Hundreds of bright young technologists have landed in California this weekend for a two-day hackathon — a quintessential start-up contest in which teams of coders race to build software. But rather than a posh, snack-laden San Francisco office, they’ll work in a cavernous 6,000 square-foot warehouse in El Segundo, a refinery town southwest of Los Angeles.
And instead of building mobile apps or AI chatbots, competitors will hack together surveillance tools, electronic warfare systems, or drone countermeasures for the front lines in Ukraine — battlefield technology driving a funding frenzy among tech investors.
“[Build] hard tech for the defense of the West,” a hackathon judge wrote on X, encouraging applicants. “Defense, Drones. Gundo,” an organizer wrote, using the city’s nickname to promote the event. Until recently, tech workers have bristled at applying the fast and nimble start-up ethos to fashion deadly weapons. When Google signed a Pentagon contract to develop AI to target drone strikes, thousands petitioned its CEO in 2018 to cancel it.
Such protests spread during the Trump administration, with workers railing against plans to sell augmented-reality headsets to U.S. troops and facial recognition tools to immigration officials at the U.S.-Mexico border.
For the rest of this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/how-silicon-valley-learned-to-love-america-drones-and-glory/ar-BB1iqoYx