cheap and plentiful, so anyone with a grudge will be even more able to cause chaos. Maybe something else we can't imagine yet. I have a feeling we'll find out eventually, one way or another.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Your second paragraph seems rather simplistic to me.

Less-able men with more ability to marshall resources/rewards can convince more-able men to be their proxies by paying them . How would they have the ability to do that? Technology, knowledge, cunning, guile.

How long has it been since the king was the best fighter in the realm? I mean, seriously?

[ufmace]

Well yeah it's simplistic, since it's 2 sentences. I'm not really prepared or qualified to write a 30 page paper on the nature of medieval combat. Yet there seems to be an obvious truth to it.

There are of course exceptions, such as persuading or paying someone else to fight for you, or concealing a weapon, getting someone to trust you, and stabbing them in the back, etc. It still seems to shape much about reality to know that the majority of people will have no chance of ever winning a remotely fair fight against the enforcers of whoever is in charge.