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I have a lot of deep ambivalence here. On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.

On the other hand, the "the ends justifies the means" justification of the near constant erosion of civil liberties and due process is really, really concerning. And I do not trust, at all, the Rand-lite tech bro sociopaths or anyone in the Trump administration to do the right thing.

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Our country is less safe because the people behind these technology companies have brought us to a place where NATO allies do not trust us, and we are implicated in war crimes facilitated by these technology companies.

Interesting claims in this article that direcly conflict with Palantir publicly calling for universal conscription. If AI and robotics are going to keep people off the front lines, why would we need the draft?

> On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.

To what extent does waging war contribute to increasing the safety of Americans? Every war the United States has started since WWII against another country has not been a defensive war, but an invasion by the U.S. itself. The United States has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. It has also become clear that even the world’s best military is no match for a large-scale psychological operation.


Be careful with dreams of superiority, those tend to make the other guy convinced you'll attack as soon as the gap gets wide enough and make them spend even more to "catch up".

A few rounds of this and eventually both sides have worked themselves into a frenzy to motivate buying excessive amounts of weapons, and then finally something trivial makes someone important "that's it, that was the thing we got the guns for" and a few billion dollars in weapons go up in smoke along with some hundreds of human lives (if everything goes well).


The question on is whether what’s happening right now is actually keeping Americans safe. I feel we are moving more and more towards accepting normalizing using military power by powerful nations. I am sure China is watching closely what’s going on and may feel encouraged to move on Taiwan. Once that happens, things will get really interesting.



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