The people of Afghanistan have a long and justifiable tradition of hating the British, mainly thanks to the three Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839, 1878 and 1919. Since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we seem almost quaint by comparison; our brutal imperialism is tinged with a vague hint of nostalgia for the days before cluster bombs and counter-insurgency tactics.
We invaded Iran during the first world war, backed a military coup of their government and ruthlessly looted the country for oil, but all of that seems like water under the bridge compared to the CIA's persistent efforts to destabilise Iranian society.
Pakistanis have every reason to hate the British - we imposed a bloody and brutal regime across the Indian subcontinent, then so badly botched the transition to self-governance that at least a million people died. Thanks to a decade of poorly-targeted and possibly illegal drone strikes by the US, nearly a century of totalitarian rule under the British is almost forgotten.
I can't remember the last time I saw a British flag being burned by an angry mob. Your government's decision to remain constantly at war probably hasn't done a great deal for your safety, but it's really distracted attention from our barbarism.
Give it fifty or a hundred years and Americans will be thanking the Chinese for the same reasons.
Maybe in Northern Ireland? Though it's mostly the British buring Irish flags...
So what stops me, as a Google customer (which I am), to stop doing business with them, given that I see proof after proof that they are working against my interests?
This is the same problem as with the Snowden leaks. I don't care if Americans feel more safe with the NSA secretly watching their emails via gag orders, if my privacy as a non-US citizen is being violated, therefore at this point absolutely all US companies are suspects, starting with a negative ranking in my book; at this point I always prefer European ones. Also the usual arguments that countries collaborate with each other is bullshit, because in the EU I can sue companies, or my government, for cheap too, whereas in the US I have no rights.
And if you find that acceptable, then maybe balkanizing the Internet isn't such a bad thing after all, lets start with ICANN.
> There's also a real chance (though perhaps small) that an industry-wide refusal to cooperate with the US military could have disastrous consequences for the world
There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
If you don't have an assessment done by experts of what might actually happen, then such arguments are bullshit.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. What if in the future, my country and USA will be enemies? It is not very probable, but so wasn't a prospect of war in Ukraine, for example. You just don't know how things will develop, and if a company want's to be global, it shouldn't directly support a military of a specific country.
There might be national secret-sauce here or there, but the major military contractors are all international. Lots of projects involve R&D spread across multiple nations. Things mostly get dicey when looking at nations that are too unstable to trust (Egypt, Pakistan, etc.), or those that are current rivals (Russia, China).
Is that trusting one's friends or are they too unstable to trust?
Trusting an ally with any version of the F-35 is a big thing. The base F-35 is still going to be a very great fighter aircraft.
Even since resolution there's unprecedented restrictions of maintenance in RAF service, requiring some major components returned to BAe in the US when BAe are a British based company.
I'm on my way out but a quick search seems to show Israel as having the least restricted version, which is a surprise: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/israel-can-customize-americas-...
Some discussion of the Blair era issues: https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/uk-warns-usa-over-itar-...
Just because Israel is allowed to add additional equipment to the F-35 doesn't mean anything in terms of the F-35 itself. Which, as I said, is the same as everyone else's.
Eu companies do the same German pro union at home hire dodgy American union busters in the UK for example
... but practically and on the ground, the Google employee base is large and international enough that there may very well be employees with friends or relatives in US military hot-zones where the US has not successfully demonstrated sufficient care about civilian casualties. Their desire to only work for the company in relatively peaceful times is pretty understandable.
Nobody wants to wake up one morning and realize they're an IBM employee in 1940.
Does anyone not think of Toyota as Japanese? General Electric is certainly an MNC, but they are quite proudly "American" as is Volkswagen proudly "German."
So, it's silly to think that MNC's, by virtue of their MNC nature, jettison their national allegiance in the ultimate case.
If you want to make the case that they should be truly "multi-national", then we're off to my favorite possible dystopian world, where a corporation becomes a sovereign entity with the power of a state, which is the ultimate conclusion of such thinking.
A multi-national company is still responsible to multiple nations in differing amounts though, no? It shouldn't mean "responsible to no one." And America quite clearly should have some significant claim on Google, even if it isn't all of it (or necessarily even a majority). Furthermore, most of the those non-American countries that Google should be accountable to (i.e. most democratic countries and most developed countries... as that is from where it draws revenue and employees) rely, in large part, on the US military for their own national security.
