The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly.
The breakthroughs are also less than they used to be. We have the nuke. We have reached space. We've hit the peaks. Everything else is just automatic turrets and AI to choose who to kill.
I remember being in college. I went to a top CS school (perhaps the top CS school), and it was often considered a black mark if you went to work for a defense company (even Palantir). It was also a different time, when we had our pick of companies to work at, not like today. But that sentiment is hard to shake off. I'm not convinced it is not still large in academia and the CS world today
> I made changes that impacted
> tens of millions of users in...
> no significant way whatsoever.
> Certainly not anything they'd
> remember on their deathbed [...]
The idea that "this one bad thing could happen, therefore I will do nothing that could remotely cause this one bad thing" is childish reasoning.
Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.
This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.
I think the conclusion is that there is very little justified technology development that actually betters society, except for things that actually save people from dying. Things like healthcare, utilities, civil engineering, defense, etc. However, almost all of those industries are mired in bureaucracy and are the ultimate examples of such.
Regarding defense specifically, there is no shortage of ways for maniacal dictators to raze entire cities to the ground under the justification that "bad guys were in the tunnels". That is, in effect, a solved problem – many times over. Accordingly, that is not where the research money is being spent. Rather, the goal of most new "Defense" is to achieve those same mission goals (kill the bad guys) with as little civilian casualties as possible, or to protect our own assets against such attacks as well as possible.
If nobody stands up for our rights and freedoms at home they could easily be eroded, or lost entirely.
Yeah, this always tickled me. Obviously smart people should just go work somewhere innocuous like Meta or ByteDance.
Also FWIW this is Palantir and Anduril's bread and butter. They get to vacuum up all the wrongthinkers.