You and I know this, but I imagine there are many Googlers who take it to heart, and the cognitive dissonance involved in their building war machines may be useful to our ends of reducing American-perpetrated violence.

How about we wait until Google actually starts building such weapons before we start accusing them of actually wanting to do so.

How about we wait until someone actually accuses Google of that before we accuse them of accusing Google of that.

What makes you think we'd ever be told?

It is flatly impossible to build such devices and prevent them from being weaponized.

But what is more evil - that your coworker works on encryption technology that is used to pilot drones, or that your coworker didn't work on that technology, and thus in order to foil a terrorist plot, ground missions were required that ended up costing the lives of a strict superset of people? Don't get me wrong - I don't condone the lengths to which our government uses war technology, but as an engineer, the probability distribution over {my technology will be evil by some metric, my technology will promote good in this world by that metric} is by no means certain.

The former is more evil. The potential disasters associated with the latter are a significant deterrent to doing it unless it really matters.

(Shrug) I don't care what you're working on, it can be used for evil. It is never rational to fixate on tools and objects. Worry more about actions.

It seems your "foil a terrorist plot" is some sort of preemptive policing. Why are we doing that, again? And who are these "terrorists"?

Puzzling that you would only be concerned with violence from one source.

It used to mean something... I wonder for how long