When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.
Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic and not moral grounds. To do so, they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, actually, except for these two narrow exceptions. And their careful word choice suggests that they are either navigating or expect to navigate significant blowback for asking for two narrow exceptions.
My, the world has changed.
"I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun.
...
This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance.
What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers."
That last line is still very relevant today.
DOW Chemical was producing Agent Orange, but was getting a ton of public pushback - so bad it decided to stop production, forcing the Pentagon to look for an alternative supplier.
That supplier? A German privately owned pharmaco called Boehringer-Ingelheim. It's Chairman at the time? Richard von Weizsäcker, future President of Germany.
The production site was in Hamburg, is contaminated for the next thousand years. Boehringer is legally forced to operate pumps to prevent the dioxins in that site from reaching the water table. If those did, it would wipe out the full population.
Oh those righteous Germans.
Disclosure - Boehringer denies the above: https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/boehringer-ingelheim-di...
Judge for yourself.
NIH on Exposure, AO and BI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230789/
Deeper dive on that BI Hamburg site: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/consumer-health/diox...
They didnt produce the final Agent Orange, they produced on of the materials needed for Agent Orange:
2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic
Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks.
I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could get leaked, imagine what might have already happened?
Industrial espionage also was publicly disclosed around the plans for the joint strike fighter. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/july/chinas-...
I’m sure in the classified arena there are a lot more examples.
I'd also be surprised if this code isn't already available with the US forces too and sometimes the enemy can be from within too.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
>But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
Caleb Hearth: "Don't Get Distracted" https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
"I’d be joining a contracting company for the Department of Defense."
(But interesting article otherwise)
That's a very bold claim. (And I am aware of the history of the Internet)
[0] https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140301185004/https://www.darpa...
Let me put it this way, if you wanted a populace that will willingly enter the military to serve your purposes of world domination through constant warfare, would you promote TV and movies, rather than reading classical literature and philosophy; and fund and press movie houses to make films that put joining the military to go to war and templating being a “warrior” as a positive thing instead of a negative, murderous thing?
The core issue itself is terribly complex because in an ideal world we would never need military at all, and at least in Europe we had this hope that humanity is evolving in this direction, and that eventually even the wars in the Middle East and Africa will calm down. 2014 and 2022 were rude awakenings - there are crazy people out there, and they became nation leaders, and will start a war for one reason or another. That's why I don't have a unified opinion on that, especially that some military tech like interceptors are saving people's lives.
1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for.
And today is a time of Andor and Succession....
I posted this in a thread about the 90's film 'Hackers'.....
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like Hackers).
BTW: Remember the 'product scene' in the film Waynes World?
Post 2000s there has been a pretty fundamental change in the US economy. Things like rent and food were far cheaper. There was also a lot of potential income to be made by individuals by connecting buyers and sellers. Typically if you wanted to sell something like a car, you either went to a dealer that screwed you, or you put and ad in the local paper. If you watched around you could quickly buy cheap cars and turn them quickly for more than enough profit to make it worth while.
The internet quickly flattened this. First by pulling all the buyers and sellers on one advertising site it quickly turned into the fastest with the most capital won. Then the sites themselves figured out they should be the middle man keeping buying up the stock and selling it.
There has also been a huge consolidation to just a few players in many markets. This consolidation and many times algorithmic collusion has lead to the general ratcheting of prices higher. When you start adding things in like 'too big to fail' the market becomes horrifically unbalanced to large protected capital with unlimited funds from the money printing machine.
It's no wonder we quickly dropped ethics, most of us would starve to death in the system we've created.
I think the money craze that came with dot.com, War on Terror spending, housing bubble, really flipped people into money at all costs.
Is that not confirming that Gen X (1965-1980, so ages 44-59 in 2024) was the most pro-Trump?
If anything it is all about boomers, gen z and rednecks on YT and TikTok when going over MAGA and Project 2025 videos.
As far as I am aware, the people that didn't gave a damm to elections and ignored their right to vote, are the main reason.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...
Just remember it always comes down to - "it is the economy, stupid" - and economy is in absolute shambles and will get a lot worse before November and it'll be a massacre for the ruling part much like in 2018
There were some rare exceptions like Veep
A lot of the war propaganda from back then is also depressingly similar to what gets pumped out now: you can't argue with success, you don't want to be on the losers' side do you?
> Beavis and Butthead, ... Office Space
I also remember it was the worse possible cultural faux paux to indicate you thought invading foreign nations wasn't a good response to 9/11. I mean go look at the votes for invasion of Iraq, damn near 2/3 of both the house and Senate in favor. Every radio blaring patriotic songs, every school doing patriotic projects, every brown kid living in hell.
It sucked, bad.
And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun).
Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have happened before the first Transformers, but it was in full swing by then.
Were one of a conspiratorial mind, one would guess massive amounts of money were spent in changing this image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...
yea, I remember reading the book and then watching the movie and it had differences iirc, its available on youtube for free and I remember some comments talking about the different ending.
IIRC, in the movie, the animals finally kick the pigs out and everything. It was a good ending.
but in the book, there was not a good ending, the humans and the pigs were celebrating together and then ended up fighting in between each other
> Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This is the last paragraph I found from the book (had to download it via archive.org to find the last para)
So am I correct or is there more to the story?
Doubly so for "business ethics" classes which became à la mode in the post-Enron era. They attempt to teach fundamental ethics, when at most it should be a very thin layer on top of a well founded internal moral framework and well-accepted ethical standards inculcated from day 1 of kindergarten.
Morals are taught 0-9 [0], Ethics perhaps slightly later as it requires more complex thought processes.
[0] https://familiesforlife.sg/pages/fflparticle/Young-Children-...
> The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me …
Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint. The idea of teaching morality from only one perspective never made sense to me. You won't even get that limited viewpoint in Seminary school, even though it'll certainly be far more biased
Secular is simply the viewpoint that claims to equalize all viewpoints while at the same time discounting them all in favor of its own … and then stealing the good parts of my viewpoint. :) It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t. At least in a good seminary they are honest about priors and articulate why their viewpoint is different / better than others. Ethics is and always has been applied theology, answering the question “what do we do?” You can’t answer that question honestly or fully without answering the prior question.
> It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t.
> Ethics is and always has been applied theology
You seem to be under the belief that without god there are no moral convictions. Well I'll quote a very famous conman, as I feel the same as him.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
- Penn Jillette
Hey look, we did Secular Ethics, and discussed religion! I disagreed with you, but you'll notice I never made claims about if I believe in god or not. You'll notice I make no judgement on you for believing in god. You'll notice, my entire argument is based on the origin of morals and really we've discussed is what is in a man's heart matters. This is no different than "Is an act of kindness good if one films themselves doing it?" There's a lot of gray in that question, obviously.
No ethics class is going to exclude you for being religious, as that would be unethical.
Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.
Golden rule does not need the existence of any god.
There are godless religions too that have strong ethical traditions. They are not religions in the Abrahamic sense.
I've met people who have never been in touch with organized religion. They generally have excellent ethical frameworks. I've also read the bible, it does not have a consistent moral or ethical framework.
How can it be that areligious people have ethics if they need god for ethics?
Ethics is all about being human, it does not require a god, and it does not require anyone to understand even what a human is, or what process led to us living life together. The subjective experience of life and the subjective experience of life in a society is all you need to develop ethics.
But I agree, empirically religion and moral behavior seem at best uncorrelated.
Many religious texts, not just the Bible start making a lot of sense when looked at like psyops.
Is your position that compassion is only possible via religion?
Once one has enough power and experience to achieve one’s goals despite opposition, and to use others instrumentally, the moral calculus can become difficult. We do not all start from the same circumstances: I am writing this on a phone produced by slave labour.
As Lenin might have said: “compassion for whom?”
You say “God is a choice”. Solipsism is a choice.
One that I find compelling is that Rawls' veil of ignorance lets us imagine that we might be on either side of a conflict, and that therefore moral actions are equitable to both sides. This gives us a secular morality that doesn't come with the baggage of religious outgroup dynamics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Sexual_...
Justification of any evil action to consider oneself as a good guy might be a human quality.
