Discuss “Conference discusses military contributions at the University”
The campus may not have missile silos under the Cut, but Carnegie Mellon may be more like a military base than commonly thought.
Concern is growing among Pittsburgh residents and Carnegie Mellon students about the extent of research funded at the University through military, defense, and security contracts. The funding is leading to new research in almost every department and acheiving advancements in robotics and software engineering.
On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Organizing Group and the Progressive Student Alliance held a Counter-Recruitment Conference at Carnegie Mellon. In a talk titled “The Military Industrial-Academic Complex and its Discontents,” David Meieran, a member of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group in the Thomas Merton Center,...
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Mar 26, 2008 at 08:23 PM
I wish I had read this article when it came out, because I would have written a letter to the editor. This article completely misrepresents my statements about dual-use.
Namely, I rejected then and still reject the idea that the existence of a non-military use makes these "dual-use projects" somehow moral. The use that these technologies are being developed for is the use that pleases the military, and that's where the moral responsibility comes into play. I believe I specifically cited the example of the knifemaker when I spoke at this conference -- that is, if you make a knife for hunting or for cooking and it gets used by a madman to stab a human instead, that's a tragedy. But when you consult with the madman about how to make a knife for the purpose of stabbing a person, and then give them that knife and they stab a person, you're complicit.
I did state that people should appropriate what's been developed, but that was in response to the straw man of "if you don't like all of the technology built by the military, you're a hypocrite if you use the internet." To elaborate, I think there are moral and ethical reasons to oppose military projects and the development of new technology for the military, but once that technology has been developed I believe that civil society and social movements should use what they can.
In 1969 I would have opposed DARPA's ARPANet research, but now that the Internet is here I think it would be foolish to think we could make it go away by ignoring it, or not using it.
I think that projects like Carnegie Mellon's "red team racing" are developing technology to advance the US military, and as someone who oppose the US military I therefore think that form of research is objectionable.