Sometimes the distinction is even more insidious. I did work on perpetual flight for drones, and Facebook had a perpetual flight project that had the goal of bringing internet access to remote locations in Africa. Sounds humanitarian, but I also didn't want to be responsible for subjecting poor Africans to what I consider Facebook's panopticon. Or maybe it would have been a net boon for the region? It's really hard to tell a priori, so the best I have managed for myself is just to try and stay in theory, where developments are further removed from direct consequence.
Separately, RE: bringing internet to new places, there's reasonable evidence to show that introducing broadband lifts GDP[1], so whatever you may think of Facebook, giving people high-speed connectivity to the whole Internet is probably a net positive. Disclaimer: I helped start Facebook's Connectivity Lab but no longer work there.
[1] http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/391452529895999/WDR16-BP-Exp...
From a wikipedia section on Free Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#User_experience_re...
> In 2015, researchers evaluating how Facebook Zero shapes information and communication technologies (ICT) usage in the developing world found that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. 65% of Nigerians, and 61% of Indonesians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet" compared with only 5% in the US
No wonder I have such an alcohol problem...
To me this argument that "anything can be used in evil ways" is a poor excuse used to distract from the issue.
When gunpowder was invented the purpose was medicinal, three centuries later we had cannons.
Many things in our world seem positive on the onset, but give it some time and start looking from different angles and you're bound to find some potentially detrimental use.
Granted some inventions like nuclear energy and nitroglycerin, both intended for constructive purposes, have a more obvious destructive potential. An example that better connects with your question is a company such as Monsanto.
It's for golf courses - there are amazing golf courses in dubai that required genetically modified burmuda grass in a sandy synthetic fertilized substrate. They take huge leaf blowers and cover football fields worth of sand with it, water the HELL out of it, and pretty soon, beautiful grass in the desert.
Grass in the desert is great for everyone, that wants to golf or make money off golfers.
Getting grass where it isn't sustainable is not benevolent.
Actually I was talking about this: http://www.naturalbuildingblog.com/sand-soil-7-hrs-biggest-s...
Regarding the original statement I was criticizing: Of course one can construct an argument of technology itself not having an ethical bias and the notion that everything can be used as a weapon. Sure, beat someone to death with flowers, go on!
The point I'm trying to make is that I consider this tactic a distraction. Nothing more than look! a three headed monkey behind you!
And then perhaps there's a question of who owns this now greened and more usable desert?...
And the prince said "by aiding them you killed my men" and slew the man.
And then the people in the next town all got together and said, "Let us all work together and see that this prince is never able to defeat our army."
"Give me six ideas from the most ethical of engineers, and I'll find something in them to weaponize."
Any primary research can be used for any range of good or evil... the task is to curtail the creators of evil uses.
Instead, he made war and death cheaper. He made it more likely. In his lifetime, machine guns were deployed asymmetrically, making it cheaper for colonial empires to kill large numbers of the colonized.
"Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops."
Some genius in the near-future will probably make the same inaccurate prediction about autonomous killerbots, or more likely realistically, cyber-warfare (I hate that term): "Shutting down hospitals, power plants and other critical infrastructure will make wars shorter"
Thinking you can is naive at best.
In the case of Fritz Haber, it's the same man who saved billions from hunger and killed millions by prolonging World War-I. Excellent article on the same - https://medium.com/the-mission/the-tragedy-of-fritz-haber-th...
Sometimes, the decision isn't clear as black & white; especially when you mix nationalism & patriotism into it.
Mass intentional killing is wrong, pretty much everyone agrees with that.
Nope.
Bomber Command in WWII and the use of nuclear weapons in WWII are both examples where you will find nuanced, intelligent debate on both sides of the argument of whether "mass, intentional killing" being wrong or not. What you describe as "hate / pride for his country" ... but isn't that the reason most soldiers kill? That you even bother to call this out shows that you know the reasons for killing people need to be taken into account.
I'm not making a statement on whether or not mass killing is wrong here, simply pointing out what seems obvious: it's far from black and white.
