>The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).
Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.
Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.
Specially AI Hallucination bombs, that hit a park named "Police Park", because it thinks it's killing policemen[1], or a children school with Shahed in the name[2], because it thinks It has something to do with drones.
This isn't even that new. Part of the motivation for building autonomous nuclear response programs during the cold war was specifically to remove accountability, and guilt, from human operators. But AI does bring it to a new level.
Your links talk about the places that were bombed, but I don't see anything apart for conjecture that this was the product of AI targeting.
Also this is a vast underestimate of the ability of organizations that were able to locate most of Iranian leadership throughout the war in their hiding places, but suddenly their Farsi is so bad they need a twitter account to tell them this is a Park
It's a popular conspiracy theory, without evidence, and without any perspective on any information that intelligence had. Using civilians as shields is well documented/known for Iranian military and groups they sponsor. For example, hospitals [1].
That “smart” vs “dumb” distinction doesn’t apply here though. What is discussed has nothing to do with the ability to physically land a bomb in a precise location, that problem seems to be solved reasonably well already. “Smart” in this case has more to do with using ML/LLM to select a target.
Smart bombs are no good if they are directed by a dumb targeting system, dumb alcoholic accelerationist religious fanatic Secretary of War, or dumb narcissistic genocidal pedophile Presidents.
> With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”, the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat’s products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people.
IBM suffered no consequences for any of that so there were no lessons to learn. IBM dominated the computer industry from the 1960s-1980s ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM") and was a more brutal monopolist than any of the FANGAM corporations.
Besides external PR, does anyone know how this affects internal morale?
Some of the earlier Red Hat people I knew would not be OK with working on weapons systems even under the most legitimate circumstances. And they'd be much more opposed to collaborating with fascist regimes. And I think horrified by the idea of shoveling AI slop and grifter hype into life&death decisions.
Of course the tech industry makeup has changed (overall culture transitioning from hacker idealists, to finance bros), and some IBM-ification of Red Hat has has also happened. But I'd like to think Red Hat still attracts a more principled pool of talent than FAANG.
> I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense
The core purpose of a military is to destroy things and kill people, and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others. You can put all the "defense" and "disaster aid" lipstick on that you like but that doesn't change what they train for and what their real purpose is.
> and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others
Yes, welcome to Earth.
There's absolutely no morality in deciding to be weaker than you have to be. If you are eaten by a predator when you had the option not to be eaten, you're not some high-minded righteous peace-lover, you're simply dead.
Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.
Archive URL to original paper
[1] https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2029575052535173364
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/6/elementary-school-in...
You or your subordinates target an elementary school: that's a war crime.
Your "battlefield AI" targets an elementary school: software bug, it happens, can't be helped.
Also this is a vast underestimate of the ability of organizations that were able to locate most of Iranian leadership throughout the war in their hiding places, but suddenly their Farsi is so bad they need a twitter account to tell them this is a Park
Shitty, but possibly a valid military target.
[1] https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8666/yemen-human-shields
You want consensus from non-experts for a plan to use 20 smart bombs.
Your opponent wants consensus for a plan to live-stream a demo of 1 smart bomb, and then use 19 dumb ones.
Your team has more expertise.
Your opponent's plan saves enough money to buy a better PR team than yours, and is still more cost effective than your plan.
Who wins?
It appears IBM learned no lessons after WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
That book will need a sequel soon.
[1] https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
Some of the earlier Red Hat people I knew would not be OK with working on weapons systems even under the most legitimate circumstances. And they'd be much more opposed to collaborating with fascist regimes. And I think horrified by the idea of shoveling AI slop and grifter hype into life&death decisions.
Of course the tech industry makeup has changed (overall culture transitioning from hacker idealists, to finance bros), and some IBM-ification of Red Hat has has also happened. But I'd like to think Red Hat still attracts a more principled pool of talent than FAANG.
Can we rename this "RedHat removes paper from website on using their software to 'shrink the kill-chain'"
The core purpose of a military is to destroy things and kill people, and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others. You can put all the "defense" and "disaster aid" lipstick on that you like but that doesn't change what they train for and what their real purpose is.
Yes, welcome to Earth.
There's absolutely no morality in deciding to be weaker than you have to be. If you are eaten by a predator when you had the option not to be eaten, you're not some high-minded righteous peace-lover, you're simply dead.