they’re too fucking big to live with grandma and open doors for her, they’d knock the china down
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dumb ass engineers: “we’ll build it because we can, how fucking cool is this shit??”
also dumb engineers: “if i dont do it, someone else will”
their funders: “this will make me so fucking rich, helllo DOD”
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What’s dumb-ass about the first two statements besides the fact that humanist social determinists who believe they actually have agency over these decisions hate them? It’s only dumb-ass if you add a 4th line by the *same* people, “oh no what have we done?”
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it’s dumb because the implications of these capabilities are REALLY OBVIOUS if you know anything at all about how money, power and influence work
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basic go to market thinking isnt something most people who engineer things for a living are incentived to think about
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Not really. I worked on drone and autonomous robotics for years and literally nobody I met on the civilian industry, military, or academic side had any illusions an;it what they were building and how it would be used. We literally used specific military and policing use cases.
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The peaceful civilian use cases are always just a nice-to-have plus market on the thinking. There is no agonizing or moral dilemmas. People with those social determinist tendencies tend not to get into such work at all.
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The trope of the clueless engineer who suddenly has a humanist consciousness raising moment of “oh god what have I done” is pure humanist wishful thinking combined with the self-important belief that they’re more morally “evolved” and see things poor dumb tech-fetishists don’t.
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They are dominantly design/UX side people or people who came to the tech side from humanities/social science because they discovered an aptitude for programming. I’d say engineers who fit your caricature are <10%. Most of us are total death-star assholes who accept the Empire 😎
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thank you for proving my point
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im entirely convinced that the majority of engineering education institutions in this country are morally bankrupt and ethically compromised
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