There's a reason it's unpopular.

If your company makes an herbicide that happens to be very good at killing off anyone who drinks it at a high concentration in their water supply, you're saying that there should be no way for your company to resist being used for mass murder (including unavoidable collateral damage)?

Also, the core mission of the military is not "killing its adversaries through any means necessary". It is to defend state interests. Some people have a belief that mass killing is the best mechanism for accomplishing that. I do not agree with, nor do I want to associate with, those people. They are morally and objectively wrong. Yes, sometimes killing people is the most effective -- or more likely, the quickest -- way. In practice, it doesn't work very well. The threat of violence is much more powerful than actually committing violence. If you have to resort to the latter, you've usually screwed up and lost the chance to achieve the optimal outcome. It is true that having no restrictions whatsoever on your ability to commit violence is going to be more intimidating, but it also means that you have to maintain that threat constantly for everyone, because nobody has any other reason to give you what you want.

The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is.

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palmotea 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>> Unpopular opinion around here, but no company should have the ability to stop the military from its core mission: killing its adevarsaries through any means necessary.

> The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is.

You're right, but there's a a real question here: should a company have the ability to control or veto the decisions of the democratically-elected government?

To give different hypothetical example: should Microsoft be allowed to put terms in its Windows contracts with the government, stipulating that Windows cannot be used to create or enforce certain tax policy or regulations that Microsoft disagrees with? Windows is all over, and I'm sure pretty much every government process touches Windows at some point, so such a term would have a lot of power.

	▲	sfink 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You're right, but there's a a real question here: should a company have the ability to control or veto the decisions of the democratically-elected government? I don't think "control or veto" is fair. Anthropic is not trying to prevent the US government from creating full autonomous killbots based on inadequate technology. They are only using contract law to prevent their own stuff from being used in that way. But that aside, my opinion is that to a first order approximation, yes a company should very much be able to have say in its contract negotiations with any party including the government. It's very similar to the draft. I don't believe a draft is ethical until the situation is extreme, and there ought to be tight controls on what it takes to declare the situation to be that extreme. At any other time, nobody should be forced to join the military and shoot people, and corporations (that are made of people) should not be forced to have their product used for shooting people. A corporation is a legal fiction to describe a group of people. Some restrictions can be placed on corporations in exchange for the benefits that come from that legal fiction, but nothing that overrides the rights of its constituent people. Governments are made of people too. Again, a subset of people are given some powers in order to better achieve the will of the people, but with tight controls on those powers to keep the divergence to a minimum. (Of course, people will always find the cracks and loopholes and break out of their constraints, but I'm talking about design not real-world implementation here.) So to look at your hypothetical, first I'd say it's not very different from the question of whether an individual person should be forced to personally enforce tax policy. Normally, I'd say no. There are many situations where the government needs more say and authority in such things, but that must only be achieved via representatives of the people passing laws to allow such authority. Other than that, yes: I believe a company should be able to negotiate whatever contract terms it wants. In a democracy, we are not subjects of a controlling government; the government is an extension of us. In practical terms, if Microsoft were to insist on that contract stipulation, the government would not agree to the contract and would award its business to someone else. If the government were especially out of control and/or unethical, it might punish Microsoft with regulations or declarations of supply chain risk or whatever, but that is clearly overstepping its bounds and ought to be considered illegal if it isn't already. The usual fallback would be that the people would throw the people perpetrating that out on their asses. That's the "democratically-elected part". Obviously, Microsoft would be stupid to insist on such a thing in their contract, and its employees would probably lose all confidence in the corporate leadership. Most likely, they'd leave and start Muckrosaft next door that rapidly develops a similar product and sells it to the government under a reasonable contract. Basically, I'm always going to start from people first, and use organizations and laws only in order to achieve the will of the people. The fact that the people are stupid does make that harder, but the whole point of democracy is that we'll work out the right balance over time.
	▲	5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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ExoticPearTree 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My conception is that the world would be a much simpler place if war was total. No one would start it unless it would be 200% it could win it. And we would all go through military training just in case, you know, a neighbor drank too much last night and thinks it can win against you.

> The threat of violence is much more powerful than actually committing violence.

While I agree with this statement, the only way the threat works is if from time to time you apply violence to reinforce your capability and availability to actually do it. And the US is really good at actually being violent so others don't even think about doing something against it, at least the majority of countries anyway.

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don_esteban 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Re: My conception is that the world would be a much simpler place if war was total. No one would start it unless it would be 200% it could win it

Now apply the same logic to the current Iran war.

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ExoticPearTree 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I do not see Iran winning this. The current government is also hated by the people who would very much like to see all of them dead.

Al Jazeera has some very good insights into this, and the gist of it is: the Iranian regime is in a fight for its life with nothing to lose. If they are degraded enough, a revolution will start in Iran and they will be killed by the people. Or by US/IL bombs - whichever comes first. There is no way they get out of this alive. They are trying to prolong the inevitable.

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don_esteban 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Regarding Iran's future:

You are describing Libya scenario, not a 'lived prosperously ever after'. There is no credible opposition in Iran to take the mantle.

	▲	ExoticPearTree 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. Iran has almost all of its population part of the same ethnic group, which in Libya it was not true: all the tribes started fighting each other. It does not an established opposition because the current regime has the habit of killing anyone it doesn't like or goes against the official line. Now there is a chance for opposition to form.

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don_esteban 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OK, slowly:

The wars are already total for the weaker sides. See Ukraine/Iran. Did not stop the stronger side attacking.

You are advocating for no constraints (total war) on the stronger side. Taken literally, that means genocide of the losers. Really, that's what you want?

But yes, you are right, the world would be much simpler in such case - there will be no humans left. OK, maybe some hunter-gatherers.

	▲	thaumasiotes 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You are advocating for no constraints (total war) on the stronger side. Taken literally, that means genocide of the losers. Really, that's what you want? Taken literally, it means genocide of the losers is an option the winning side has. It always has been. Note that Genghis Khan's explicit plan when he conquered China was to wipe out the Chinese to make room for Mongols. He wasn't stopped from doing that; there was no constraint to block him. But he was persuaded not to.

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Tanjreeve 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the same mistake as made in Iraq and Syria by media policy pundits. Dictatorial regimes collapse pretty quickly without a significant base of support enough to stop a revolution happening. They might not have a majority of people supporting but it isn't a democracy. Dictatorial regimes will always have one or more of military, business, or sub-groups of citizens in their pockets as clients.

Whenever we say "the regime is hated by it's people it will collapse" it should be asked "then why didn't it collapse already?". In Iran metropolitan areas are where you see opposition. That's also where people have cameras and media orgs tend to be. We get a warped depiction of opposition in Iran even without our own media's baggage. Meanwhile the power base of Iran is everywhere but metropolitan cities. And there's a lot of clients who benefit from the regime. I think this might be worse than the sectarian violence that came out of the Hussein regimes collapse because the Sunni sect his base was built around was still a minority. This time it's the majority and the people being fought against are the Americans, the Israelis and the Arabs so their backs are against the wall this is a total war already from their side.