That being said, Majority of wars/conflicts in the past have sadly been because of religions and that number doesn't seem to be stopping and is still continuing to this day sadly.
There's only hunger for power. Man's essence.
Option E: God may or may not exist but once again, has no effect on our lives. (agnosticism)
So all option C), D), E) [I don't think that the concept of hell/heaven exists in it] have the same impact IMO that esentially there isn't any consequence on our day to day live and we are all gonna be just void when we die. Nothingness,
From here, we can approach towards what is the meaning of life and add onto the existenialism to find ones own meanings and that itself becomes a bedrock of morality
I personally fall somewhere along C), D), E) myself but I don't like to wonder about where exactly because it doesn't really have an impact on my life. I also sometimes fall into B) (God is outside me) in times of troubles to somehow get out of trouble or find strength if I am unable to find within myself during that time.
Logically, it might not make sense for me to believe in god during times of troubles if I can't have logic find the same meaning during not times of troubles. But I do think that humans are driven by emotions not logic at its core so its best to be light on yourself.
Also I feel gratitude towards the universe rather than god and the things which help me in my life during times of joy sometimes.
I also sometimes believe in rituals/festivals because they are part of my culture/community and it brings me joy at times.
But I have enough freeway leverage within all of this that I dictate this as my choice of life and If I see any religious figure person or anything being misused or see faults in any rituals being cruel. I don't feel dear to them and can quickly call anything out and be secular in the sense that I respect other people's rituals to be in co-existence with mine as long as they are peaceful about it because the element of coexistence is only possible within the elements of being peaceful/society being cooperative at large and I hold both people of my community/outside my community to the same standard and am quick to call out if new faults start to happen from my community but also from any other community. (Calling spade a spade)
Only people can say things. And following people that start by lying that they have unique and superior insight into what things ought to be is not a good strategy. Secular is just saying, we are all in this together as equals, let's figure things out, here's what we got thus far.
Demonstrate the telephone line by which this so called yhwh communicates his words and prove how and why it no longer does.
(A) way too late, and
(B) without a strong character to begin with, this lecture will simply become a "necessary chore" for students, and basically go in one ear, and out the other ear. (Does that saying/phrase translate to English?)
By the time people start their undergrad, if they are not already at least trying to act ethically, that ship has sailed for most. Their upbringing and education did not manage to drill that into them before. I see it as more of an early childhood and parenting topic. If the parents are not leading by example and teaching their children ethics, then the children are often just going with the flow, not swimming against the current to uphold ideals. Why would they, if the other way is easier. I think it is rare, that people adopt ethics that they have not grown up with / raised according to.
So I would advocate ethics as a mandatory subject at school, if not primary school already.
What if their morals are “I am not responsible for how my products are used?”
You may not agree, but it’s a valid ethical stance to hold.
I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I think there are definitely many positions with which I disagree, but are nonetheless well-thought through and coherent.
But it seems pretty clear that the people making these decisions haven’t done the work of thinking it through, and are instead just trying to maximize money. That’s my claim, at least.
You're not suggesting that, but then put up your own requirements for someone's ethics to be "valid". So in the end you are filtering others ethical choices by your own requirements.
And your logic seems to work backwards: someone does something you disagree with based on your personal ethical view -> assume they aren't well thought out
If someone criticizes the French language, but doesn't speak a word of French, sorry, but I don't have much respect for their opinion on French.
And no, I don't "assume they aren't well thought out," because many of these people have explicitly said philosophy is a waste of time.
No amount of words will change that.
It is my experience -- after seeing the quality of thinking from those philosophically trained (I am not) -- that learning philosophy is learning how to think, and by extension figuring out for oneself what is capital g Good.
Morals and ethics are different and you conflate them. That is the crux of your confusion. Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it; but ethics requires actual intentional thought over years and years of reflecting on lived experience. What is good for you and your small circle can be grasped intuitively, but to grasp what is good "at scale" must be reasoned about. Without having seriously grappled with this, one is liable to have simplistic views, and in many cases hold views that have already been trodden through and whose "holes" have been exposed and new routes taken in unveiling ethics.
Without seriously having interfaced with it, it's like talking to someone about the exercise science when all they know is do steroids, lift weight, and eat. Sure, that works, but it lacks nuance and almost no thought has gone into it.
Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers. It requires intimacy and is a deeply personal conversation one should have with those close to them and explore together.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
> Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
Edit:
Oops, missed pazimzadeh's comment. I'll leave mine because I say more
Especially not when certain people in positions of great power say things like "stupid rules of engagement" when referring to acts of war.
"A laser is a beam of coherent light." "Does that mean it talks?"
"Your stutter has improved." "I've been giving myself shock treatment." "Up the voltage."
"In the immortal words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?'"
"Is there anything I can do for you? Or...more to the point... to you?"
"Can you drive a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?" "...not right now." "A girl's got to have her standards."
"What are you looking at? You're laborers, you're supposed to be laboring! That's what you get for not having an education!"
-- I'm sure I could remember more if I thought about it for a bit. That movie made quite an impression on young me.
Professor Hathaway: "I want to start seeing more of you around in the lab."
Chris Knight: "Fine. I'll gain weight."
Only when I’m being chased.
I don't recall Caltech having any ethics classes. Caltech did have an honor system, however, which was surprisingly effective.
The government has a monopoly on violence. Whether you want to enhance it or not all comes down to your political alignment, not ethics.
... or so she was told.
She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.
Except if Facebook has auto correct, you can be sure it’s driven by a personal dossier on each of us, correlated by AI with every other person on the planet.
They know you were thinking that word!
The neverending benefits of personalization.
IDK, maybe it's different outside the National Capitol Region. But here, you could probably shout "For The Empire" as a toast in the right bars and people wouldn't think you were joking.
They're not. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, everyone has their own coping mechanism.
What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.
The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.
A journalist not involved at all figured it out just fine, but at the very least it's not like it wasn't going to be a weapon.
Frankly though I wonder what the various judgemental people in these comments think about say, the tens of thousands of people who at the time were just straight up making artillery ammo.
Not to mention it itself requires a conspiracy theory: "no one would do this work voluntarily" (or "all the smart people have to be tricked because they're so smart they obviously agree with me").
As though people don't just go and work at Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more.
If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told.
The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.
If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore I can reconcile the idea of working for defence related r&d. I also know that these sentiments are used by unscrupulous individuals to gain influence, but I don't feel like we should let that cause a divide between people with a strong moral compass and those without, since we'd be worse off if there was no one in a position of power to make moral decisions. That requires people to judge work based on it's content instead of the domain. It also requires workforce to have enough collective pressure to stall immoral defence (or rather attack) systems.
Automated decisionmaking tools throw a wrench into this because it brings us steps closer to mass deployment of questionable and potentially unhinged munitions. If laws mandated human-in-the-loop systems it would be a better outcome.
I can imagine some Americans making a decision based on the threat of other authortarian states and being left completely bewildered when they have to grapple with the notion that their government may be the bigger threat to their own security.
The reality is that the US government has not historically been engaged in defense. They have been engaged in offense. If you live in the united states and work on "defense," you are working on offense. If even if you are designing something like missile interceptors, they have historically been used primarily to protect US assets in wars that the US started.
All the things we have are jeopardized because those systems are actually attack systems and were just used to start a war. We will be lucky if it wont grow into WWIII.
And I just read an article about how those defense systems are used to bomb hospitals with double tap tactic - meaning you bomb rescuers when they come. Literally the first day of that no-defense war, they were used to bomb a school. And before that, they were used to execute fishermen and maybe smugglers with no judicial review. Just to make someone feel manly.
Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fired if an LLM hallucinates and kills people? Perhaps Anthropic's stance is to avoid liability if that were to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fisher_(academic)#Preven...
> Fisher [...] suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes in a volunteer. If the President of the United States wanted to activate nuclear weapons, he would be required to kill the volunteer to retrieve the codes.
>> [...] The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. [...]
>> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981[10]
Counsel: "How do you explain the nanny cam footage of you planting a weapon?"
Robot: "I have encountered an exception and must power off. Shutting down."
> anytime a person in power feels like assassinating a leader or taking out a dissident
I don't really see much of a difference nowadays
"If we develop <terrible weapon> we can save so many lives of our soldiers". It always ends up being used to murder civilians.
