Comment by daenz
4 years ago
I generally agree with this, however, the rough men willing to do violence on our behalf are more and more becoming the quirky scientists who are very disconnected from the actual impact of their work. I think there's a big difference between those types of people. It seems like people don't feel the weight of violence as much as they used to. I imagine this will increase as we develop more AI driven weapons.
This doesn't square with my experience in defense. I worked in software and we saw plenty of combat and aftermath footage and were always aware that the design decisions we made and the tools we built meant life-and-death for someone. We did our best to make sure it was the right people.
I'd add, the weight of violence—if anything—is going up. People today are devastated when a dozen soldiers and scores of civilians are killed in a suicide bombing or urban conflict, but go back to Vietnam and those incidents barely register because they happened all the time. The number of people killed in any given armed conflict has dropped quite a bit in the last 50-or-so years. (The Syrian Civil War is one big exception.)
Thanks for sharing your experience. To your last point, I think it's a tradeoff. The number of individuals getting killed is going down, but we're closer than ever to the ability kill everyone more easily (beyond nukes: weaponized viruses, etc). Scientists who are drawn to a field of research may not be practically connecting the dots about what they're actually working on, or the full implications of their work (eg: gain of function research). These are the people I'm referring to when I mention them not realizing the weight of violence that they are contributing to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon