This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.
The heuristic is that DoD doesn’t do counterterrorism. I don’t expect DoD to prevent terror attacks just like I don’t expect the FBI to blow up bunkers in Iran. We don’t need numbers to be able to confidently estimate that the number of Iranian bunkers blown up by the FBI is approximately zero.
Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
The point is, why would they bother when there’s cheaper and easier ways to do it? A high tech laser system is great for shooting stuff down because it replaces missile systems that cost even more. If you want to cripple people, why would you use it instead of a cheap gun or baton?
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
Countries dont generally invest in shitty weapons when they already have good weapons. Bombs & missiles already exist and are much better than lasers if your goal is to destroy a stationary target.
In Batman Begins, the villian just makes the drinking water toxic. With todays AI and Biotech, one can create a new bacteria or virus and cripple water supply of cities. I am sure a suitable trained AI can get more creative with such low cost attack vectors.
Nah. You can't just engineer some sort of pathogen which will survive water purification treatments, or grow and reproduce in pure water without any nutrients. Real life isn't like the movies.
Won't work very well. Such things need great stability.
And it's not like there's any need of a fancy weapon to do that. This exists to engage high speed targets. Just because you can use a GBU-28 to kill a gopher doesn't mean anyone ever will.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
> If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of
You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, the other has more than 80,000 dead citizens, famine, and virtually no infrastructure left standing.
Gaza's "air defense" is hundreds of miles of tunnels, civilians just aren't allowed to shelter in them. Hamas having better technology wouldn't change the fact that they're not interested in protecting civilians.
I’m not going to defend hamas’ choices, but i think it’s disingenuous to say that they have the ability to protect the people of gaza. A few thousand fighters in tunnels is possible, but millions of civilians? And wouldn’t that be more of this “using human shields” stuff people like to point out so often?
I am imagining a world, where cheaper access to defensive technology will make defense more viable. That's seems like it will simply be true directionally.
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
I think they mean communicable diseases, not combat injuries. For example, around 2/3rds of the military deaths in the American civil war were from disease, not combat. I don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine.
That’s gross. You’re basically saying that hundreds of millions of people need to be held as hostages to ensure good behavior, and that trying to rescue those hostages is morally wrong.
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
I think the historical relationship between war and human societies is deeper than many like to admit. We often act as if advancing technology, and some societies well-being, have fundamentally changed human behavior, but in reality conflict and the use of force have been central to how groups have interacted for millennia. The peace utopia doesn't click.
This isn’t an endorsement of corruption or violence; it’s just a recognition that human social organization has long involved the use of force alongside diplomacy, negotiations, trade, and other political instruments. The modern/post-modern/meta-modern isms may change how we fight, but it doesn’t by itself make the underlying dynamics disappear.