That's to say nothing of the deaths in a potential US/USSR conflict that goes hot without the Damocles Sword of MAD...
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
While this is all speculation, that was at the very least a defensible point of view held by a bunch of Americans shortly after the war.
Regarding firebombing: Hiroshima alone killed probably more civilians than the entire Tokyo firebombing campaign. A firestorm is a terrible thing, but you can still run from a fire even if your whole city burns down; you can't run from a nuke.
So if you measure collateral damage primarily in civilian deaths, firebombing still looks much better (a hypothetical firebombing campaign would have probably killed <40k civilians in Hiroshima instead of 100k, guesstimating from Tokyo numbers).
Edit: I don't think dropping the nuclear bombs was especially ethically questionable compared to the rest of the war, but I feel it is very important to not whitewash that event as valiant effort to save young American conscripts. Regarding it as a slightly selfish weapon demonstration feels much more accurate to me.
Nuclear bombs appear as uniquely horrifying and requiring special justification only in hindsight. Back then, it was just another type of bomb. The thought process behind dropping it was simply "let's hit them as hard as we can until they surrender".
I disagree slightly with that take. Decisionmakers knew that those singular bombs were gonna glass an entire city each, and previously almost untouched targets were selected to better show and observe the effect.
If you're at a point where you can afford to slash the primary target (Kyoto) because of nostalgic value to your secretary of war then it becomes difficult to rationalize the whole thing as "normal genuine war effort" and makes the thing look somewhat of an optional choice.
But from my point of view much more questionable decisions were made than the atomic bombings, and hindsight is always 20/20.
To some of the military leaders, sure. To the scientists and politicians, it wasn't viewed through such a simplistic lens.
I don't know, but there's a lot of evidence this wasn't a factor in the decision to drop the bombs on Japan. The planners for the invasion and the planners for the bombing weren't exactly talking to each other and coordinating the strategy.
They had the bomb and they were going to use it. Everything else was an a posteriori justification.
Now think what will happen with easily deployed AI-powered weapons.
I guess let the record state that I am deeply morally opposed to automated killing of any kind.
I am sick to my stomach when I really try to put myself in the shoes of the indigenous peoples of Africa who were the first victims of highly automatic weapons, “machine guns” or “Gatling guns”. The asymmetry was barbaric. I do hope that there is a hell, simply that those who made the decision to execute en masse those peoples have a place to rot in internal hellfire.
To even think of modernizing that scene of inhumane depravity with AI is despicable. No, I am deeply opposed to automated killing of any kind.
The “machine gun” has a more complicated history, and the first practical example may have been Gatling’s, or an earlier example used in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun
We need to do it because our enemies are doing it, in any case.
Of course they have the means. Nothing technical prohibits them from blowing couple of carriers. But the price they would have to pay is way too high.
Because there are actual technical impediments why neither China nor the Russians could have blown a US carrier in the Caribbean.
I do not believe so. Not unsurmountable at least. The consequences are however far from pleasant for each side
Furthermore, you mentioned this in response to "helping Venezuela", but even damaging a carrier (something technically very, very difficult for Russia or China) would not have helped Venezuela one bit.
It'd be more technically feasible for them to help Iran than Venezuela, and even that is not particularly feasible now, other than very indirectly.
I think it would, meaning that right from that exact minute the US and Russia will be very busy and Venezuela left to it's own devices. Does not mean Venezuela would feel any better of course.
There's no effective way of Russia to militarily help Venezuela and strike any US carrier. Same with China. You haven't proposed any because there is no feasible way.
Even if they could, such action would have been followed by the US knocking Venezuela out and taking them out of the equation. A neighboring ally of an actively engaged hostile power wouldn't be "left to its own devices".
Not so clear cut. Because now sending people to die in distant wars is likely to get a negative reaction at home, this creates some sort of impediment for waging war. Sometimes not enough, but it's not nothing. Sending your boys to die for fuck knows what.
If you're just sending AI powered drones, it reduces the threshold for war tremendously, which in my mind is not "the moral choice".
All of this assuming AI is as good as humans.
Eventually, unfortunately, we will build these systems but it is weak to argue that the technology isn't ready right now and that is why we won't build them. No matter when these systems come on line there will be collateral damage so there will be no right time from a technology standpoint. Anthropic is making that weak argument and that is primarily what I am dismissive of. The argument that needs to be made is that we aren't ready as a society for these weapons. The US government hasn't done the work to prove they can handle them. The US people haven't proven we are ready to understand their ramifications. So, in my view, Anthropic shouldn't be arguing the technology isn't ready, no weapon of war is ever clean and your hands will be dirty no matter how well you craft the knife. Instead Anthropic should be arguing that we aren't ready as a society and that is why they aren't going to support them.
> War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral.
Nobody who starts a war today acknowledges that they do this for other reasons than "survival", e.g. for stealing various kinds of resources from the attacked.
It has become difficult to distinguish those who truly fight for survival from those who only claim to do this.
However, the Iranians chant Death To America regularly and openly. They have both an active nuclear program and a means to deliver a nuclear weapon. They are also heavy funders of anti-American militias and groups. It is incumbent upon the Americans to ensure that the Iranians do not achieve their nuclear ambitions.
No, they do not
The kind of modern wars we're discussing now are often not about survival. Often, the initiator of the war wants dominance rather than survival.
This completely changes the equation. I do pass judgement on those who would wage war to ensure their dominance and access to resources.
However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
Agreed that some countries seek to dominate other regions by force or threat, but you and I are not thinking of the same "groups".
> However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
No, Iran poses no real threat to America, and according to Trump last year suffered a 10+ year setback in their nuclear ambitions. Do you think Trump was lying back then, now, or both?
The US is asserting dominance. Even Trump occasionally says so. Iran mostly poses a danger to their own citizens and, arguably, against Israel when conflict flares up in the region, but not to the US.
By the way, the current situation in Iran is heavily influenced by actions by the UK and the US in the region, back in the 50s. So maybe meddling is not the right course of action?
If war is safe to wage, then it just means we'll do it more and kill more people around the globe.
In what kind of deranged world are we living that people are fighting against the notion that waging war on another country should be a costly decision!?
My, the Overton window has indeed shifted far.
Had the US waited until Iran were an eminent threat and then suffered a nuclear blast in one of her harbours, they would have nothing but "I told you so" to comfort them. Don't let your repulsion of war blind you to the fact that other cultures with different values don't have the same repulsion as you.
The only people who could claim that Obama's treaty had a positive effect were those who either see 10 years as an extraordinary long time and no longer their worry, or those who wish to see a serious threat to the American way of life.
Claiming now that this other attack has the same purpose makes certain that USA has lied either at the previous attack or at the current attack.
When the government of a country is a proven liar, no allegations about how dangerous another country is are credible.
Moreover, just before the attack, during the negotiations between USA and Iran it was said that Iran accepted most of the new American requests regarding their nuclear capabilities, which had the goal to prevent them from making any weapons, but their willingness to make concessions did not help them at all to avoid a surprise attack before the end of the negotiations.
Iran wasn't a threat to the US.
Which it is well known that it hasn't been the case since the revolution, where the republic inherited the nuclear program the US pushed the king to pursue. The shia leaders consider such weapons immoral, and hence it seems like the main aim for the aggressors is to remove obstacles in Iran and rush them into getting nukes. It also has the side effect of increasing proliferation in Europe, with several states now moving towards extending or developing nuclear weapons.
This rhetoric about them getting nukes is a deception, it's for people who know little to nothing about Iran that are constrained to a rather racist world view. The animosity towards Iran mainly has to do with them having tried to move away from a monarchical type of government towards a more democratic, unlike US and israeli allies in the region, who are mostly kingdoms and extremely autocratic.
What genuine threat did Venezuela or Iran pose to Americans? Corporate interests don't count.
You can't condemn one and condone the other on that basis.
Iran has both reason and were developing capability to destroy a significant part of American national security. America absolutely must prevent that at any cost.
You could argue about how the rhetoric between the states got so bad that they each threatened each other's destruction. But the fact is that they got there.
