What is the general opinion of the EA community regarding the Defense industry? This is kind of generic question but basically, I would like to know:
In their current form these question are rather broad which makes them a bit hard to effectively/insightfully answer. That being said, my thinking is:
Depending on how broad your definition of “defense industry” is, most likely there are some positions in the field that make sense to pursue if someone already has relevant connections and/or experience, especially some things related to AI safety or biosafety/biosecurity (while my cursory impression is that things related to nuclear weapons or missile defense are less promising due to effort saturation (less neglectedness), inflexibility of long-standing systems, the fact that asymmetric improvements in such weapons/defenses could be destabilizing, etc.). However, aside from those areas nothing else immediately comes to mind, and overall I suspect that the defense industry is probably not the best career path for most people—even for someone interested in international security there are other options like focusing on security policy. (If your parents are arms magnates, I’d say it might be a good idea, but otherwise I’m fairly skeptical)
I can’t really provide a good answer to this, in part because I’m not even sure what issues to address/focus on, but also in part because I haven’t seen it as a impactful question to answer: we can’t just wish away a (bad?) industry by snapping our fingers, much like we can’t just wish away all nuclear weapons in the world. Should America have a defense industry? Absolutely. Does America spend too much on its defense industry? Most likely in some areas yes, but overall I don’t know. One plain justification is “without an American defense industry, other countries (e.g., China, Russia) will gain relative military advantage and bully/invade surrounding countries, prop up brutal dictators, etc. Additionally, subnational groups will still acquire weapons and commit similar acts of violence against populations…”
I should have narrowed down the question by excluding the AI and nuclear part which I fully agree that are non-neglected topics. However, the rest of the industry: Aerospace (transport, fighters, satellites...), armament, naval, electronic war suppliers, etc... are composed by powerful companies that are not usually "EA targets" in the literature, I mean, not identified as relevant career paths. This seems strange to me since this engineering sector (and even the military itself) seem to have great impact. Hence, it shou... (read more)