Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.
>[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally.
Is this a normative statement? In other words are you simply claiming "the government has men with guns and therefore can force people/companies do whatever they want", or are you claiming that "the government should be able to commandeer civilian resources for whatever it wants"?
Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.
Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.
Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.
(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)
Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.
Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.
You are conflating lack of true representation (what we have), with lack of support. It's very possible that the broad majority of the electorate would in fact get rid of conscription in the U.S. if they actually had a say in the matter? [1]
> I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.
Or more people are wising up to the reality that the real risk to their safety and security is from within not from without, its from people like you who would happily subjugate and violate your countrymen while telling them it's all for their own protection.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/28642/vast-majority-americans-o...
People largely tend not to believe in this kind of jingoistic bullshit nowadays.
> If Congress doesn’t want AI-powered killing machines, they’re the ones who have the right to make that call.
You have it backwards, and you know it. If Congress wants to invoke natsec concerns to force companies to sell to the federal government, then they have to explicitly say so, and any such legislation and exercise of execute power pursuant thereto would be heavily litigated.
> The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally. It’s totally incompatible with that to say companies should be allowed to veto the use of their technologies in war.
Yes, it's legal to have drafts, but that's not relevant, and also includes certain exceptions for conscientious objectors. It doesn't matter if its paradoxical or ironic that an individual could be pressed into military service whereas a private company doesn't have to sell stuff to the federal government.