I'm sorry, but this sentence contains already the problem.
In shooting war, both sides have already ceded that killing people is morally justified.
And now you're in the unenviable position arguing about how much death is too much, and what are the proper ways to kill people in a war setting.
And then you get asked moral dilemmas if killing 100,000 people is okay if it saves 1,000,000 people from dying further. This is the Hiroshima/Nagasaki question in a nutshell.
I don't know that answer, but then I didn't fight a brutal war for four years, watching my friends, family, and countrymen die at the hands of a brutal regime.
Power, corruption and lies.
Those people often stand to personally (financially) benefit from unethical business decisions. Engineers have to think through all the dirty consequences, and still draw pretty much the same salary.
So, there are two aspects of that: first, do you trust the people you're designing a weapon for to use it for justifiable purposes, and second, how does the weapon itself influence whether it can be used for just or unjust reasons? Gas chambers, for example, can only be used to kill someone whom you are already able to coerce into entering it; its only use is to murder a helpless prisoner. A Spitfire or Hurricane can shoot down bombers but not necessarily do that much damage on the ground. Orwell had an interesting perspective on this question: "Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak."
I really don't have answers. The stance of, "weapons equals bad, therefore it's wrong to ever help design weapons" is a pacifist notion, and maybe that appeals to you, but if you're not a pacifist, it becomes a complicated question with certain political ramifications.
If one could engineer a solution to save lives, but instead uses his/her talents to build the nth iteration of, say, a food delivery app, does he/she bear any ethical culpability?
Because it seems the bigger challenge for engineers is not avoiding overt evil, but in the opportunity cost of spending their time on work of significantly lesser consequence than their talents might allow.
https://www.asce.org/code-of-ethics/
Yes, yes, we have a responsibility to not defraud people, and to not work on obviously evil projects, and even to speak out if your employer is, say, building a bridge that is not up to the clearly defined, established standards. (which is super different from when you think a bridge will collapse, but can't explain why in a way that other people can understand. This parenthetical part is particularly important, I think.)
But we are free humans, and if we want to waste our lives on trivial things, so long as those trivial things don't hurt others, that's our choice. We are humans, and humans need entertainment, we need play.
Well, that's a narrow view of ethical guidelines in conducting one's work. We all generally agree that people shouldn't be evil.
My question sits above that. Is it enough for a moral society to simply decline to do evil? Or do we have a responsibility beyond that? And if it's the latter, then whose responsibility is it?
My question was whether it's just as immoral a choice to not use one's potential to help people as it is to use one's talent to overtly harm people.
Is the answer to that not obvious? It's the difference between negligence and pre-meditation/mens rea.
Because, yes, it would seem obvious.
>It's the difference between negligence and pre-meditation/mens rea.
a) you're using legal definitions when the question is about morality and b) it's not negligence to actively choose one path over another. It's simply making a decision, and I was asking if that decision can be considered a moral one.
Started off as a philosophical question, but seems to have gone a bit literal. Oh well, it happens.
You don't think the legal differences between those two things were based on perceived immorality?
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf Here they say that the design of the internet was very much determined by the military priorities of the project (Telcos had different priorities so they came up with OSI where the link layer is supposed to be reliable, as opposed to DARPANET/IP, where the link layer/IP routing is dumb and the endpoint is smart; this allowed link layer to be pluggable and IP routers to be cheap)
That said, the approach of some of the commentors here is that the only acceptable approach is to refuse to work on anything that could ever be "weaponized". It's possible that the distinction you've so clearly and correctly pointed to could stand to be more compatible with this stance.
Autonomous murderbots are highly likely to depend on network protocols, among other things.
Please excuse my manichaeism.
But then came the nuke. Nuclear weapons make traditional war between developed and nuclear capable nations basically impossible. Think about what the Cold War really was, or even what the geopolitical 'disagreements' of today are. Those are World Wars 3 and 4, averted because these wars would be unwinnable by any side. Like Einstein said, 'I'm not sure what World War 3 will be fought with, but the 4th will be fought with sticks and stones!'