As for delivery, Iran does have missiles capable of launching a nuclear weapon at American assets in the Middle East, or American allies. Or even to just float it over on a ship.
There's reports Iran agreed to limit themselves to only medical grade centrifuges as recently as last week.
And no, Iran does not have weapons capability to reach the US, period.
They fundamentally did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. A threat to American strategic goals is not an imminent threat to the American people.
People are always worried about getting rid of humans in decision-making. Not that humans are perfect, but because we worry that buggy software will be worse.
> Putting real lives on the line makes war a costly last resort.
But the AI cat-for-war has left the box for both Iran and the US. Opposing US development of AI for warfare will not suppress US's adversaries from developing the technology.
Why do people keep falling into traps of anthropomorphize companies like this? What's the point? Either you care about a company in the "for-profit" sense, and then money is all that matters (so clearly OpenAI currently wins there), or you care about pesky things like morality and ethics, and then you should look beyond corporations, because they're not humans, stop treating them as such. Both of them do their best to earn as much as possible, and that's their entire "morality", as they're both for-profit companies,.
[1] "In the months leading up to the war, majorities of between 55% and 68% said they favored taking military action to end Hussein’s rule in Iraq. No more than about a third opposed military action."
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-...
[2] "Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, which were conducted alongside Israeli attacks on Iran, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure"
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/just-one-four-americans-sup...
It's amusing amidst the US bombing Iran, incarceration the president of Venezuela and his wife after slaughtering everyone who was in the room with him, seizing oil tankers off Cuba, continuing the siege of Gaza and on and on to start getting sanctimonious about China.
Taiwan is Kinmen island in Xiamen harbor, so a mainland invasion of Taiwan would be mainland China "invading" an island in its harbor.
Also mainland China does not recognize Taiwan and mainland China to be separate countries. The US does not recognize Taiwan and mainland China to be separate countries. Taiwan does not consider Taiwan and mainland China to be separate countries. I'm not sure what the invasion would be, a country invading itself? It would be like if the US president sent armed agents to Minnesota who started killing people willy nilly - oh yaa, that just happened.
The most satisfying thing is if mainland China did choose to reassert it's rightful authority in Taiwan against the colonial powers, there's absolutely nothing those western powers can do about it. Just like Russia's assertion over the West tring to nove it's NATO armies to its western borders in the Ukraine. It's amusing to see the US flailing about, hitting a Venezuelan here, a Cuban there to try to look tough. I guess Nicaragua is next on the list. The changes coming in the 21st century are welcome. A bozo like Trump as president is a sign of a fading West.
the USA can drop a JDAM down the chimney of any leader who decides to do so
that’s not nothing
This is false. Both the government of Taiwan, and the people here, obviously consider the two countries separate, and neither have made any overtures challenging the sovereignty of the CPC in nearly fifty years. Not to mention the fact that the last government to do so has been overthrown in the 90s (the overthrow of the KMT settler colonial dictatorship).
You will now vaguely refer to the ROC constitution, but I'll preempt that by saying the constitution makes no claims to PRC territory, full stop. And the constitutional reforms in the 90s explicitly recognize PRC sovereignty over its territory - because Taiwanese people aren't the KMT and want nothing to do with the KMT's now 8 decade old fight.
> I'm not sure what the invasion would be, a country invading itself?
I know exactly what it would be: tens of thousands of PLA dead at the order of Xi in service of his old man's ego, and economic disaster for both countries, followed up by the most riotously uncontrolled occupied territory in the PRC. Taiwanese people in living memory bled to overthrow a military dictatorship, you think they won't fight to do so again?
PRC invasion of Taiwan would be imperialism.
The current ruling party of Taiwan would like to change that, but they haven't done so for the obvious reason that the PRC would not accept it (and most Taiwanese people prefer to just leave things as they are).
There is no "China, the country." "China" just means, essentially, "Empire." It's like a country claiming to be Europe, or maybe better, The Roman Empire. Many States may try to make claims for the title to support their legitimacy and heavenly mandate to rule, but that doesn't make it true.
> They're the product of a civil war inside China, after all.
Only one side of that conflict still exists. The other was overthrown by the people of Taiwan in the 90s. Descendants of those overthrown maintain government positions under that party name, but it's essentially a different government, given that it's a multi party democracy now, not a single party military dictatorship.
> The current ruling party of Taiwan would like to change that, but they haven't done so for the obvious reason that the PRC would not accept it (and most Taiwanese people prefer to just leave things as they are).
This is mostly true, with caveats: Most people in Taiwan prefer independence, but don't want to declare it to trigger a war, so therefore they only prefer status quo because it involves independence without war. If they could get it, most Taiwanese would prefer declared independence with no threat of war, but pragmatism rules out.
I'm also not sure I agree the DPP is necessarily pro-overt independence, just the current president tends to use more aggressive language than normal.
By this logic, America not recognising by the sovereignty of Venezuela, Iran and Cuba—and Israel of Palestine, as well as vice versa—makes everyone an a-okay actor!
> there's absolutely nothing those western powers can do about it. Just like Russia's assertion over the West tring to nove it's NATO armies to its western borders in the Ukraine
Russia is a spent power and geopolitical afterthought because of Ukraine. Its borders with NATO have increased massively, all while reducing its security, economy and demography.
Even Xi couldn’t fuck over China as thoroughly as Putin has Russia. But Xi going on a vanity crusade into Taiwan would essentially write off China’s ascendancy as a military and economic superpower this generation.
> if mainland China did choose to reassert it's rightful authority in Taiwan against the colonial powers
An aging dictator invading a democracy. At least Deng chose a quarry he could crush [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
I would like to believe there's no chance Xi would invade Taiwan but I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine. Those leaders are full of themselves. If we learnt much over the last few years is that anything can happen. China has both declared the intention and built the capabilities to invade Taiwan. As the saying goes if a loaded rifle is introduced in the first act of a play, it must be fired by the final act.
Wait...you mean China doesn't currently have authority in Taiwan?
How could that be??
This is what baffles me when I see people flocking to them for subscriptions based on these events.
Personally, I loathe seeing power shift towards mega corporations like that, away from being able to run your own computer with free software, but it feels like the economics are headed that way in terms of productivity.
Now the only reason models trained on any and every public data can't be attached to autonomous weapons is that we didn't fed enough data to these systems to carry this tasks reliably yet.
You said the overton window is moved, yet there's no window to discuss about in today's world. As a human being you either get exploited or get exploded. In either case human is the product. We just serve machines at this point.
Aside from that - there's a lot more people in tech now. It grew too fast too quick to maintain all the values it had back in the 00's and earlier.
It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).
The core of the issue here is having a private company which is trying to dictate terms of use to the military, which is not really something that has been done before afaik
Originally this contract was signed with these terms included, and it wasn’t until Anthropic started investigating how its tech was used by Palantir in the Maduro operation that this became an issue.
On a surface level it seems like Anthropic is doing the right thing here but this is really at the root of this & the outcome of the case (and whether or not Anthropic is a legitimate supply chain risk) depends entirely on the details of those conversations they had with Palantir.
> I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
Iraq.
Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.
Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.
Not in same ballpark. There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one.
> Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too.
No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture. Especially on the saliency axis.
But the war was still deeply unpopular. There is a reason America did the extraordinary - to that point - and elect its first black president.
The economic toll will be greater with these wars than Vietnam.
American centrism strikes again.
Plenty of us of the same generation living in countries that didn't fight in Vietnam (with no such draft or casualties) share such ethical views.
Don't make this an American argument.
And if autonomous weapons become the norm, _there will never be_.
Imagine a future where people just don't question wars on their ethical basis, since it happens far away and "no one is hurt".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
Also: https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38... .
Effective Altruism is a deeply silly, flawed, unserious, superficial way of engaging with the world if this, FTX, and shrimp welfare are the outcome of people putting it in action.
What Anthropic wants is to be able to go back and pontificate and sue a government if they determine that their terms of service have been violated. In order to enforce that, they wanted oversight, access, and to intervene if they felt it was being put to a purpose they disagreed with, namely surveillance or autonomous weapons/killing, etc.
