A call to arms (literally) for tech bros
In “The Technological Republic,” Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that Silicon Valley should work more closely with the Pentagon
“The message of “
The Technological Republic” is as clear and bracing as reveille: Tech bros, who have spent the boom years of the Silicon Valley revolution perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers, better grow up. They need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values by developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us. That means getting over any aversion they have to working with the Pentagon. The atomic age is over; we’re in the software century. The emergence of artificial intelligence, and its fathomless array of potential military uses, only adds urgency to the necessity of what ought to be a national project.
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Google stopped work on the contract because, as one executive put it, “the backlash has been terrible.” “The Technological Republic” strenuously objects. About the company’s retreat, the authors write: “They charge themselves with constructing vast technical empires but decline to offer support to the state whose protections — not to mention educational institutions and capital markets — have provided the necessary conditions for their ascent. They would do well to understand that debt, even if it remains unpaid.”
There’s a whiff in this assessment of Col. Nathan Jessep, Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men.”
Indeed, “The Technological Republic” can get a bit old-man-yells-at-cloud when, regrettably, it blames only “the left” for the lack of a national consensus, something the authors say is essential to winning the AI weapons race. …”