Is is that surprisingly few weapons inventors expressed regret and doubt? Or just that very few wrote about it?
Snark aside, we have massively more people alive today than in 1900 and yet the proportion of people that die in armed conflicts is— while horrific- barely noteworthy in most years around the dawn of the 20th century and not infrequently dwarfed by the body counts racked up in those days.
That's true if your definition of 'die in armed conflicts' is limited to 'the soldiers on the battlefield.' If you extend that definition a little to 'people who would not have died if there hadn't been an armed conflict' then you need to scale it up to about a million people a year today. That's just from 5 countries where it's been studied. Globally it's likely to be much more. There's some good information about it, from a credible source, here: https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
Analysis cannot be X in ~1900's vs. x + y these days -> "Oh wow things have changed".
Do you think "would not have died if there hadn't been an armed conflict" wasn't a thing in 1900? I know such things to have been high then, though not with precision, but starvation followed conflict whether because crops went unharvested or were burned or scavenged by the armies. Logistic to rapidly transport food from other regions easily, humanitarian aid, not very good compared to today. That's just one area things may have been worse at those times.
Very true. I'm not suggesting that we should ignore the tens of millions killed in wars and as the indirect result of wars decades ago. I'm only saying that there's still a really large number of people killed. If you take a war like World War 2 that resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths per year (60 million dead over 6 years) we've only reduced that by a factor of 10 (at most, because the study I linked to is not all conflicts) which isn't very much, and that's still a catastrophic and tragic number of deaths.
By all means, count in all the civilians killed in 1900 too. But it is completely ridiculous to count only soldiers.
Civilians are more likely to die due to wars. And soldiers kill civilians intentionally.
> proportion of people that die in armed conflicts
That must include the majority of victims of it all.
I’ll say this: the difference isn’t small around this general question, hospitals don’t get bombed every day, and if you’re going to disagree with something that would be commonly known among knowledge among people familiar with a topic if you pause for a moment to reflect then the habit of checking to see if your instinct or sense of a thing is actually correct is a useful habit. Analysis is both a profession for me as well as a habit so I’ll stipulate I could be wrong and would welcome discussion of anything I’ve missed.
That said: things like bombing a hospital is now possible yes but destroying them has ever been so, or simply slaughtering their residents as you march through, and there were far fewer norms against that sort of thing. Much worse things done more often. Deliberate slaughter of non combatants isn’t new. Prohibitions against it arose for a good reason and strong precedent of the practice from times where marching armies were more common and therefore systematic slaughter of this sort more convenient to those inclined. Accidentally or on purpose, giving smallpox via infected blankets to people forcibly removed from their land and marked across thousands of miles is just one variety. Cholera and other disease outbreaks are another.
These too are not unobvious things to if you consider possible modes of death by or adjacent to military campaigns and they too are also not hard to find estimates for.
not a knock on modern medicine, and probably the people who survive are happy that they did for the most part, however if you compare the results in the way you did, you should compare those as well.
At those times the only redress for any injury was amputation. These days a very large numbers of injuries can be addressed with less life changing impact.
>"should compare"
I'm not going to include "better dead than crippled" in my considerations here. It seems both absurd and also not something that was encompassed in the orignal point I was adressing.
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
Tyranny, slavery, colonialism- it never lasts.
Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?
I didn't know that Alfred Nobel thought that removing this distinction would bring peace though.
I guess he didn't read the book, which was published long after his death. It's main thesis is just that war before civilization was a thing at all, that the archeological evidence for it can be taken at face value, that weapons were not means of exchange and walls were not symbols of unity. It could have been written before the invention of dynamite.
The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?
>The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?
Well, for a time greek city states did fight pretty much like this. Small armies of hoplites were raised outside harvest season, went out, fought almost show-battles with very few casualties, and tribute changed hands based on the results. Everyone went home for the harvest.
I believe there's even instances where a battle wasn't fought at all in favour of two appointed champions dueling (origin of the popular fiction trope)
It didn't last, but for a time the greek city states had a kind of equilibrium with relatively few resources (or people) spent on war.
> that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Our force structure shifted towards logistics and infrastructure from combatants as we moved up the weapon complexity hierarchy. First automatic guns, then tanks, then airplanes.
To a large extent, a tank or air crew is 50 guys waving off 1-5, while they sit back at base and do hobbies between bouts of mechanic labor. They’re not literally at home, but we do fight with small mechanized armies while most soldiers watch on from the base.
It wasn’t over night but it did exactly what it intended and sped up a battle significantly as though you had multiples of troops compared to a musket firing line
Then miniaturized it becomes the SAW
16% of adult males in the Roman mid-republic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_army_of_the_mid-Republic...), call that 8% of adults of all genders.