As an AI platform, they can decide if they want the military to be able to use the software. I'm 1000% on board with this. They don't get to sit an Anthropic employee down and say "ok, now you watch these soldiers and make sure they follow the rules, and if they do anything wrong, you hit the big red button that shuts them down." They don't get to program a Claude oversight agent to do that, either. That messes with realtime operations. They don't get to go back and sue "ackshually, we looked at these logs and determined that you violated rule 102.3a in the contract, because one of the terrorists was participating from an IP address determined to reside in the continental US" or whatever.
Anthropic doesn't get to hold the US military accountable. It doesn't get to do oversight. It doesn't get to constrain its scope of operation, through legal threat or active intervention or contracts or otherwise.
Chain of command and rule of law constrain the US military. Congressional oversight and rule of law hold it accountable. A private contractor, no matter how noble or principled, doesn't get extra privileges.
Anthropic playing political games, advocating for unelected and unaccountable power to be granted a private corporation, is what got them designated a supply chain risk, and I can see the argument for it. Depending on how much effort they put in to hassling the government and pushing for their side, it remains to be seen whether the designation sticks.
And in principle, I also see the utility of being extremely heavy handed when slapping down a private company trying to make a power grab like that. Either through ignorance or incredible arrogance and entitlement, a private company and industry needs to learn their place in the grand scheme of things. Anthropic isn't special, their place is right alongside all the rest of we the people; they don't get extra privileges because they feel strongly that they're particularly right or righteous.
OpenAI effectively said "yeah, rule of law, thumbs up, sounds good." and took the $200B on the table. Anthropic was pushing for extra private oversight and accountability, and it doesn't matter if it was surveillance, autonomous weapons, or not eating babies - the particular rule doesn't matter, the precedent being set of private corporations getting a say, at all, beyond legal limits, is the point. No company gets to tell the US military what to do or what not do, or hold them accountable post-hoc, or constrain available options, because if they absolutely need to break a technicality for a good reason, when national security and defense is under consideration, a private company's rules and terms of service is the very last thing in the world that should be important to that discussion.
I'm a Snowden fan and absolutely want the global surveillance apparatus to vanish, and don't want an AI singleton dystopia, and I'm probably waaayyy more liberal and liberty minded than is reasonable, but even I can understand where this line in the sand is, and why it's there. I'd be shocked if Dario lasts the year as CEO, it's clear he's ill equipped for real world, adult decisions.
There was the 3 laws of robotics, where a robot/software was not to do any harm.
There was concerns over privacy and refusal of sharing your name and info on the internet. After all it's full of strategers and there was danger
Don't get into cars with strangers
Holy mother of bubbles. No, for several decades it was a common thing for the L3 Harris, Lockheed Martin, etc to scoop up half the geeks from most graduating classes.
more like fashionable virtue signaling that survives only the least amount of inconvenience
Clearly, all of the traditional big leagues were lined up to take the Army's money. IBM, Control Data, Cray, SGI, and HP all viewed weapons research as a major line of business. DEC was the default minicomputer of the DoD and Sun created features to court the intelligence community including the DoD "Trusted Workstation". Sperry Rand defined "military industrial complex".
I guess there's a reason we saw plenty of articles about software used somewhat defensively -- such as distinguishing whether a particular "bang" was a gunshot, and where it likely came from -- instead of offensively -- such as improvements to targeting software.
For every company that stands on values, there is another that will do some shady shit for a dollar.
Maybe companies are more open about it today, but it is hard to make such a wide assertion.
And enormous amount of political support because of the negative perception of AI in society
I don't want to be stuck with horses when the enemy is invading with tanks.
I don't want wars.
But tell me, what would you like your country to do when conflicts arise due to want of natural resources? Would you want your country to just give up that resource your people depend on, like may be 50/50?
Do you believe it will always be possible to settle on a solution in a peaceful way that works for everyone?
I think it's very reasonable to not want your products or work going towards making it easier for the US military wage unjustified wars.
I also think it would be reasonable to change your stance on that if America entered a war that you felt was justified.
(For example, I don't want to work for the military, but if we were being invaded I would consider it.)
Saying the military can't use your tool _today_ doesn't prevent you from changing your mind _tomorrow._
> I don't want to work for the military, but if we were being invaded I would consider it.
I am not. Every country is corrupt, and war makes a lot of money for powerful people, but does it justify sabotaging your own existence?
‘Sabotaging your own existence’ is a magic sentence that can justify everything. Israel can kill children more than any other nation in the world, and justify it by ‘not sabotaging their own existence’
Anyone can do anything with this perspective. This is the exact point gere. Pull yourself back, if you are about to ‘not sabotage your own existence’ by simply killing innocent civilians because you believe a computer algorithm told you in about 15 years they or their children might do something harmful.
But I think that is a question that anyone would rather not consider.
The issue is that if you don't consider that question, and jump into discussion or actions, in general just have an "outrage", then it would be very hard to take you seriously.
What would your response be? What is the value of `x` at which you will approve of the pre-emptive attack?
Just curious.
Your example seems to validate my point of view: warmongers disguise their subjectivity by basing their actions on “objective” models.
It does not have anything to do with objectivity. I thought it to be futile to discuss that since, as you implied, predicting future can't be 100% objective, and thus decisions to avert a bad future outcome always need to be based on subjective decisions.
So this is another question where I want to ask you how you would make a subjective call.
Make your call.
Not really. Not unless one is thinking in absolutes, at which point one is by definition an extremist.
The rational dialogue that emerges is the proper size of a military for defensive—but not continuous offensive—purposes. I’d guess, for America, that is half its current size at most. (The wrong answers are zero and $1.4tn.)
Like we have solar now. People talk about how it saves environment. But I think another similar win would be reduction in dependency on oil, and countries won't have to go to war over oil. But it takes time...
But it seems what technology gives, technology takes away. Because new technologies comes with its own resource requirements. And the cycle looks like it will go on...
So be it.
This doesn't excuse going to war with neighbors because you want to steal their stuff. Learn to live with yours.
Would you murder your neighbor to steal their food? Especially if you weren't really starving, just preemptively stealing their supplies?
All this talk of hoarding and taking resources by force used to be the stuff of villains. When did it become normalized?
If don't, then I will have to say you got no idea about what you are talking about..
1. You will see no protest on the street.
2. You will see no homeless on the street.
3. You will hear no more school shootings or any shooting.
4. No more tech companies conflicting with the government.
5. No one will sue the government because it's perfect.
6. All bad people will disappear.
7. Everyone sings praise of the government.
This is better than Utopia, you should pursue it.
There wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley without World War 2 and US gov. funding of Stanford to develop radar basically.
The initial investment from then gave critical capital mass for Stanford, the VCs, and the tech companies of today.
Yes they do because they are trying to sell to the Department of War.
No one made Anthropic try to be a military contractor. It’s pretty much the definition of being a military contractor that your product helps to kill people.
Has it though? I'd say it's morphed, not changed. This is still, underneath it all, Hanseatic League and East India Company domination style colonialism, but adapted to and shaped by the digital age.
The US has pretty much all throughout its history had its military-industrial complex and warfare as an economic motor too, and in view of this, it's inevitable that software gets integrated.
Israel, the most recent settler-colonial state (of course some people try to claim it's not using various mental gymnastics, but I'm not fooled), was the experiment and has become a model for how to intermingle the industrial-military complex with society to the degree they two become indistinguishable, and with backing of the West it's been a very profitable and, I hate to say it, successful model.
Here's[1] a review of a book about the subject, talking about the state incubating start-ups and spawning a tech sector for the sole purpose of warmongering.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/the-harvard-of-anti-terrorism-ho...
Same with the claims from companies like Google - “dont be evil”. Easy to say when there is nothing on the line.
But when the choice is between your claimed morals and the future success of your company, those morals disappear in a hurry. But they were never strongly held in the first place.
Watch as the same people pushing for war today will pretend they were always against it 10 years from now.
I guess we're just doomed to repeat the same cycles.
Their kids don't give a shit.
Revisionist history.
When you graduated in 2007, the leading tech companies were Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Intel, HP, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.
How many refused DoD application of their products?
I only recall one -- Google. (And it actually first agreed to Project Maven before later backing out.)
"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! "
"The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.
Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!"