Did the people developing nukes understand that they would finally create a weapon that immensely powerful that it would deter open unrestrained war for decades to come? It's possible, but I think that their motivation was something more straight forward - gain military superiority in the present, probably also mixed with a bit of scientific curiosity about the challenge of creating a nuclear bomb.
It's difficult to predict the future. The most awful and aweful weapon created in the history of mankind ended up creating the most unprecedented period of peace for mankind as well. This is also why I vehemently oppose nuclear disarmament. That's how you get WW3 if people actually disarm, though in reality it'd simply likely result in nations obfuscating their nuclear weapon programs and facilities. It's just a molten salt thorium reactor guys, come on - breeders are awesome!
The loss of life when developed nations fight against each other is literally inconceivable in today's times which is why I went out of my way to try to give measurements that can help you grasp it. The entirety of the world's conflicts today is completely and absolutely negligible compared to WW2. And I'm focusing on WW2. The major point here is the WW3 that we have avoided. The reason for that avoidance is almost entirely because of nuclear weapons.
Finally, it's not just peace for the west. There is unprecedented peace throughout the vast majority of the world. The entirety of Africa and the Mideast account for less than 20% of the world's population.
The school my friend went to as a child no longer exists because it was bombed (Syria)
Wars are still happening today, just not with nukes. Every nation with nukes knows that it would be suicide to launch one.
I used to find myself most of the times confused while using technologies whose CEOs, mission I do not agree with. It felt as if I was contradicting myself. But then I realized the dialectical nature of this relationship which is if you want to create something better, improve something it is only natural that you will do so using the existing tools available in your world.
A great example is Facebook. There are things you might not agree with, you might hate it but if you look closer you will see volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests which are organized only via Facebook. One of such political activities one day could as well change Facebook or the world we live in drastically.
You can apply this to other cases. You might have an anti-capitalist philosophy podcast hosted on Amazon or Spotify or Apple which in essence contradicts the very existence of such companies. But in the end you are using them to deliver your message, cause change etc.
I am curious about what others think about this and how they feel about looking at it from a dialectical point of view as I am continuously thinking about this and still forming my thoughts.
But there is space for ethical contemplation during an arms race.
No one hates war more than soldiers.
If you didn't do great in school and don't have rich parents to pay for college, the military in the US will look great with its education perks and chance to "see the world".
Or they're broke, have their back against the wall, and can get good training and education through the military.
How should the military fill its ranks? Would you rather have a lottery?
That's the truth.
Did the engineers of the atomic bomb save millions of lives and usher in an era of unprecedented peace? Or did they slaughter millions of innocents and sow the seeds of humanity's destruction?
It's been 70 years; we've had plenty of time to make up our minds.
Many inventions are not so easily classified as innately good or evil.
>Kearns was a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the U.S. CIA, during World War II.[1][2][3]
Somehow I don't think that Kearns would have had an issue with wriing software to analyze video footage for the military.
Merely offering a force projecting capability is not evil.
If you look at world history, the only concrete definition of who has most political power is this: it's the party with the most capability for projecting violence in a given area.
Small close knit groups that live outside of large populations can live independently and do without military force. Once you have a large population with more or less fixed hearth and home the party with most violence projection capability owns them politically.
This dynamic is played in almost ridiculously minuscule scale in the peloponnesian wars of the greek city states of antiquity.
The pathological manifestation of this principle can be viewed, say, in the rise of ISIS and the Somali warlords.
While a modern state is seldom a benevolent actor, at least in the western countries it's the best of known alternatives.
In this framework violence is a key tool of the state, just like good governance, tax collection, etc.
Given that violence is a necessity, in my opinion designing military instruments in itself is not evil. It's not as good as designing new vaccines, so there is some ethical scale in the matter, but I'm damned if I can put it in concrete terms.
Are you sure it's a good idea to become less influential on the world stage?
