Phenomenal essay by Lucas Kunce, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, responding to news that 4,600 Google employees signed a petition urging the company to refuse to build weapons technology:
People frequently threw objects of all sizes at our vehicles in anger and protest. Aside from roadside bombs, the biggest threat at the time, particularly in crowded areas, was an armor-piercing hand-held grenade. It looked like a dark soda can with a handle protruding from the bottom. Or, from a distance and with only an instant to decide, it looked just like many of the other objects that were thrown at us.
One day in Falluja, at the site of a previous attack, an Iraqi man threw a dark oblong object at one of the vehicles in my sister team. The Marine in the turret, believing it was an armor-piercing grenade, shot the man in the chest. The object turned out to be a shoe.
[. . . . .]
When I think about A.I. and weapons development, I don’t imagine Skynet, the Terminator, or some other Hollywood dream of killer robots. I picture the Marines I know patrolling Falluja with a heads-up display like HoloLens, tied to sensors and to an A.I. system that can process data faster and more precisely than humanly possible — an interface that helps them identify an object as a shoe, or an approaching truck as too light to be laden with explosives.
Dear Tech Workers, U.S. Service Members Need Your Help