It's the effect of a cult of personality. People don't feel like they want or need this. But they're on board with the cult.
I don't think it was very common really.
I think for the most part it was tech companies whose systems were not being used for war who like to boast that they refused to let their systems be used for war. Or that they creatively interpreted "for war" that since they were not actually manufacturing explosives, they could claim it was not for war.
On the timescale of the industry as a whole, working with the military has been the norm and we are seeing a reversion to mean after about two decades of aberrant divergence.
1. As President Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961 [1], every dollar spent on the military-industrial complex is a dollar not spent on schools or houses or hospitals or bridges;
2. Every American company with sufficient size eventually becomes a defense contractor. That's really what's happened with the tech companies. They're moving in lockstep with the administration on both domestic and foreign policy;
3. The so-called "imperial boomerang" [2]. Every tactic, weapon and strategy used against colonial subjects are eventually used against the imperial core eg [3]. Do you think it's an accident that US police forces have become increasingly militarized?
The example I like to give is China's high speed rail. China started building HSR only 20 years ago and now has over 32,000 miles of HSR tracks taking ~4M passengers per day. The estimated cost for the entire network is ~$900B. That's less than the US spends on the military every year.
I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it.
Then again, I think Steve Jobs was the only Silicon Valley billlionaire not in a transhumanist polycule with a more than even chance of being in the files.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
[3]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
Given that Steve Jobs was best friends with Larry Ellison, I’d say he wouldn’t have bent the knee because he would’ve been standing hand in hand with Trump, just like Larry.
This humanist view unfortunately doesn’t hold anymore in the modern world. Boomers will be happy as long as not a single dollar is spent on housing, so that their own homes can appreciate in value. Republicans would rather burn money than spend it on houses, hospitals, or bridges that might benefit immigrants or “other people” more than themselves.
I used an American political party only as a reference, but the same phenomenon can be seen in many countries around the world. Society has become incredibly cynical and has regressed a lot in terms of humanity.
Not sure what boomers you are talking about. I for one am disgusted at what is happening with the things in general and with the housing in particular. I do not want my house to appreciate Ad infinitum. I do not want to have ever growing class of have-not's so that few jerks can own the governments and half of the world.
Generational politics has definite limits and isn't absolute but it's also true that the Baby Boomer generation as a whole enjoyed the great opportunities and wealth generation opportunities in history. They fled to the suburbs, subsidized by the government every step of the way, and then basically pulled up the ladder behind them. They also refuse to quit.
And then when crime receded (and there are multiple theories for why this happened), they moved back into the city, bought up all the real estate and then blocked building affordable housing there too.
I personally have a theory that the parting gift of the Baby Boomer generation will be to get rid of Social Security and Medicare since they don't need it anymore.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270470
> Dean Ball: What Secretary Pete Hegseth announced is a desire to kill Anthropic. It is true that the government has abridged private-property rights before. But it is radical and different to say, brazenly: If you don’t do business on our terms, we will kill you; we will kill your company. I can’t imagine sending a worse signal to the business community. It cuts right at heart at everything that makes us different from China, which roots in this idea that the government can’t just kill you if you say you don’t want to do business with it, literally or figuratively. Though in this case, I’m speaking figuratively.
CEOs are bound to sociopathically amoral behavior - not by the law, but by the Pareto-optimal behavior of the job market for executives. The law obligates you to act in the interests of the shareholders, but it does not mandate[1] that Line Go Up. That is a function of a specific brand of shareholder that fires their CEOs every 18 months until the line goes up.
In 2007, Big Tech had plenty of the consumer market to conquer, so they could afford to pretend to be opposed to selling to the military. But the game they were playing was always going to end with them selling to the military. Once they were entrenched they could ignore the no-longer-useful-to-us-right-now dissenters, change their politics on a dime, and go after the "real money".
[0] Several of the sibling comments are mentioning hypothetical scenarios involving dual-use technologies or obfuscated purposes. Those are also relevant, but not the whole story.
[1] There are plenty of arguments a CEO could use to defend against a shareholder lawsuit that they did not take a particularly short-sighted action. Notably, that most line-go-up actions tend to be bad long-term decisions. You're allowed to sell low-risk investments.
No. Your tech experience was an aberration.
For almost all of history, including recent history, tech and military went together. Whether compound bows, or spears or metallurgy.
Euler used his math to develop artillery tables for the Prussian army.
von Neumann helped develop the atom bomb.
The military played a huge role in creating Silicon Valley.
However, to people who grew up in the mid to late 90s, it is easy to miss that that period was a major aberration. You had serious people talking about the end of history. You had John Perry Barlow's utterly naive Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace which looks more and more naive every year.
> When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war,
In 2007 the US was the sole world hegemon. It could afford to let the smartest people work on ad delivery systems.
In 2026, in certain fields, China has a stronger economy and military. Russia is taking over Europe. India and Brazil are going their own way. China is economically colonizing Africa.
The US can't afford to let it's enemies develop strong AI weapons first because of the naive thinking that Russia/China/others will also have naive thinkers that will demand the same.
---
People were just as naive with respect to Ukraine. They were saying that mines and depleted uranium shells are evil. But when Russia attacked, many changed their minds because they realized you can't kill Russians with grandstanding on noble principle. You kill them with mines and depleted uranium shells.
Hopefully people here will change their minds before a hot war. As the saying goes, America always picks the right solution after trying all the wrong ones.
After spending couple of years studying in the US, I came to conclusion that executives and board members in industry doesn't care about society or humans, even universities don't push students towards critical thinking and ethics, and all has turned into a vocational training, turning humans into crafting tools.
The same time, at Harvard, I attended VR innovation week and the last panel discussion of the day was Ethics and Law, which was discussed by Law Professor, a journalist and a moderator and was attended a handful of people. I inquired why founders, CEOs or developers weren't in part of the discussion or in attendance? Moderator responded that they couldn't find them qualified enough to take part in the discussion. The discussion basically was - how product companies build affects the society? Laws aren't founders problem, that's what lawyers are for, and ethics - who cares, right?
This frenzy, this rat race towards next billion dollar company at any cost, has tore down the fabric of the society to the individual thinking level; or more like not thinking, just wanting and needing.
But what is the option? I feel each of us wants to draw a line based off of our morality but the circumstances don't allow us to stick to it (still gotta pay rent)
We are all on a Titanic the way I see it. It's just the DARPA guy is gonna sink first. Rest of us are just pretending to be Jack trying to be the last ones to go.
I was with you up to this point, but when you say "life is to hard to stay moral" I am thinking about how buying the wrong shampoo contributes to micro plastic in the ocean, or how buying a fitting jeans that is not exploiting labor is an extremely time intensive endeavor, or how avocados may be vegan but often produced unsustainable. Basically I thought you were making this point from The Good Place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lci6P1-jMV8 .
But when you are working in IT, an industry that is generally still very well of, avoiding an employer that is actively making the world a worse place, is a low bar to cross. It's just one decision every few years, which also is comparatively easy to research (you are probably doing it as your normal preparation for the job interview anyway) and the impact of that decision is enormous in comparison to most other decisions you make, so it's well worth it to ponder a bit.
There are hundreds of sectors and industries that don't have net negative effects on society and involve software development.
Don't see money as the only goal?
Otherwise it ain't black and white.
There are forms of advertisment that are not so bad and there is a need for kill devices since there are lots of other existing kill devices. But this ad technology and this actual war ministry who take pride in revoking all "woke shit" like "rules of engagement" - I would not work for. There is other work, even if it pays less, but money ain't everything.
That’s easy to say when you have money, it kind of sounds like “let them eat cake”
Don't forget ICE and other government agencies using the bidstream data to track the location and behavior of immigrants, dissidents, etc, so they can be tracked down and arrested and sent to the gulag.
And it's a fallacy to assume that critical thinking is something that you're born with. In addition to the media landscape being completely ingrained into society. I can't really escape recommender engines anymore when consuming media.
If your exposure to media is curated since you were born, how are you going to tell if you're being deceived? It's pretty much the allegory of the cave.
Orwell wrote about this: https://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien
> "The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."
This seems more like credentialist arrogance than a well-reasoned judgment.