Wikipedia says that there's about 1.34 million people in active duty in the US military, out of about 342 million people, 21.5% of which are under 18. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces)
I think that's 0.5%? Down from 8% in ancient Rome?
Even including Aative + reserves + paramilitaries, less than 2% of Iranian adults are in the military.
Probably none at all.
How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.
That means they're made from renewable resources, right?
The other pattern that’s a bit less explicit here is that these technologies try to win over the public by theorizing on their incredible peace time use. While many genuinely have great use in peacetime we should not allow that to blind ourselves to their wartime potential. Many of us have little power to direct the future but for those who care doing what you can do is always more than nothing and when done in concert with others does have an impact.
We've had no WW3 (so far) and no one here needs to worry about being drafted into a war. Gatling might have thought his gun would reduce the number of war fatalities, but but Oppenheimer thought he would end the world. Both were wrong.
Alternative take: Inventors are bad at predicting the downstream societal effects of their inventions.
Since this result is presumably inevitable at increasing frequency, it's more like nukes prevented another major world war and stole a form of peace from the future, temporarily. That peace debt might be repaid with the end of everything.
At least, it gives impunity to attack others with less fear of retaliation…
Lots of talk in the UK recently about conscription.
My question is, how low is that probability, exactly? Because the tradeoff looks very different if it’s one in a million per year, versus one in a hundred per year.
My assessment, looking at the history and the close calls, is that it’s more like one in a hundred.
here meaning the US or HN?
The Americans wanted to keep it all to themselves you know...
The unwritten implication is that this applies to AI, as well. I find it hard to disagree. I don't know what to do about it.
The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is already using AI to subvert democracy, spread misinformation, and develop weapons. "If we don't build these weapons, someone else will." If we can learn nothing else from history, we should learn that you can't turn back the clock.
But also, inevitability is not an argument for complicity. If you personally decide to work on bioweapons, I don't think you can shrug and say "eh, it was going to happen either way". As tech workers, we've really mastered the art of coming up with justifications for what essentially just boils down to "all my friends have gotten rich and now it's my turn".
I've met hundreds of sharp engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. None of them could look me straight in the eye and say "yeah, you know, what we're doing with ad tech is actually good". They just always had an explanation along the lines of "it's not that bad, and besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here".
> besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here".
- second 10 years of my career, started seriously thinking about ethics
- last 10 years of my career (including now) - would not work for Big Tech etc if they gave me 9-digit / year compensation package
I'm on the inverse moral ladder currently, specially as more and more services are privatized (public health here is on fast-track to be americanized).
I worked for Monsanto, I mean as evil of a company as you’d find (during that time, nothing compared to today’s Big Tech evil). I just honestly did not give a F at all.
I know I don't have all the answers, but I minored in philosophy in school. I studied ethics quite a lot and being ethical has always been very important to me
I never had 20 years of "let's burn down everything in my way as long as it pays well"
> The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is
oh please.
Most scientific development especially root-node stuff has been funded and kick-started by the military for centuries. You can't take funds from DARPA and then be shocked to see the air force using it. You can't work at ecole polytechnique and be shocked to see your work being used in libya.
Humans would have never gone to space [as quick and as at much scale as they did] if they didn't want spy satellites and ICBMs.
Shannon invented a whole new field while working with money earmarked for cryptography work in WW2.
Machine translation was first posed and funded by anyone for russian-english translation - 1949 Warren Weaver memo at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Do see my other comment for more examples.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364917
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45365211 [Context: the creator of waymo was the winner of that challenge]
And need I mention the internet itself...
As the first comment I linked mentions, even many medicines were developed only cos soldiers were dying in theater, not because normal people were dying at home. So it's not just limited to tech.
> the ruling class
No, we don't get to deflect blame like that. If we take money from DARPA/similar to invent something, we are part of the system and are responsible. Everyone involved in the space race in the 50s, Transit (sat nav) in the 60s knew it was to make ICBMs. The creator of waymo surely read that DARPA document I linked in my second comment. And need I mention that oppenheimer knew why nuclear energy was being harnessed :) You can't "oh the evil few tricking the innocent majority, what ever will they do" it away.
A logically defensible position might be that you agree that war is a timeless motivation and that you are fine with stuff being used for military purposes and continue to develop the technology with government money, OR not taking any money from the government. There are not that many others that aren't hypocritical.
Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools.
No one is arguing that modern technology is the sole or even principal cause of military deaths. The argument is simply that technology has greatly facilitated the ease and scale.
Imagine a world without nuclear weapons, automatic weapons, rockets, and explosives (other than gunpowder). There would still be wars, certainly, but they would be a lot less destructive.
The death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated at about 200,000.
Nuclear weapons have killed far fewer people then any other type in history, whereas the musket did some work.
