I personally think this is the most interesting part of the entire article:
'He then focused on defense work, lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were “largely refusing to work with the defense sector.”'
I wonder to what extent that is still true. There is clearly a lot of money flowing and some definitely followed the money ( Palantir exists after all ).
> ...lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were "largely refusing to work with the defense sector".
Getting tech people into defense was easier when they never saw the aftermath of what those weapons did or were largely unaware of what they were actually building (a la Manhattan Project). But when people can watch a live-streamed bombing of a random neighborhood on Twitter, they may have second guesses about assisting in that...
I imagine approximately every single person that worked on this project wouldn't be there if the Nazis and Japan weren't actively trying to kill... well whatever share of the world's population they desired to kill. (I'm pretty sure the union would be close to 100%)
It's clearly true to some degree, there are documented cases of people that refused to work with the defense sector at great personal costs. The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit talent?
> The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit talent?
Easy: Give potential employees similar salaries to MAMAA companies, and a similar amount of freedom and independence (at least in the ways in which it is possible at a defense company) as it existed in the early days of Google and Facebook, and I think a lot of potential employees (though of course not all, but this is not necessary) will "forget" their initial moral objections and go for the money. :-)
Wasn't DARPA kinda close to that idea ( I am honestly not sure, but it seemed like a lot of interesting stuff came from there )?
Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
> Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
You just developed an insanely small part of this machinery. Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot. :-(
If you still have bad feelings, there exists the charity-industrial complex: donate some decent paycheck to give a poor, starving child a better life - something that you could not have done if you hadn't accepted the well-paid defense contract.
"Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot."
Definitely. When I worked at a aerospace co some of the young engineers had internal conflicts they rationalized away by saying "we aren't building bombs." No, they were just building the targeting systems. Pointing the gun but someone else pulling the trigger. So it's all good.
I suspect it's way less true than tech folks who hate the US defense industry think. The correlation between liberal opinions and problem-solving intelligence is nonzero but it's not all that high.
'He then focused on defense work, lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were “largely refusing to work with the defense sector.”'
I wonder to what extent that is still true. There is clearly a lot of money flowing and some definitely followed the money ( Palantir exists after all ).