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
The actual logical end point of most of the 'for the good of humanity' folks in the bay area is:
'Only I can be trusted with the money, power, and weapons that I believe will break the world, but I promise it is for the best. No system or power should hold me to account in the event I am wrong or change my mind. Trust me.'
I cannot stand this kind of absolute thinking from the left or right. It’s usually just cope for personal deficiencies.
This line of thinking, that creating machines that kill is unethical, will destroy the West. If the US wasn't so good at producing killing machines in WW2, you wouldn't be here to complain about DARPA ethics.
Instead of having engineers develop the most advanced machines for killing (i.e. protecting the West) such people go into producing the most addictive content delivery systems, destroying the brains of minors.
He specifically said autonomous killing machines. You understand the difference right?
Hell yeah
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.
With a gate keeping attitude like that, are you really surprised engineers don’t want to participate?
Anyway, I won’t guess at your friend’s motivation but if you gave me the ability to make America’s industry better at prosecuting war you’d better believe I’d do it with great enthusiasm.
Besides I’ve been around long enough to know that when the rubber hits the road the ethical people will find their way rapidly to the Paradox of Tolerance and suddenly find that violence is highly desirable. I find this kind of high variance behaviour is undesirable and leads to unhappiness all around.
We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back
Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position
None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns
Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?
I'm not saying the government can't overreach or over control, but if I or you or any of us were in charge of the defense of a country then we'd want to make sure technology from our country at the very least wasn't used to hurt us and if possible used to help us.
That's what alignment means and it's totally reasonable.
We ran out of bombs actually. If there had been more bombs there would have been more bombings.
Because they’ve likely all lost faith in humanity watching Trump get reelected and now just want to get rich and hope to insulate their families from the reality we’re all living in.
And even then you had politicians like Chamberlain in the UK who wanted to make peace because the UK wasn't directly threatened (this is after much of Europe was under siege).
"We both want a docile American public who go along with our desires so we can achieve goals that may be contrary to the interests of the American public."
This is not the forbidden love story I would've asked for.
I fear that frontier AI is going to be nationalised for military purposes, not just in the US but across the globe.
At the same time, I really don’t know what Anthropic were expecting when they described their technology as potentially more dangerous than an atom bomb while agreeing to integrate purpose-built models with Palantir to be deployed in high-security networks for classified military tasks.
My takeaway is that they are bending a knee to smooth things over. It’s business and it’s human behavior. They are actually furious and would love to tell Trump to crawl up his own ass, but that doesn’t help anyone in the long run. It’s in everyone’s best interest to get back to work and hope for the best tomorrow. It’s the adult thing to do. However, it's exactly why humanity is the shitshow it is right now. One side is trying to keep the world going by adulting while the other side keeps acting like complete fucking idiots.
> we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible.
Why are people leaving openAI when this is Anthropic's stance? Are their two narrow requirements enough to draw the ethical boundary people are comfortable with?
When you perform your business impact analysis, these will bubble up in different ways, requiring some differences to the playbooks.
Service members are anyone serving in the military.
Warfighter is used to describe combat roles.
If useful to distinguish between the two, warfighter is the correct term.
The POGiest of POGs are "warfighters" and individual organizations within the DoD proudly advertise how they serve runny eggs and chicken to warfighters every day or issue their uniforms/equipment with incredible lethargy or maintain their personnel records in 20+ different systems duct taped together.
"Service member" does get used a lot still. Usually abbreviated to "SM".
Source: Personal experience in both combat arms and non combat arms roles.
He (and his allies) have referred to him as "warfighter": https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/look-ma-im-a-warfighter...
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/4ta3hh/cmv_th...
There are many reasons to detest the current political landscape. Don't get distracted.
Service member is extremely vague. "A member of a service."
I'm pretty sure that term could even work for the Pods in some of my Deployments.
Why wouldn’t you move your dollars to someplace incrementally better?
Their statement doesn't make it sound they are incrementally better, they are trying to bend over backwards to keep working for war.
Moving my subscription is not terribly consequential, but since the products are so similar and easy to substitute with one another for my uses, it seems best to participate in what in aggregate is a signal that is being noticed and commented on and interpreted to mean that a significant number of people who buy AI access do care about this.
Both of these companies have heavy PR teams that they use to convince you that they do, in fact, care about these issues. But that is PR and generally to be considered bullshit. They care about nothing other than their bottom lines.
This has been a wonderous PR move by Anthropic. It gets to make money off the US war machine while somehow being able to portray themselves as the "good guys" in the story leading to that whole #cancelOpenAI trend. If you're dumb enough to believe that Anthropic is really the "good guy" in this story, I have some meme coin to sell you.
To me the most Orwellian thing is everyone using the newspeak name for the DoD.
Some of his arguments:
It used to be called the department of war, and it had a better track record with regard to foreign conflict, under that name then it did under the DoD name.
Department of war is a more honest name, department of defense is a somewhat newspeak term, although "Department of Peace" would be worse.
It's harder to seek funding for "war", then it is to seek funding for "defense". If you ask someone, "Do you want to spend money on education or war?", you will get a different answer asking, "Do you want to spend money on education or defense?".
[0] Palmer Luckey talking to Mike Rowe about the name change: https://youtu.be/dejWbn_-gUQ?t=1007
The flaw in this logic is maddening
I'm confused. This seems like a bad change.
Regarding Luckey's other statements, I can almost assure you that the administration did not think as much about it as Luckey has. Insecure Pete just thought the title "Secretary of Defense" was too wussy so he wanted to be Secretary of War.
Also, I think people mainly have issue with the fact that Trump is just randomly and unilaterally renaming random stuff and demolishing buildings without congressional approval. If he had gone through the correct alleys then maybe people could ignore it. Maybe. We'd probably still have qualms about it, but at least we'd know that our representatives had a say.
It’s a good change in that it discourages unwarranted funding. Bad for the DoD’s budget, good for the country.
It’s analogous to why `React.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` is a pretty good name.
(But even if it's a decent name in isolation, it isn't actually the name of the department, and using it is a tacit submission to the power of the executive over congress. So… bad overall.)
Just because a name is more accurate doesn't mean that it's its new name. Otherwise we wouldn't be the United States of America (we are literally not united bc Hawaii and Alaska are not contiguous, and we are figuratively not united because... Well, you know)
> DoW is newspeak. Thats not it's name.
I understood that comment I was replying to was responding to was replying to the latter part of the comment.
Discussions and threads can evolve. They are not static.
The problem will get worse as we have a generation raised by LLMs.
They changed the name and it matches the intention. It is not a newspeak name anymore.
No, they didn't. The name of the department at issue is “the Department of Defense” and of its head the “Secretary of Defense” — these are set in statute (the latter for slightly longer time than the former) and the relevant statutes has not been changed, since the office of the Secretary of Defense was created in 1947 and the Department of Defense was created in 1949. The executive branch has just decided to use a nickname for a government department (which is the historical name for a prior department which was split to form two of what are now the three main direct subordinate elements within that department.)
However I suppose Amodei in this context can be included in the former group.
Edit: not sure if you're talking about the term warfighters or dept of war. Either way, warfighters just sounds silly, regardless of how long its been in use, and dept of war also sounds silly. It's like what my 5 year old nephew would call his fictitious military agency.
It’s exactly the kind of language people like Hegseth love.
Soldiers were just called soldiers. The word soldier just means a member of an army and has been used for centuries.
Warfighters is probably more accurate for their intended job description.
Also the original commenter does not understand the word "Orwellian" and uses it just to mean "different than what I'm used to" which is a common mistake.
Seems they understood it well: George Orwell wrote a book named "1984", in which a central plot point was that distortion of language causes distortion of thought.
This is an example of that: by distorting, say, "servicemember" into "warfighter", you distort the reality that people at the DoD are there to serve the people as their primary goal, not "fight wars". This means building bridges, levees, aiding disaster-struck friends overseas, etc.
Even if a war actually needs to be fought, it should not be the goal, and thus the job description. It should be in service of the actual primary goal, which is serving the people.
"When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-horses breed on the border." Tao Te Ching chapter 46.
It's pretty wild to observe you all getting firmware updates in real time. At least it proves, once and for all, that any attempt at reasoning is futile.
