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.
I hope for your personal consistency that you then are also okay with a woman in a hijab creating educational videos for youtube.
As far as the crazy atheists go, there’s a type of “atheists” that treat atheism as a belief system, but have neither tried nor have the intellectual capacity to come up with their own, original understanding of why there is no god. However, there is a fundamental difference: Every crazy atheist is on their own, there’s no “atheist institution” that backs their craziness. For cults (and the only practical distinction between a religion and a cult is just the amount of followers), that’s not the case - you have a power hierarchy, sometimes more, sometimes less flat, that advocates their belief system.
It is therefore okay for a teacher - when asked(!) about it - to tell children about their personal beliefs. It is absolutely not okay for a teacher to tell unasked, or to tell children about the belief system / cult they are a part of.
Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying. You are correct, I am completely okay with that.
I disagree. It’s perfectly fine for someone to give a sort of disclaimer as to what they believe in and other things like that. The issue is when they start preaching what they believe in without warning while supposedly teaching a different subject.