What gets me now, is how much the US economy and focus is on death and violence. Offensive death and violence. We're bombing people all over the Middle East. And have been for years. Tangentially, I find 'March for our Lives' ironic given the amount of, to me, unjustified, violence and death the US country exports to children and families around the world.
For self-defense only? In an ideal world, yea, invent the meanest things possible. That philosophy still is compatible with a strong military. But then again you have Gulf of Tonkin, etc., so who knows!?
Lately I've been telling myself this whole wargame is a game I'll never be privy to what's actually happening.
- Slaughterbots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
- Last Day of War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJmTeBSEzU
I think people often have that twisted. A lot of the U.S.'s expansion is cultural, not military. That is to say: people liked what they were doing, and became a fan. Think: music, movies, and to some extent, literature, and now you might add software and consumer electronics to that list.
And even when looking at Rome, can you imagine how much harder those repeated annexations would have been if the Roman culture wasn't respected?
I'd say that being capable at least of defending oneself, independently, from most individual powers and believable coalitions, creates a certain amount of stability.
I'm not claiming it is, nor am I arguing that culture isn't also a factor. I'm saying that military presence shouldn't be discounted, as the parent seemed to be doing.
Realpolitik is meaningful; and everyone on the left seems to have forgotten about it (I say this as an unabashed progressive liberal).
The US’ prime advantage in the 20th century was the fact that basically the rest of the industrialized world was completely destroyed twice — and then they paid the United States to help them rebuild. It wasn’t until the 70s that the US’ reliance on oil became heavy enough to exploit strategically, but by then we had built an entire post-industrial economy a decade ahead of Europe and two decades ahead of the rest of the world. We helped Japan do the same because they were basically a puppet state and gave us a foothold in Asia to serve as a buffer with Russia.
Does that sound like cultural expansion driving the military, or the military goals driving the cultural expansion?
The list goes on and on.
Defense spending is a small parasite on an enormous private market for cultural and consumer products, of which the U.S. is and was a major exporter, respectively.
Added:
Defense agencies drive innovation because they have external constraints which force them to try to procure things which haven't yet been invented. It's similar to the way that automobile races are used to drive auto innovation. Necessity is the mother of invention, and necessity is not unique to defense, but defense necessities tend to produce extreme engineering efforts.
But, there is power in organizing, or unionizing, for collective bargaining.
Well, given how unimaginative a leap the national socialists took from the national fumigation program to the gas chambers, I doubt there was much more to it than "take bug poison room tech, use it on humans".
There's no such thing as an "engineer" in the real world, and there's almost always somebody more unscrupulous, devout, or patriotic than you who knows or is willing to learn what it takes to finish the job, and school is not going to get in the way.
Added: Engineering is a practice, not an immutable identity. Even if you publicly shame all the "engineers" away from contributing to an effort you disagree with, replacing them is a matter of learning enough of the practice to complete the task. Even if we were just talking about what is in paper books today, it's hard to say that anyone could have control over who is or isn't capable of engineering efforts.
If you believe that doing something is wrong, the idea that someone more unscrupulous will do it if you do not must not be used as an excuse for doing that thing yourself. Giving in to this notion will prove yourself to be the one who is unscrupulous.
By involving yourself, you gain the opportunity to do the right thing (for the given the circumstances). If quitting accomplishes the same thing as sabotage or internal lobbying, then by all means.
1. If you're on an active battlefield, both sides have already agreed that killing people is morally justified.
2. If the enemy is shooting at you, he is not interested in the ethics of killing someone on a battlefield.
3. If ethics helped wars end, there would be a US Army 27th Ethics Brigade to parachute in, but there's not and probably never will be.
If on a battlefield, given a choice between holding scrupulous ideals and living, most people would choose living.
If someone wasn't willing to kill someone else on your country's behalf, most likely you wouldn't have the freedom to ask that question.
Edited to add:
The metaphysical question you posted might be better phrased to ask:
What's the point of life if someone else is willing to extinguish it?
"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."
"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."
To me this is incredibly valid for Silicon Valley engineers these days.