At the beginning, they’re usually doing it for the money — and maybe some level of patriotism. Eventually they find themselves involved in things so ugly that they can’t really stomach it anymore. At the same time, they can’t easily back out either.
Then a new CEO comes in and thinks the previous guy was too soft, "He couldn’t handle it, but I can."
And the cycle continues.
https://x.com/uswremichael/status/2029754965778907493?s=46&t...
What a weird (and false) dichotomy. If I don't want the government to use AI for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, I'm taking upon myself to be God?! Also, "monopoly on violence" never meant unregulated violence.
"Everything and I mean everything can be taken from you except your integrity, only you can give that up"
There are also missions people find valuable, like SBIRS ground, where theoretically real lives are being protected. I know a lot of people who enjoy finding meaning in their work, and there are many programs that bring that level of satisfaction (again, look at things like SBIRS ground).
They should rather say, we don't have to take you to court, just a misunderstanding.
One of the things that Altman does great is that when he writes he writes as though it will be read by the public every time. It’s why he is able to constantly post his own internal memos/posts on twitter. It’s great too because it makes him look “transparent”.
Try decoupling how you feel about people and what you think objectively about them.
What, I ask, is the point of having laws and rules if you can just ignore the ones you don't like?
Its just a name, who cares?
Not me.
…but, if you break the law, you break the law. Not maybe maybe who cares, its not me being water boarded, I dont care…
If you break the law. You break the law.
Otherwise, who gives a duck what congress says?
Just fire them all and crown Trump King of America.
I’m being facetious. …but maybe its more of a big deal than you superficially pretend it is.
It’s just another case of the administration blatantly breaking the rules.
…so, you know. If youre ok with no laws or rules, I guess its fine.
Seems a bit chaotic to me. I prefer my governing body to be… marginally bound by some kind of responsibilty to something or someone.
Its very evident in his statement, he's trying very hard to clarify what that list means for corporations and downstream business with large commercial and strategic companies.
Imagine if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc decided that they don't want to ANY sort of minuscule risk (real or perceived) to their massive public sector business lines (via all their DoD DoJ NHS and other 3 letter agencies, state agencies, city and local municipals etc) - and decide to cancel their enterprise Anthropic licenses - which is a VERY possible scenario.
And these are the big players, theres a whole slew of medium and small players all with existing government contracts that need to tread carefully.
People can speak how they truly feel and then regret the tone with zero cynicism.
That begs the following question: why does Dario Amodei repeatedly call the Department of Defense "Department of War"?
"Palantir's Maven uses Anthropic's Claude code, sources say."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
It is always astonishing that the reviled mainstream press is more critical than hackers these days.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/anthropic-pe...
Claude is integrated into Palantir’s Project Maven targeting system. The Pentagon has touted how many more targets they were able to attack with this system (1,000’s).
NY Times: Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/world/middleeast/iran-sch...
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-investigation-p...
What a world we live in now where private companies are apologising for the "tone" of their speech while official representatives of the government daily express blatant lies and misrepresentations without the slightest fear of consequence.
It really is incredibly sad that what was one of the most respected countries in the world has descended to this - an utter mockery of a functioning democracy.
He lashes out, accusing others of lies, spin, gaslighting and peddling. He refers to "Twitter morons", takes a swipe at Trump (who doesn't) and self-delights in the belief that Anthropic are seen as "heroes" while the competition "sketchy".
Not a great post. It's in the own goal zone.
There’s so much circular investment and connections that makes you wonder if this is a theatre in some form or another.
Say this were to be the case, what would be the end goal? Genuinely curious.
Slow it down as much as possible to give us more time.
The public: Anthropic are so noble, we should give them ever more praise and money.
Is that the synopsis? (Not really paying attention.)
This is a message to people working for that line of business at Anthropic. You don't have to do it, you can quit. If you are helping this insane administration to conduct war on Iran quit. You don't need to have that kind of blood on your hands.
I saw a someone's hypothesis that a generative model was used to help classify buildings to decide what to bomb and that the Girls school was misclassified. If this was an Anthropic model, I can imagine what it feels like being a worker there in that line of business.
Tech leadership is rotten to the core, and that can't be fixed by individuals making a stand.
I've never quit a company on purely ethical grounds, but I have turned down interviews and offers because of them. They're probably not going to go bankrupt just by not hiring me, but I like to think that making it incrementally harder to find talent slows down their progress of doing evil things, if only a little.
That's probably still a delusion of grandeur on my end, but we all should have an ethical line that we won't cross; most of us end up working for monsters and/or assholes, especially at BigCos, so your options generally boil down to "work for an asshole who's doing evil that you can live with" or "go live in a Unabomber shed". I guess it's important to make sure that "the evil thing you can live with here" isn't just any act of evil.
Or who simply had a different point of view than you.
One aspect that sticks with me was the sheer excitement of a lot of people in the room, engineers excited to be working on new problems. I believe many didn't consider the consequences of their labor.
As a worker it can take time for it to sink in that the products you are actively working on are being used for immoral/unethical purposes. I've also noticed a perceived weakness when expressing these types of views to colleagues, responses either masked by apathy or just direct justified destruction of lives along patriotic or ideological lines.
Its worth bringing up these stories whenever appropriate I believe, people sometimes _need_ a jolt even if the probability of success are low.
I imagine that's why the implementation got so far along before this blew up. Someone at Anthropic talked with someone at Palantir and they had a "you did what? Did you read the contract terms" moment, and that was after it went into production.
"Anthropic CEO says company was punished for not giving "dictator-style praise" or donations to Trump"
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-ceo-say...
Calling it the Department of Defense implies a system of laws, checks and balances which no longer exists.
I'm not obeying in advance, but I'm not giving lip service to normality, either.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
Look at the votes taken today if you need a refresher.
No one wants the middle way of 'capture' that hypothetically exists between peaceful cooperation and wars of domination, so it will not exist. You should consider, in this moment, if you stand for imperial aggression, or against it, as there is no third way.
The Silicon Valley tech jobs we have now has a history rooted in World War 2 and funding of it by the US gov.
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS
I’m not saying war is good or anything, but also don't ride a high horse cause none of it would be here w/o WW2.
Watching this, I realised one thing: Germans, once upon a time phenomenally intelligent folks, got eroded by a bunch of stupid politicians’ ambitions.
Or more importantly - say something that says nothing.
When you say nothing to politicians like this then eventually the story moves elsewhere.
But these guys had to put a stake in the ground and yell it out loud.
In politics you must know when to speak and what to speak and how to speak without speaking.
Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195085
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47269649
"Amodei claimed that tensions between his company and the Trump administration stem partly from the firm’s refusal to financially support Trump and its approach to AI regulation and safety issues."
What a sentence that inspires trust in Anthropic. DoW is currently bombing a sovereign country in a blatant act of aggression. It has been complicit in the gaza genocide. There should be zero cooperation.
Trump is the communist nobody warn you about :-D
thankfully, the giga Chads always win against the incel dorks and nerds in the end
That should be the headline here. We know Trump personally made $4B last year, and we know he's been using the full power of the US gov't to retaliate against people that don't "support" him.
Come 2029, when there's an opportunity for the corruption trials to start, this sort of behavior needs to be front of the public mind, both at the top, and throughout his network of appointees.
Now we have a president who doesn't even hide his bribes, and instead starts multiple cryptocurrencies and has a publicly traded company in order to optimize the bribery. Maybe this is this "Department of Government Efficiency" thing I keep hearing about; it's never been more efficient to bribe public officials.
When you give a guy who started a coup the keys to the kingdom, instead of a life-long prison sentence, arguing over what his taxes were a decade ago is... Splitting hairs.
Well I say that, it's not like I'm doing anything about it outside of complaining on the internet, which is nothing.
I still don't buy this discussion. How exactly do they want to use an llm for autonomous weapons, given it's not even possible to reliably have a piece of code written without having to review it?
And how is a 1M token window model suppposed to be useful for mass surveillance?
Honest questions, I am sure I am missing some details. Because so far it looks like a very sophisticated marketing strategy.
Probably the same way Claude can play Pokemon: give it a bunch of informations and let it make a decision by itself to achieve a specified goal.