>There's also a real chance that I might get hit by a brick and die tomorrow, yet that doesn't stop me from going out.
This misses the point entirely--which was that whether or not the US military is good or bad for the world is a complicated and difficult question to answer. At the very least, this is clear from the large number of democratic countries who have chosen to mostly rely on the US military for their own national security. So the apparent certainty in the moral correctness of those refusing to work on technology for it is unjustified.
Again, I'm not saying that these employees are necessarily making the incorrect moral decision. I'm saying that the conversations on this topic seem to overlook a lot of the ethical difficulties associated with their choice.
You've been using your military the get cheap resources in the midfle east, ever since the cold war.
So I dont want to work for such a military, even in proxy.
I often wonder if statements like this are disingenuous. The US military "polices" parts of the world where American interests lie; ie Natural resources, supply chains, potential markets for American companies to exploit. When you say countries "choose" American military protection you are not considering the considerable economic pressure America can leverage when it wants something you have. In developing countries this can be a difficult choice too. By not spending on military you can spend elsewhere. Even if that means resources end up in the hands of politicians directly; which is no different to any first world country.
A similar difference to the one that motivated its even longer occupation of the oil-less Afghanistan.
The USA was formed on a basic distrust of the government, including checks & balances, and non-federal armament in the 2nd amendment. It is not allowed to be a single, trusted federal power, but rather one whose powers are defined by limited and explicit allowance, with default powers resting on the distributed states and people.
The notion that the USA should stand in a singular trusted and empowered situation over the rest of the world neither fits with fundamental American concepts, nor notions of robustness in general. Strength of militaries should be distributed among independent allies, not focused on any single point of failure or corruption.
The military strength of the USA certainly benefits the USA. But a singular point of above-and-beyond military strength is not a model of benefiting the world.
One point I haven't seen raised here is that "a strong military" is not a one-dimensional proposition. The military does a lot of things in a lot of contexts, and they don't all have the same moral value.
If someone wants to build better Humvee armor for the US Army, I wouldn't criticize them at all. I don't think there's a reasonable case that better-armored Humvees are worse for the world. (Not least because we proved in 2003 that a lack of proper armor doesn't deter the US from starting wars.)
But I think the work Google engineers are likely to do for the US military is not likely to advance Pax Americana, which is mostly about a nuclear umbrella and secure international shipping lanes. Instead, it's very likely to abet either the drone war or mass surveillance, since those are closer to Google's area of expertise.
Quite a lot of people who are not strictly against US superpower status are still deeply opposed to the specific sorts of action Google would be best-placed to enable. And since they haven't actually signed on with the military, it seems totally reasonable that they would object to doing such work even if they do value a strong US military in other domains.
Why do these workers have such a lien, whereas the people who happened to go into a career that isn't useful for the military don't? That sounds quite unfair. I'd say they pay their obligation the same way everybody else does: through taxes. And people who benefited more from that environment will earn more, and subsequently pay more as well.
Then make a case, don't just state that you can and move on as if you did. For example here is my counter argument:
The US is currently stealing children, this is obviously not in the best interests of anyone, womp womp.
"a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world"
Democratic countries like to keep their democracy not be ruled by a tyrant. The US Military is very tyrannical, the CIA has been a massive destabilising force in a lot of democratic countries.
"Given that society created the environment"
The tech companies created their environment, just like their employees spent their time and effort acquiring their skills. You are claiming authority over other peoples work with no justification.
"I'm not in favor of compelling anyone to work for any purpose"
You just stated the opposite. These are hypocritical weasel words so you can walk back your argument.
"There's also a real chance -sic- refusal to cooperate -sic- could have disastrous consequences for the world"
Such as? You make a lot of wild claims with absolutely nothing to back it up.
Your argument is ultimately trying to make a case for totalitarianism as long as the US are the totalitarians.
No. Education ideally is a gift from society to the individual, in the hope that it will be reciprocated, by work, but also by making informed decisions. And those can easily include refusing to work on a project (military or not) if the individual deems it harmful. Harmful to who? To the society that financed the education, to their family, or to "the world"? That's up to the individual to decide, too.
That's probably true for US citizens, but I highly doubt non-US folks share that view (at least from a western European perspective I'd say definitely not).
