Posted by surprisetalk 2 days ago
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?
The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?
> that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Our force structure shifted towards logistics and infrastructure from combatants as we moved up the weapon complexity hierarchy. First automatic guns, then tanks, then airplanes.
To a large extent, a tank or air crew is 50 guys waving off 1-5, while they sit back at base and do hobbies between bouts of mechanic labor. They’re not literally at home, but we do fight with small mechanized armies while most soldiers watch on from the base.
It wasn’t over night but it did exactly what it intended and sped up a battle significantly as though you had multiples of troops compared to a musket firing line
Then miniaturized it becomes the SAW
16% of adult males in the Roman mid-republic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_army_of_the_mid-Republic...), call that 8% of adults of all genders.
Wikipedia says that there's about 1.34 million people in active duty in the US military, out of about 342 million people, 21.5% of which are under 18. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces)
I think that's 0.5%? Down from 8% in ancient Rome?
Is is that surprisingly few weapons inventors expressed regret and doubt? Or just that very few wrote about it?
Snark aside, we have massively more people alive today than in 1900 and yet the proportion of people that die in armed conflicts is— while horrific- barely noteworthy in most years around the dawn of the 20th century and not infrequently dwarfed by the body counts racked up in those days.
That's true if your definition of 'die in armed conflicts' is limited to 'the soldiers on the battlefield.' If you extend that definition a little to 'people who would not have died if there hadn't been an armed conflict' then you need to scale it up to about a million people a year today. That's just from 5 countries where it's been studied. Globally it's likely to be much more. There's some good information about it, from a credible source, here: https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
not a knock on modern medicine, and probably the people who survive are happy that they did for the most part, however if you compare the results in the way you did, you should compare those as well.
How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.
That means they're made from renewable resources, right?
The unwritten implication is that this applies to AI, as well. I find it hard to disagree. I don't know what to do about it.
The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is already using AI to subvert democracy, spread misinformation, and develop weapons. "If we don't build these weapons, someone else will." If we can learn nothing else from history, we should learn that you can't turn back the clock.
But also, inevitability is not an argument for complicity. If you personally decide to work on bioweapons, I don't think you can shrug and say "eh, it was going to happen either way". As tech workers, we've really mastered the art of coming up with justifications for what essentially just boils down to "all my friends have gotten rich and now it's my turn".
I've met hundreds of sharp engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. None of them could look me straight in the eye and say "yeah, you know, what we're doing with ad tech is actually good". They just always had an explanation along the lines of "it's not that bad, and besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here".
> besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here".
- second 10 years of my career, started seriously thinking about ethics
- last 10 years of my career (including now) - would not work for Big Tech etc if they gave me 9-digit / year compensation package
> The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is
oh please.
Most scientific development especially root-node stuff has been funded and kick-started by the military for centuries. You can't take funds from DARPA and then be shocked to see the air force using it. You can't work at ecole polytechnique and be shocked to see your work being used in libya.
Humans would have never gone to space [as quick and as at much scale as they did] if they didn't want spy satellites and ICBMs.
Shannon invented a whole new field while working with money earmarked for cryptography work in WW2.
Machine translation was first posed and funded by anyone for russian-english translation - 1949 Warren Weaver memo at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Do see my other comment for more examples.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364917
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45365211 [Context: the creator of waymo was the winner of that challenge]
And need I mention the internet itself...
As the first comment I linked mentions, even many medicines were developed only cos soldiers were dying in theater, not because normal people were dying at home. So it's not just limited to tech.
> the ruling class
No, we don't get to deflect blame like that. If we take money from DARPA/similar to invent something, we are part of the system and are responsible. Everyone involved in the space race in the 50s, Transit (sat nav) in the 60s knew it was to make ICBMs. The creator of waymo surely read that DARPA document I linked in my second comment. And need I mention that oppenheimer knew why nuclear energy was being harnessed :) You can't "oh the evil few tricking the innocent majority, what ever will they do" it away.
A logically defensible position might be that you agree that war is a timeless motivation and that you are fine with stuff being used for military purposes and continue to develop the technology with government money, OR not taking any money from the government. There are not that many others that aren't hypocritical.
We've had no WW3 (so far) and no one here needs to worry about being drafted into a war. Gatling might have thought his gun would reduce the number of war fatalities, but but Oppenheimer thought he would end the world. Both were wrong.
Alternative take: Inventors are bad at predicting the downstream societal effects of their inventions.
Since this result is presumably inevitable at increasing frequency, it's more like nukes prevented another major world war and stole a form of peace from the future, temporarily. That peace debt might be repaid with the end of everything.
At least, it gives impunity to attack others with less fear of retaliation…
Lots of talk in the UK recently about conscription.
here meaning the US or HN?
My question is, how low is that probability, exactly? Because the tradeoff looks very different if it’s one in a million per year, versus one in a hundred per year.
My assessment, looking at the history and the close calls, is that it’s more like one in a hundred.