This is basically a response to Joel’s response to my post from 28 Nov. but some free-association quickly turned it into a geopolitical rant of sorts so I’ve posted it separately. None of this is very new for me though maybe I haven’t articulated it this way before, and I don’t assume that I’m right about anything. Though of course I think I’m more right than wrong or I wouldn’t say it.

There’s the whole “if you pay taxes / buy x,y,z products etc. you’ve got blood on your hands” philosophy which like you say is true to a point, but for both selfish quality-of-life and strategic reasons (people like you and I probably can do more good from the inside) that’s not a philosophy I live by.

My feelings about working in military technology are very mixed.
Like you say most technologies and sciences can have some relevance to military operations.

I remember in junior high school physics one of the kinematics problems we did in class was about the trajectory of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
My teacher (who’s an astronomer and far from being a militarist) was like “the nuke was air-exploded, which is ‘better’ to the extent detonating a nuke in a certain way can be ‘better’ because it doesn’t fling up so much radioactive soil like it would if it penetrated the ground first”. My grandfather who narrowly avoided Korea when it ended trained as an artillery officer. I assume he learned kinematics and stuff derived therefrom.
If I do computer/electrical, it’s virtually guaranteed to have military applications whether I intentionally design something for that reason or not. Smaller and faster chips and improved programs can go into almost anything.

Some things like precision-guided munitions, non-lethal small arms, tazers, etc. might reduce the negative impacts of war. On the other end there’s stuff like VX which can only be used as an instrument of highly efficient death and destruction.

But even atomic weapons might have contributed to a reduction in the scale and overall deaths in war in the last 65 years. But is that really a property of weapons of mass destruction or a property of the mutually assured destruction doctrine? Couldn’t we adopt a MAD outlook toward conventional warfare also? Hopefully, but apparently less so than with nukes, and bio/chem weapons (which of course do get used sometimes like in the Iran-Iraq war, and we’ve only avoided using nukes by a narrow margin at least in ’63 and maybe in several false alarm incidents thereafter).

And again being selfish (and/or altruistic within my national/regional social group) I’d rather that “we” have something before or at the same time as our competitors. Because I don’t trust them not to use it if they’re convinced the other side can’t retaliate. Of course I don’t trust us not to use it either. So yeah it sucks. I imagine our counterparts in China, Russia, India etc. feel about the same way.

So anyway I wouldn’t want to work on something that seemed to have a high likelihood of being used unilaterally in the pursuit of oppression. But I might not be able to accurately judge whether it would be, and perhaps more importantly, “oppression” is subjective.

Is the U.S. currently an oppressor in Iraq and Afghanistan? I don’t think so exactly, in the sense that we’re not (to my knowledge) just trying to take all their resources for no compensation and use the locals for slave labor. But we’re there for our own interests, not because we love democracy so much we want everyone to experience its blessings.

It seems the goals in these wars are to create states that are military and trade partners with us and that don’t provide the sort of conditions that make people want to become guerrillas or terrorists. I don’t think those objectives necessarily mean the populace of these counties has to lose; it’s not a zero-sum game.
However a large part of making people not want to become fanatical resistance fighters consists in offering them a decent quality of life by abstaining from exploitation of the sort we currently subsidize in China, Saudi (where bin Laden’s from), and elsewhere, and allow at home though to a less dramatic extent.

Of course I don’t think there are any really easy solutions to this. Developed nations could decide to be a lot more altruistic tomorrow and we’d still have problems.

Hopefully positive technological developments (cheap non fossil-fuel electricity generation, water treatment, carbon sequestration, vaccines, recombinant crops that increase yields without intensive fertilizer and pesticide needs, etc.) and their equitable sharing throughout the world (e.g. exceptions and limitations on intellectual property rights for technologies that enable basic infrastructure needs rather than “luxuries” ) will help.

This all reminds me of Blue Submarine No. 6, Rage Against the Machine, and perhaps most importantly this:
[link] ; [link] [link]

The links are two complementary projects served by, and a blog by the founder of, the company my dad works for. Obviously I have a potential conflict of interest here. But I mention them because I know a decent bit about them and think they have potential, and because they’re nonprofit efforts. Though the sort of reform to the international intellectual property system they advocate would help the sponsoring company, it seems a far less exploitative and more socially just pursuit than a lot of businesses I know about. Unless I’m just too dumb and being totally deceived but obviously I doubt that.

The first is a freely accessible (registration required) index of life-sustaining and quality-of-life-improving technologies that are in the public domain in some or all nations. The second describes an intellectual property framework designed to ensure that “indigenous knowledge” (medicinal uses of plants, agriculture, materials science, etc.) is fairly compensated and controlled by those with whom it originated rather than whoever can get the locals to explain it to them and then file a patent on it (cf. the HIV antiretroviral drug prostratin). The last is a personal blog that deals with the above subjects and others related to the intersection of technology development, ethics, economics, etc.

Okay. Sorry for the long post.