It is Pax Atomica.
The world leaders will do anything to prevent nuclear warfare. This includes doing war with nations that have no nukes.
Countries under US rule never faced such severe repression.
I'm a US citizen and I would like to see the US stop being the worlds police for 5 to 10 years, just to see what the world looks like at the end of that.
Why did they not blow up Canada, or Mexico, or China? Do you think the US military actions might be a reason?
Best way to figure it out might be for the US to try it :) (but it seems to go in a different, likely more dangerous way instead: isolationism from the international scene with increased military spending).
wow. words fail me. I used to see the US as the "big partner overseas". That was 20 years ago. Maybe I'm projecting my own views and development here, but IMHO the picture the US as friendly or even just benign faded over a decade or so, then got utterly destroyed by whatever the heck US politics is today.
For example I can argue that a strong military is important to defend the country (or maybe even the West or whatever) while a military made out of drones and robots mixed with AI, driven by a Space Force is too easily deployed in combat, since risk on own loss is low, while the opponent might see civilian casualties, causing more harm than good.
Yes. And that's the rub. I had the good fortune to work in research for the military for almost 10 years. They have more patience and willingness to adapt than any commercial company I've known. Their time horizon spans a much longer interval than most corporations. Did neural networks out of the PDP groups work in the '80s, and when things were too slow, they went yup and bought a bunch of Mercury computer cards to speed stuff up without squawking or delaying. Now I do work in stereoscopic machine vision. I'm pretty certain that biological or machine, the lowest levels of the visual stack are just targeting systems based on feedback loops. Here I agree with Dr. Russell at Bezerkely. We must not, can not, make autonomous killing machines because the consequences are potentially too catastrophic. So I refuse to work on anything resembling autonomous mobile weapons systems, as do many many others in this field. This has happened before - we were playing with enhanced radiation weapons in the '70s and '80s (neutron bomb), and over time pretty much every participant decided it was a very bad horrible no good idea. I would argue that for talented players capable of dragging the future into the present, the issue is not that the military is bad, it's whether a specific application they want is unequivocally bad. It's not about who, it's about what.
Which society does have that lien, the one I left behind that fully payed for my education (although almost everything I know about computers I learned on my own) or the one hosting the company I happen to work for right now? What about some years in the future when I move to another company/country?
The general reputation of private sector weapons makers used to be very low. They were "merchants of death." This comment assumes their legitimacy.
Given that the U.S. is being consistently voted as being the biggest threat to world peace, I'd vaguer not. That does not mean we want Russia or China to dominate us instead, it just means the world doesn't want to be bullied by the U.S. either. You do realize that every single empire in history assumed it has a more moral position to bully others that those that came before it, don't you?
I don't know how it reflects in American society, but in the rest of the world the fact that the U.S. killed a million Iraqis here, a few hundred thousand Afghanis elsewhere, enabled the slave-markets of Libya, funded terrorists in Syria and is currently helping to commit genocide in Yemen does not reflect anywhere near great on the U.S.
Some of us actually think that the people from these places are also valid, genuine human beings who deserve to live, so no, many people do not think the U.S. has any moral high ground here. It may be hard to swallow for some U.S. patriots, but I'd say you should be proud of the country and what it is supposed to stand for, rather than being proud of the government, (government != country), and what it is doing in many places.
Despite what many Americans seem to think, you do not have the best healthcare in the world, nor the best education system, nor the best infrastructure and I could go on and on - please focus on that instead of empire building.
Given that society created the environment for these tech companies (and their employees) to acquire their skills and thrive, does not society have some moral/ethical lien on how those skills are applied?
Granted, as stated in the first sentence, I'm not in favor of compelling anyone to work for any purpose, let alone military ones. But to pretend such a lien doesn't exist strikes me as somewhat selfish/narrow-minded in its own right. For that reason, I think the ostensible certainty that these employees (and their abundant proponents here) have in their convictions seems a little naive to me.
There's also a real chance (though perhaps small) that an industry-wide refusal to cooperate with the US military could have disastrous consequences for the world, and that alone should give one pause before being so self-assured about such a decision. I agree that there is also a real chance (also perhaps small) that the US military could use the technology with disastrous consequences for the world, but--again--that makes this a difficult ethical conundrum, not the clear right/wrong moral issue as I often see it portrayed as in the industry.