I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun and accessible topics, cute concepts, and decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:
imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil
This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, it is showing off military technology with serious ethical implications.
There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones.
Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense that can rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats — or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries
This was months after he left Facebook. He left in March 2017 and opened Anduril in June 2017.
Point one against him was that he sold Oculus to Facebook. Point two is that he used his earnings from Oculus/Facebook to start a military hardware company with focus on autonomous weapons.
In other words, everyone who paid money to support Oculus ended up supporting this. This is what the profits of Oculus Rift bought: violent weaponry with more concern for profit than humanity. Great job, VR gamers!
Like seriously, though. If I buy a video game console, I shouldn’t have to be concerned the profits will be used to make weapons.
While I don’t want to support weapons, blaming people that bought the vr headset in the past for what he would do with the money after the sale is a very bad take. You can’t blame them for not knowing the future.
Also the argument itself doesn’t make much sense and can be strawmaned to “you pay taxes, therefore you are a complicit in the murders of your military, therefore you are a bad person”.