this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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I had a friend in a difficult position, deciding between high pay at Buy N Large or the opportunity to work on insanely cool shit for Death Inc.
Ultimately he chose Death Inc, and the reasoning was along the lines of "This might kill a hundred people, but at least it'll kill them specifically. I can't even conceptualize the harm Amazon et al. do on a global scale to entire populations without even trying".
Made me think. I didn't have a very good answer to that.
those bombs will kill far more than just a hundred people, far more than he can ever conceptualize. the consequences of those deaths will shape the world more than the extra microsecond an engineer could shave off of an internal Amazon function
The argument the person was saying is that we already have big bombs that do catastrophic damage, the R&D is how do you make those bombs more targeted so they have less collateral damage.
Now whether that will actually lead to less deaths or will just cause the bombs to be used in places they otherwise wouldn’t be used with the same amount of collateral damage is unknown.
But it brings up a bit of a utilitarian dilemma of “is it ethical to work on weapons if it leads to an overall reduction of collateral damage to civilians”
It doesn’t have a necessarily correct answer
Have advancements in precision bombing technology ever led to an overall reduction in collateral damage to civilians? Is that even an argument defense contractors make, or are you just making it up?
Or has every study shown the exact opposite, that "precision" bombs actually cause more civilian deaths?
Yep, in world war 2 without precision bombing we fire bombed entire cities to the ground and one of them was so bad it caused a fire tornado that literally suck people into it! World war 2 had such a problem with imprecise bombing that they are still finding bombs today
yea but nestle
Also, "if I don't make this thing that will kill a hundred people specifically, they'll just use something that kills more people with less precision / more casualties."
Ah good ole ego.
How is precision weaponry "insanely cool shit"???
I mean it's impressive from an engineering standpoint
Anduril has had many, many recruiters desperately trying to get me to work for them. On the surface, what they make does sound incredibly cool: embedded systems/operating systems for autonomous robotics.
The only problem is those robots happen to be death bots (and Palmer Luckey, who makes me want to stay far, far away).
Technically if you think about it, he’d be saving innocent lives, since non precise weapons have more collateral damage. Might as well make bombs accurate and hit the right targets.
The "right targets" tend to be innocent lives as well. Besides, who said anything about precise weaponry? These days, it's all about AI, where precision is actually not the goal
Shame that the right targets are often schools, hospitals, weddings, and apartment complexes
If we're murdering the planet, we might as well do it well! hur dur....
It means you can take out the bride's party, or the groom's party.
Military technology has got a near unlimited budget, that means you get tons of cool and technically impressive toys and things to work with
I enjoy watching the breakdowns of the most advanced weaponry and stuff like jet fighters (that we have access to information about), nuclear armaments, and other stuff like that, because they are very very impressive from an engineering perspective
But, of course, I really do strongly hate them for existing in terms of their actual purpose. It would be much cooler for similar engineering feats to be in use for civilian purposes. But I can't deny that they are amazing from a purely technical perspective
Well, I can't get into details, but the field is vast.
That's how the entire "education" process goes. They lure kids with promises of making cool video games or whatnot. Then they brainwash them, teach them helplessness, and exploit their entire life in order to profit from murdering people.
That’s an interesting take. One on one side the death is a haphazard byproduct and on the other it is at least motivated by someone. Somebody has to have a vision for why these weapons need to be used. I’d argue though that in the case of Amazon, wether or not it’s of any priority to them, the suffering would be something worth ironing out over time whereas, for weapons companies, it’s the entire product they sell
It should make you think about how your friend is in a brainwashed delusion.
Not quite, no. Not everyone works on the weapons.
I worked gps until i determined The Customer was not interested in reducing civilian casualties.
They wanted the induced fear, priming the next generation ready for revenge, the garuntee of future business.