{"id":2612,"date":"2025-08-06T11:21:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T02:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/?p=2612"},"modified":"2025-08-17T10:25:34","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T01:25:34","slug":"silicon-valley-is-rooted-in-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/?p=2612","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley is rooted in Defense"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Silicon Valley&#8217;s militarization is in many ways a return to the region&#8217;s roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia&#8217;s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology &#8211; such as the internet &#8211; that became the basis for Silicon Valley&#8217;s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate student Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding form Darpa and other government agencies to create Goole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But in the late 1990s and 2000s, tech companies turned toward consumer technology such as e-commerce and social networks. They presented themselves as doing good and democratizing technology for the masses, drawing a largely liberal work force that was opposed to working with the defense establishment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2008, more than 4,000 Goole employees protested a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, which would have used the company&#8217;s A.I. to analyze drone surveillance footage. In a letter to executives, the employees said Goole &#8220;should not be in the business for war.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Google soon said it would not renew the Pentagon contract  and dropped out of a race for a $10 billion cloud computing contract called JEDI for the Department of Defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That year, Goole published guiding principles for future A.I. projects, forbidding A.I. for &#8220;weapons for other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.&#8221; Other companies followed with similar pledges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/06\/17\/multimedia\/BIZ-SV-PIVOT-DEFENSE-demis-hassabis-flzm\/BIZ-SV-PIVOT-DEFENSE-demis-hassabis-flzm-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">In 2018, Google published a guiding principle forbidding A.I. for \u201cweapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">There were outliers. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir a tech data analytics firm founded in 2003, was so enthusiastic for Silicon Valley to take a bigger role in defense that he sued the Army in 2016 to force it to consider Palantir&#8217;s software. Palantir claimed the Army was failing to look at commercial options for its needs.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Palantir won the suit. Other tech companies provided the Defense Department with software and cloud computing, among other services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2015, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter visited Silicon Valley to open the Defense Innovation Unit, a flagship military program to speed the adoption of advanced technology. But start-ups said the buraucratic process for signing deals with the Pentagon made the program untenable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>2024.08.04 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/04\/technology\/google-meta-openai-military-war.html\">New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Silicon Valley&#8217;s militarization is in many ways a return to the region&#8217;s roots. Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia&#8217;s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/?p=2612\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[257,256],"class_list":["post-2612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-military","tag-silicon-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2612"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}