> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people.

There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

Even before Fairchild Semiconductor was founded, much of the original SF Bay Area tech industry started during and after WWII to develop radar and electronic warfare systems for the military.

I think this is true, and also a lot of tech, which often isn't as PR as the web/internet tech, gets funded by DOD/DARPA

That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.

Good point, but there's a very big difference between dual use tech that gets it's start in the military, vs building weapons systems.

Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile.

Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question.

I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well.

That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism

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There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force.

Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.

To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.

It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.

No need to get serious. Only a sith deals in absolutes. There's plenty of work within the us military that is definitely not evil. Even within the field of weapons development. You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches. You are literally saving lives working on that project, despite what the people who only see in black and white and make grandstand positions online might think.

>Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?

Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.

Other countries probably focus quite a bit more on the defense aspect. How many times has the US military countered a hostile attacking force? Instead, I can think of significantly more instances where the US was instigating the situation.

I think it’s difficult to come up with hard and fast rules. But the fact that the US government (falsely) renamed their Department of Defense to Department of War is perhaps a useful signal.

The US is almost uniquely evil, though.

People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.

I think this is secondary to a widespread loss of confidence in our nation's political and foreign policy apparatus to do what's right for the average American. "Working for the military is evil" descends from a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq, post-Snowden worldview that presupposes that the military will leverage technology it has access to in unexpected, undesirable, and broadly harmful ways.

> * Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the* US is uniquely evil?

What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.

Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?

There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN.

Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.

Work for defense but elect better leaders. Your leaders decide where and when the military is used.

If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global landscape.

This long pre-dates Google.

Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).

Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.

Tech workers on the way to work: I wonder why this tram stop is called "Lockheed-Martin". I guess we'll never know!

Wait till they find out where the Internet came from.

Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.

As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.

Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.

Huh, I learned something new but also your post is misleading. According to what I read after reading your comment:

- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.

- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).

Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.

I originally read the headline as "Silicon Valley Is Transforming Military-Industrial Complex".

It's fair to bring up the issue, but that is a deeply misrepresentative framing.

Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.

Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.

There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.

As a person whose graduate work in GOFAI in the early 1980's was funded by DARPA, I am somewhat conflicted by choices like this.

In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.

Keyhole founder John Hanke also went on to found Niantic and develop Pokémon Go.

VCs don't have ethics. The first puppy crushing startup will achieve record valuation in record time. The Torment Nexus is already real enough.

Microsoft has been participating in PRISM program (SIGAD US-984XN) since 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.

" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Well it's good you just left on your own accord, basically you fired yourself rather than wasting their time having to do it. There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. There are some very intense ideological dynamics within big tech companies among the employee base but I always found it interesting that the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.

Good on you. I left my post-university defense job after a year and a half. Of all career decisions, that's one I don't regret, and rather the regret I harbor was for joining in the first place (albeit did so under a combination of limited information & naivete).

The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.

Thank you, both for following your values and for sharing it publicly

Do you support the status quo of millions of H1Bs? Those people I doubt can or will take such a principled stance, making collective action by tech workers impossible.

> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.

Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.

I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.

Yeah, relying on someone’s conscious won’t really cut it, greed and current economy will always win. The best solution imo is crowdsourcing, there should be a site or platform that aggregates all the people who works in these companies, categorize the company as grey or black list based on how they are engaged in shady practices. If someone chose to do something morally questionable, it’s up to them, but it’s also transparent that other people get to know that, could be colleagues, employers, or investors. I think it’s fair that whoever is building surveillance systems and tracking to be surveilled, whoever is making weapons to be known, they can be a public danger given that they sell their morals to highest bidder.

You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so.

But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.

I feel like tech has lost its way recently. It's a huge, huge field, so there have always been people working on 'bad' things, but IDK, I just don't have the same feeling of optimism about things that I used to and I wish there was some kind of movement bringing that back.

A few days ago I recall you taking the position that Israel should not exist and that anyone who disagree is a Zionist (correct definition) that you would not associate with.

The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)

If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion. Threads like this always have lots of people agreeing to people quitting the jobs, not even ones that are directly working on that but even ones just associated with the company at hand. This is an honest question, how do you decide what is Ok? A job with a company that was involved in this is not Ok, fair enough. What about working with a company that does business with Microsoft or uses Microsoft products? What about owning Microsoft stock and benefiting off it? what about owning Microsoft stock via index funds? Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I use Microsoft products, can I use outlook? can I use an xbox? What are my other realistic options, considering it feels like every industry (not just tech) has big 2-3 realistic options and they all likely have something bad headlines, even if I don't know about it. How much time can I realistically invest digging and fact checking this? I want to be good, but these threads generally leave me feeling judged.

I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.

It should be noted that MSFT is the only tech company that explicitly asked the FBI to surveil about workers that were protesting the Gaza genocide:

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...

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Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.

What was your job at Microsoft?

You spoke to my heart, comrade! Already sending Microsoft my resignation letter so I can join you on skid row fighting against the evil capitalist empire!

You’re doing the right thing! Glad to see this kind of action.

On the contrary, you will do exactly as you're told if you expect to cash those sweet MSFT paychecks, which I assume you did prior to this epiphany, otherwise you would have returned all the money.

Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"

This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.

You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"

This is the problem with capitalism.

Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...

it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).

they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.

no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.

I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.

endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.

> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.

This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.

> If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons.

I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.

The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.

In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.

Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.

I think you are referencing it’s hugely profitable to not make artillery shells like that 500 million dollar factory we taxpayers paid for and got nothing from - in case anyone forgot https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...

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It was not just the VCs. There were also influential people in Pentagon who saw the inefficiency of the prime defense contractors, especially after having seen what SpaceX was able to do.

One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".

Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.

[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE

I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

We'll still have plenty of utter failures. I was shocked hearing about the IVAS program when it was announced, it was such an obvious loser. I guess it's better to have burned 2billion rather than the full amount but whoever green lit that nonsense should spend the rest of their career peeling potatoes.

The question is whether SV will do better than the prime contractors or just become another one.

> it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff

The U.S. military spends about $800bn a year [1]. That's up about $300bn from ten years ago.

American consumers spend about $21 trillion a month [2].

If you look at VC, most of it still goes to B2C and B2B. DefenseTech is a headline because it's novel.

[1] https://www.warcosts.org/us-military-budget-2026

[2] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categor...

True. 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', Steve Blank, is essential viewing, IMO.

hoisted by its own petard!

heh upvoted, came here to note same; the continuous net gain of defense R&D

All sorts of research. Clinical trial efficacy testing has its statistical origins in military radar target verification.

And ENIAC and ARPANET... what's interesting is how much of this is not capitalism but instead state funded and directed. I fear we're also seeing SOTA AI captured by the state. I am grateful for Chinese open models and a multi-polar world, especially given the egregious ethical violations the US has perpetrated very consistently since its formation.

Before chips it was radio and radars. The Klystron was invented at Stanford. Lockheed Martin Space and Raytheon have locations in Silicon Valley.

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There are now multiple reputation laundering agencies on this site who flag wrongthink or sink submissions.

> Kushner leads a funding round, then someone in the Trump environment boosts the company

It's been an open secret for over a year that a cheque from Thrive buys tariff exemptions.

"Childhood's End" (1953) https://archive.org/details/childhoodsend0000clar_f3g4

Evidently they want to deplete the military's reserves in order to sell them the refills.

There are now multiple reputation laundering agencies on this site who flag wrongthink or sink submissions.

also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started

this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.

first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.

second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.

third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.