[caleb_thompson]

Author here. I gave this as a talk at several conferences through 2017.

I didn't realize that the video embed was broken until someone pointed out that this was making the rounds again, so I've just fixed that. If you've already looked, the video is now available. The content is more or less the same as the written version so don't feel like you need to watch it if you've already read the post.

[bsenftner]

I went into facial recognition specifically to demystify the technology as well as first hand learn the ethics of that industry. I was there for 7 years, and learned enough to duplicate what is SOTA and to know the ethics are none. Securing locations was the primary goal of the company and tech, but when they started ignoring obvious unethical client behavior, and it became clear that client behavior was omnipresent, and they refused to do anything about it when discussing the situation, I left he company and the industry entirely.

The issue is the common practice of police asking crime victims if their assailant looked like any celebrity. If they give any celebrity's name, they put that celebrity's face into their FR system, and start harassing anybody in their FR system that looks like the celebrity. That is omnipresent, and a very good reason to alter your appearance if you are unlucky enough to look like anyone famous.

[Teever]

Do you believe that there is sufficient moral hazard for Ukrainians working in their domestic drone industry to dissuade them from doing that work? Why or why not?

What is different about that situation from the situation you described in your talk?

What factors would have to change in the global balance of power for you to consider building systems that kill for American companies?

[caleb_thompson]

Morality is personal. In any instance, we should think through first-, second-, and subsequent-order consequences of our actions and consider whether we're comfortable with those potential outcomes and whether those consequences balance one another.

I won't take the bait on defining the differences between wartime and peacetime work.

[myk9001]

I don't know if the gp's question is intended as a bait or not.

However, it describes a real scenario playing out literally as we speak.

While I absolutely don't mean this in a confrontational manner, if your ethical framework doesn't provide you with means to address a real-world ongoing situation, what's it even useful for?

[Teever]

The distinction between wartime and peacetime is important. As you said, the devil is in the details and we should always think about the consequences of our (in)actions.

The decades of American misadventure in the Middle East have been devastating for the future of world peace. In the quest to occupy two countries and engage in asymmetric warfare against relatively poorly equipped terrorists / freedom fighters the United States has burned a tremendous amount of social capital and soft power abroad. Additionally these prolonged conflicts have been hugely unpopular domestically and have had detrimental effects on the morale and functionality of the armed forces. People and institutions are burned out at the thought of supporting the armed forces, and your talk is a prime example of that.

This threatens world peace because even in times we consider to be peaceful authoritarian forces are plotting against democratic institutions. While America burned trillions of dollars of assets and social capital, Russia and China have been quietly amassing the resources to wage war and shatter the peace that people like us as well as our Ukrainian, Taiwanese, South Korean, and Japanese counterparts. At the same time they've been not so quietly waging war in a different domain and have built up a disconcertingly powerful fifth column through concerted social media campaigns that affect large sites and Hacker News alike.

I used to be very opposed to American hegemony and interventionism and for good reason too. What happened in Iraq and Afghanistan was an atrocity. Dick Cheney and others should be living out the rest of their lives in the ICC detention centre and the oligarchs who indirectly amassed their fortunes from these conflicts like Liz Cheney should be stripped of the resources and influence that they have in our society today. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in.

Instead we live in the reality where these people are free to run amok and their authoritarian counterparts in Russia and China are preparing for an all-out assault on global democratic institutions and individual freedom.

What's even more concerning is that we live in a world where the resources of the US military are depleted. The decades spent fighting insurgencies have left the military unfocused to address the rise of countries like Russia and China. The US can't even supply enough shells for Ukraine to wage war effectively. And there plans to rise to the level of production needed for that conflict and others like it are too little too late.

In the seeingly impending conflict with China over Taiwan the wargame scenarios paint a dire picture.[0]. America has insufficient stocks of missiles to wage a protracted war with China with many supplies estimated to be exhausted within a week of conflict and the lead time for producing replacements is measured in months to years. China comically outstrips the shipbuilding capacity of the United States with the US Navy so desperate to build naval ships that they've begun outsourcing production to South Korea[2] which again seems too little too late and precariously close to Chinese missiles.

If America loses access to the advanced production of South Korea[3] and Taiwan in the near future how will it ever scale up production to meet the rising threat of authoritarianism like it did in World War 2?[4] While the US has let their industrial capacity deteriorate and has meagre stockpiles for war China is not so quietly building theirs.[5] China dominates in the production of crucial commodities like steel, aluminum, copper as well as more advanced products like batteries and solar panels. They are constructing massive factories[6] to dominate the electric car industry that can easily be repurposed to producing drones which are proving to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine and Russia.

I agree with you completely. We must be ever mindful of actions and their effects both intentional and unintentional. There are consequences to action and inaction alike but question is not whether the price of action is high, but whether the world can afford the cost of inaction.

[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...

[2] https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/08/hanwha-ocean-be...

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-countries-have-the-mo...

[4] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-a...

[5] https://archive.ph/5hlDA

[6] https://x.com/taylorogan/status/1859146242519167249

[vaylian]

Thanks. I really appreciate the transcript! I'm still reading it. This is a really good and thoughtful talk. Thanks for sharing it!