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.
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
Gatling died in 1903 and he never saw his gun used in a trench and the engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google they're watching it happen on X in real time..that's the difference nobody's talking about So Does seeing it change anything? I genuinely don't know.
The Gatling quote is hilarious. Did the inventor of the machine gun really think that each company of 100 men was going to be reduced to one guy with a Gatling gun, and 99 of them send him to the battlefield by himself, saying "good luck buddy, let us know how it works out?"
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?
That has little to do with technological advances, just the fact that the US is at an imperial peace; ie. it is under zero threat of invasion and is currently only engaged in small-scale imperial adventurism across the globe which does not require a large standing army. ~16% of adult Americans served in WW2, or ~33% of adult men.
> 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
I don't know if this is your point, but we're hearing the same stores with AI. Do these people really mean what they say or are they just lying to paint themselves as honorable
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.
Let's assume a nuclear exchange happens at some point during a war. There is a very high chance that this will cause an escalation leading to a nuclear apocalypse.
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.
I haven’t heard a peep about conscription, can you provide a source? There was some vague national service proposal for school leavers a couple of years ago, but that was it.
Nuclear weapons traded a high probability of a major war for a low probability of an apocalyptic war.
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.
tldr: many great scientific advancement were created by well-intentioned researchers who were subsequently shocked to find their work applied to military, often to the great detriment of mankind.
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.
I think both things can simultaneously be true. There is a certain inevitability to technological progress. Once you reach a critical mass of collective knowledge, the resulting "thing" will get developed. If not by you, then by someone else.
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".
It's funny that people justify themselves that way considering it's the literal phrase is discussed in every ethics 101 course... and not because a bunch of good people were saying it...
If the comments on this website are any indication I'd wager a great many people in tech haven't spent even a single minute of their lives seriously thinking about ethics, nevermind studying ethics in a classroom
That’s a weird tldr and not my takeaway. More like “scientists convinced their new ultra destructive weapon is sure to bring about peace this time around”. Spoiler: it does not. Arguably maybe nuclear weapons but even then I’d say the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict hasn’t really been tested yet and people are generally hesitant to do so, preferring instead illegal chemical and biological warfare.
Reminds me a quote from Gibson's Spook Country: "That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery."
This is such a tiresome take. Anything is a weapon if you work hard enough at it, but do you really think the main thing that will stop us killing each other is access or lack thereof to weapons?
Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools.
> 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 number of casualties from the American civil war was estimated at 700,000 soldiers from both sides.
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.
Interesting perspective. One could argue that nuclear weapons are among the less harmful things invented, since they killed fewer people than knives, clubs, spears, guns, cars, cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos, coal power plants, and probably a lot of other things. Plus they probably prevent a 3rd world war with killing on the same scale as WW1 and WW2, tens of millions each.
They prevent the third world war, until they don’t. Then they will bring mayhem and misery. And with the current lunatics in charge I am not really at ease just because nobody pushed the big red button yet.
You’re comparing a 4 year bloodbath to 10 minutes and being underimpressed? Also those weapons are several orders of magnitude less powerful than what they’re capable of today…
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.
That caused endless tragedy and trauma. Perhaps the 10 mins terror was the less worse outcome of the two, mode decisive, that ended the war quicker. Who can decide? Wars aren't statistic.
> The death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated at about 200,000.
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.
This business about Alberto Santos-Dumont does put most of the thing into question:
> 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.
Nah, before the Internet if you asked a random German on the street, who'd they think invented the airplane I'm pretty sure you'd had gotten Otto Lilienthal as an answer. I guess the reality is that before the world got hyper connected every country had its own set of inventors for almost everything. There are numerous examples but they are hard to find now.
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.
I'll happily grant that claim but today it is after the Internet was invented and therefore this "much of the world believes" claim from OP is nonsense since it uses the present tense.
Dozens of credible witnesses, including several who authored sworn affidavits, claim they saw Richard Pearse achieve powered flight before the Wright brothers. Pearse is a much better option if someone wants to claim the Wright brothers were not the first.
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
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
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?
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?
> 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
Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?
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.
here meaning the US or HN?
At least, it gives impunity to attack others with less fear of retaliation…
Lots of talk in the UK recently about conscription.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/croatia-r...
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.
How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.
That means they're made from renewable resources, right?
None of them were women.
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".
- 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
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.
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.
That caused endless tragedy and trauma. Perhaps the 10 mins terror was the less worse outcome of the two, mode decisive, that ended the war quicker. Who can decide? Wars aren't statistic.
Poor me having hard time trying to understand how he didn't notice that by himself.
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.
> 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.
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.