In 2020, the DPA was used to order car companies to manufacture ventilators, a new product. Not for the military, but is that really the relevant detail? The car companies wanted to make ventilators anyhow, so it probably had no effect, but, in principle, this is the most extreme version of DPA.
When using the DPA a key question is how likely it is for a company to sue against it and whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the company. While the current Supreme Court is generally pro-Trump it’s generally pro-corporate rights.
If you stand in front of the Supreme Court and say, it doesn’t go against my red lines that my software being used to hack a powerplant and shut it down and let people starve as a result but I’m not okay with it being used to make direct decisions to kill people please allow me the right to make my software not make direct autonomous decisions to kill people, that argument is a lot weaker than the argument you are making when you are making a software that’s supposed to have internal guardrails against killing people and the government shouldn’t be able to force you to remove those guardrails.
The position of “our guardrails don’t prevent the military from doing anything it actually wants to do, but we think it’s important as a matter of principle to have guardrails against things the military does not want to do” is just a very odd one to defend in front of a court.
If you don’t want to produce weapons that kill people you can say that you can argue employees who have religious convictions against producing weapons that kill people. If you only want to produce weapons that kill people with explicit human approval for the people killed it is much harder to make those arguments.
How would this policy prevent the usage of the DPA?
I don’t think we have seen uses of the DPA to turn companies that weren’t military contractors into military contractors in recent decades.
In 2020, the DPA was used to order car companies to manufacture ventilators, a new product. Not for the military, but is that really the relevant detail? The car companies wanted to make ventilators anyhow, so it probably had no effect, but, in principle, this is the most extreme version of DPA.
When using the DPA a key question is how likely it is for a company to sue against it and whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the company. While the current Supreme Court is generally pro-Trump it’s generally pro-corporate rights.
If you stand in front of the Supreme Court and say, it doesn’t go against my red lines that my software being used to hack a powerplant and shut it down and let people starve as a result but I’m not okay with it being used to make direct decisions to kill people please allow me the right to make my software not make direct autonomous decisions to kill people, that argument is a lot weaker than the argument you are making when you are making a software that’s supposed to have internal guardrails against killing people and the government shouldn’t be able to force you to remove those guardrails.
The position of “our guardrails don’t prevent the military from doing anything it actually wants to do, but we think it’s important as a matter of principle to have guardrails against things the military does not want to do” is just a very odd one to defend in front of a court.
If you don’t want to produce weapons that kill people you can say that you can argue employees who have religious convictions against producing weapons that kill people. If you only want to produce weapons that kill people with explicit human approval for the people killed it is much harder to make those arguments.