alt Hacker NewsI've been working in the aerospace (now space) arena my entire career, and there's a lot of overlap there with the defense industry. What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used). I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.
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> What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used).
Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers. Say you're working on nuclear weapons technology: is your job building weapons to enable the genocidal destruction of another country, or to prevent that kind of thing through a credible MAD deterrent? Both things are simultaneously true.
And then there's no way to predict the future: what's true today when you build it may not be true tomorrow when it's used, because there's a different leader or political system in place.
> I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.
I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.
Palantir on the other hand is an invisible weapon. They could be reading my comment right now and identifying me with sentiment "adversarial" for all I know. What implications that has on my daily life is innumerable...and I'm a US citizen!