I won't say much more here but this second question caught my eye,
because the answer is the same as for your earlier question. Some
impactful work I am intensely proud of also became a thing that haunts
me (or at least challenged my idea of "doing good").
Think about dual-use. You may never really know quite how your
creations pan out. Not quite in the league of Mikhail Kalashnikov, but
it piqued my now intense interest in tech ethics.
EDIT: damnit seems like everybody here is in the same boat. So mine
was a gesture detection for medical robotics control that was
repurposed for look-and-lock air combat (fire and forget a2a missile.
An important caveat is I'm not even a "pacifist" and went in eye's
wide open with a defence firm. I just wish they'd told me more up
front that this was "generic tech" I was developing.
Got me curious how often firms will purposefully disguise a military project as an innocent challenge solving their problem they'll repurpose later on.
I once saw a very good talk on this exact subject, by someone who was in an incredibly similar situation as that commenter was. IIRC their bit of tech was a tool to triangulate a fairly specific location of a device connected to a wifi network (this was at least a decade ago).
As I remember it the point was basically: there are a lot of valid applications for this concept, but ultimately only one that a defense contractor is really going to care about. If that's who you're making it for they will use it to kill people eventually, even if that's not the plan right now. But also that probably is the plan right now, don't be naive.
Do you mean the missile would lock on to what the pilot is looking at when it's fired, or it would change target inflight if the pilot looks elsewhere?
I'm intrigued by how missiles work. I bought this [0] book to learn about them but I've forgotten math.
Think about dual-use. You may never really know quite how your creations pan out. Not quite in the league of Mikhail Kalashnikov, but it piqued my now intense interest in tech ethics.
EDIT: damnit seems like everybody here is in the same boat. So mine was a gesture detection for medical robotics control that was repurposed for look-and-lock air combat (fire and forget a2a missile. An important caveat is I'm not even a "pacifist" and went in eye's wide open with a defence firm. I just wish they'd told me more up front that this was "generic tech" I was developing.