And you know, a bunch of Romans with the pinnacle of technology - the sharp thing on a long stick - in the Battle of Carthage collectively had about 100,000 casualties and also demolished a city. And that was one of many battles in many wars.
The masses of man and ground into the masses of man in conflict, at scale, at every turn that we've had organized society. We live in a time where casualty scales are actually shockingly low in conflict.
Or, they've had no effect, and there hasn't been a "WW3" due to other factors. Or, they've made one more likely, it just hasn't happened yet.
Battle of Carthage was also 3 years and was a siege of a city, so you know… not a lot of places for the people inside to escape. Also took about 20-50k expertly trained Roman soldiers vs a few trained guys in a plane pressing a button.
And sibling comment is right. The application of industrialization to the death process in WW2 and similar application of the idea (eg Pol Pot and Stalin) also led to death on an unprecedented scale.
Nice of you to omit the 50 million other civilian casualties in WW2, plus around 20 million military casualties a 5 million prisoners. Nothing in the classical world comes close to that left of destruction.
None of them were women.
Is the parent statement supposed to be an argument that women are not capable, or even less likely, of providing means for, or inflicting massive destruction?
How would that follow from what is said here or in the article?
Certainly women can be destructive too. What would make it a sex issue?
I know this is called techbro crowd for a reason, but you know that plenty of women invented things and did scientific discoveries right? especially after they were unbanned from it
> Certainly women can be destructive too
Sure if you say so.
It's just that 0% of these destructive weapons and tech in the article was developed by women.
Maybe there's a pattern here
> North Americans think the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Much of the world believes that credit belongs to Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor working in Paris.
Much of the world? It's a minority viewpoint both among scholars and lay people. Some people in the insight porn "actually, the thing they won't tell you" genre of blogs and so on also do it. Certainly it's standard in China and India, so at the least you have to put Asia on that list as well. And Wright is the standard teaching in Australia, and the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Egypt and Botswana and I'd be surprised if other places in Africa are different.
In general, when I look in my rice at a restaurant and I see a cockroach, I assume there are more cockroaches in the restaurant. So, too, I assume there are other cockroaches in this article. I don't have the time to verify the other things, but this is wrong enough that I'd rather eat elsewhere.
The rice made by Flat Earthers is full of cockroaches. Though you do present a compelling proposition which I will entertain. For the right sum, I am willing to point out mistakes and withhold opinion - leaving that to the rest of you to have. I'll go with my rate on the usual experts platforms: for $1200/hour I will tell you when people are claiming the Earth is Flat and I will make no other judgment of their epistemics.
In the early days of Wikipedia I thought about writing a crawler that makes a table with inventor per country. It would have been an interesting experiment. Maybe it could be done with an archive even now.
Aside from just the potential for accidents, one has to consider the potential for irrational actors or those who choose to employ game theory more recklessly. And when I think of Metcalfe's law, I feel this sort of horror about the idea of proliferation and the loss of control in communication (which was of course vital in preventing Armageddon during the Cold War.)
I think ultimately, future security will come from defensive technology and I believe that's the most noble pursuit for engineers wishing to leave an indelible mark on humanity.
There is of course no defensive solution against those who wish to build Sundial [0] or Poseidon [1]. Humanity appears to be unequipped to carry the mantle of life.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon_(unmanned_underwater_...
Assume an "Evil" state worked on defensive technology that can foil any nuclear attacks against it. Now, this allows this "Evil" state to use it's own nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation. So in this example the innovation made in defensive technologies allowed for war and destruction
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5596034/
https://www.thebombnow.com/
Like, there is no other option - not having them means you will be turned into rubble or will have to pay a lot for not being tuned into rubble.
The most aggressive states have nuclear power. The countries they attacked dont.
If you have a better idea, we're all ears. Disarmament isn't an option, the destroyer is here so choose its form.
States seeking nuclear defence should join the nuclear umbrella of a greater power.
"Joining the nuclear umbrella of a greater power" implies MAD as a doctrine, unless there is only one nuclear power.
And that's just imperialism. Ask former Soviet states or Europe or Canada currently how things work out as a vassal of their liege lord.
I'm Canadian. Things are good here. Obtaining a bomb wouldn't make life materially better for anyone in Canada, nor would it defend us against the US. Not to mention anybody could drive a nuke into the middle of Manhattan and detonate it and you'd maybe never know who was responsible.
The importance of non-proliferation cannot be understated.
An alternative, as always, is to work towards our strengths as middle-powers. Remain steadfast in our pursuit of diplomatic and economic ties. Make the world too complex and intertwined to make invasions practical.
And of course, while Russia is the leader in this area, it's not the only country that could balkanize the US through "peaceful" means.