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Luis Villa
@lu.is

This is the one I can’t get over when people tell me that Palantir is unusually evil. It is very bad, and it is very big, but California companies building computers and software to kill innocents is older than most of us on this website and we’re all pretty damn old.

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

100% of early computer research was military, and not dual-use, either. It was specifically for war.

Luis Villa
@lu.is

a lot more tech people should read, as a starter, What the Dormouse Said, in which computers get bombed because they are associated with the defense industry.

Luis Villa
@lu.is

It was bad then, and is bad now, but if you’re going around saying “oh before AI tech was good and now it is bad” or anything along those lines... that’s just some completely ahistorical nonsense.

1 repost16 likes

Mar Hicks
@histoftech.bsky.social

Yep, when I titled the first chapter in my book “War Machines” I wasn’t being hyperbolic. And even tech workers themselves have long recognized this—for example, take this 1971 pamphlet from the group Computer People for Peace:

Luis Villa
@lu.is

Once you’ve finished the pop history version of Dormouse, graduate to @histoftech.bsky.social whose book Programmed Inequality is both fascinating and infuriating. bsky.app/profile/hist...

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social

Yep, when I titled the first chapter in my book “War Machines” I wasn’t being hyperbolic. And even tech workers themselves have long recognized this—for example, take this 1971 pamphlet from the group Computer People for Peace: