I guess I would feel better about Google's new willingness to use AI for weapons and surveillance if I thought the country leading in AI development actually *was* a democracy guided by core values like equality and respect for human rights. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... - ThreadSky

tedunderwood.me • 56 days ago

I guess I would feel better about Google's new willingness to use AI for weapons and surveillance if I thought the country leading in AI development actually *was* a democracy guided by core values like equality and respect for human rights. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/04/google-ai-policies-weapons-harm/

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aelkus.bsky.social•56 days ago

the thing about natsec is that you are, in some sense, totally subordinate to the priorities of the client (the state). if you cannot trust the state, then you cannot really do your job. i think that's an issue those still in security in gov will confront

https://www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/Arrigo-JPE%201999.pdf

aelkus.bsky.social•56 days ago

the attached paper is the best overall depiction of the mentality behind defense and security work and the ethical issues associated with it

tedunderwood.me•56 days ago

Yeah, if you start to wonder "Hans, are we the baddies" it becomes problematic.

Which is, pragmatically, a good reason to try to behave in a way that makes it very clear to your own people that the answer to that question is no, or mostly no.

tedunderwood.me•56 days ago

I think this is really, really hard. I wonder sometimes how I would have distinguished, at the time, between our involvement in Korea and our involvement in Vietnam.

It's a bad combination of "morally, very important question" and "question you're likely to get wrong."

aelkus.bsky.social•56 days ago

i often think about daniel ellsberg, whose motivation for leaking was that he realized kissinger and nixon were grandiose megalomaniacs who were getting people killed because of their bizarre aristocratic pretensions https://jacobin.com/2015/09/vietnam-war-cambodia-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-kissinger

aelkus.bsky.social•56 days ago

quants and computer guys are often blamed for losing the war, but ellsberg was a numbers guy that ran the code and discovered that america couldn't win in vietnam. the response to this assessment was to bury the information

zas.bsky.social•56 days ago

Our Man, a book about Richard Holbrooke, had a few chapters on vietnam that blew me away with how obviously doomed the whole endeavor was by 65 at the latest and how Kissinger, LBJ, and later Nixon just kept pushing on.

telephonebooth.bsky.social•56 days ago

yes and ability to discern the weight in the room, who his real clients were, not always Nixon, vs copper concessions in Chile etc and then the ability to generate manage pretext cause the mooks had no real vision just a little entrepreneurial leverage

phdhurtbrain.bsky.social•56 days ago

I feel like these two things are linked

tedunderwood.me•56 days ago

Oh we've been good at ignoring human rights and self-determination for a long, long time. I remember standing on a roadside holding signs about the Iraq War circa 2003.

phdhurtbrain.bsky.social•56 days ago

Madness

flamekurve.bsky.social•56 days ago

💙

tedunderwood.me•56 days ago

You can't go sit with the Trump family at the inauguration and then say "trust us, we're only going to use this to support freedom and equality." Manifestly you are not.

alxfed.bsky.social•56 days ago

Hassabis is an all time shame for the Nobel Committee. Like Philipp Lenard (who was a _real_ great physicist on the scale of Oersted or Hertz) before.

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