Student Tells All: Internship at Anduril
With fall break on the horizon, it's safe to say that we've fully settled into the semester. Yet, I still get people bringing up my summer internship at Anduril. That was two whole months ago! Most often, the people who bring it up are just classmates who want to find out more about what a chill time a chill guy like me had at a chill engineering firm. Once in a while, though, someone seems to take issue with me having interned at Anduril, talking about how it's "unethical" and that I "kill" people or whatever. So, let's set the record straight.
First of all, what I did that summer was entirely ethical. I deployed an internal dashboard for coordinating distributed nodes to help ensure synergy inside Anduril's product ecosystem. In layman’s terms, I made sure the drones arrived on time. If you imagine that each drone is a pointer, then anyone who’s written a linked list in 15122: Principles of Imperative Computation has basically done the same thing I did. You might be asking, what do these drones do? That's an excellent question! The problem is, I don't actually know what the drone products my tool interacts with are specifically used for, but the applications of Anduril's unmanned aerial vehicles are practically endless: they could be used for removing unwanted elements from our operational spaces, payload delivery at supersonic timescales, and acute onset hospital demolition.
Secondly, not only was what I did ethical, but Anduril as a whole is a fully ethical company. I don't know when it happened, but "drones" has become such a buzzword. Any old drone company is being labeled as unethical! I don’t see anyone protesting drones used to film weddings from above! Let me be clear: Anduril does not kill people, people kill people. The United States military uses Anduril's drones and systems to defend this country, and they just happen to incur a handful of collateral noncombatant casualties along the way! Palmer Luckey's hands are clean, and so are mine.
Lastly, if you still think what I'm doing is wrong, I'm afraid to tell you that you have just fallen victim to the is-ought fallacy. Just because what I'm doing ought to be illegal, doesn't mean it really is. They teach you about this in 76101: Interpretation and Argument. But, of course, you wouldn’t know that.
Honestly, it's weird that people are antagonizing me over my attempt at career development. When students attend CMU, they do so with the expectation of getting an engineering job in SoCal. It is my right as a student of CIT to get a six-figure job right out the door. I'm done arguing whether or not my work is ethical: it obviously is, and my continued dwelling on the past isn't going to do me any favors. This is why I am proud to announce that next summer, I will be getting closer to the action by joining the Central Intelligence Agency as a destabilization strategy intern.