One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
I think it's pretty cool. And I think that kind of work needs people who think it's cool, or else it'll only attract evil people.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
That is absolutely not true. There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance. That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary. As long as humans have nuclear weapons the probability of practically annihilating our species and leaving any survivors living in the stone age again remains higher than zero.
Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces. We can deal with pretty much anything else.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. One of my sneaky reasons for joining the military establishment would be to help make those sorts of changes from within. Or at least that's what I'd like to tell myself while designing devastating weapons.
I really do feel that reasonable people need to join such organizations, though, otherwise only unreasonable people will be in them. I recently found (to my dismay) that Von Neumann argued vehemently in favor of bombing the Russians before their nuclear program could be built, and all I could think was "This isn't the type of scientist that should have a lot of influence."
I completely believe humanity can and will deal with climate change. It'll take a few wars, an anti-capitalist revolution in a first world country or two, and a massive shift towards equality and justice for poorer people, but it will happen.
Defense contracts aren't all weapons - in fact, I'd wager most aren't (by quantity, if not by dollar amount). Due to how the US allocates its budget, a large portion of its publicly funded research goes through DoD contracts. The startup I used to work at had a contract for making prototypes of multi-material 3D printers for creating medical training models (ie artificial cadavers).
Those things are also insurance against being killed. Are you supposed to just hope the bad people don't pick you? No, you invest in offense so you can have a better defense.
I know man, I know. I'm not so naive as to say that if a country was enlightened enough to disband their military, then other countries would leave them be. They would be a seen as a ripe fruit, and they would be picked.
I just wish it wasn't like this. I wish we didn't have people engaged in the business of enabling industrial scale murder. I wish it wasn't profitable. I wish the citizenry would see through the propaganda and hold their leaders to account. I wish it wasn't the nation's poorest who were sent to die for the benefit of the nation's richest.
The war machine is a rotten, gruesome system, and I acknowledge it's not going away any time soon. But the least we can do is agree not to actively contribute towards it.
Understand, there's a lot of distance between 'we don't need a military', 'we need a military to defend American soil', and what we have today.
I am strongly in the 'we only need to defend American soil' camp. I'm not sure how much that costs, but considering we're a nuclear power, we have two relatively friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of ocean between us and our nearest peer enemies, it wouldn't surprise me if we could get away with spending a miniscule fraction of the 700B we do today.
Modern warfare is much less likely to involve the nation’s poorest dying for the sake of the richest. There’s a recent article about how the average American soldier is now better educated than the average civilian. The specialist weapons we’re talking about shift the balance towards capital and away from labour in the killing production function.
Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure. The age of mass armies was also the age of democratisation. If war is waged by defence firms and brilliant technocrats, then maybe defence firms and brilliant technocrats will run the country.
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.