In today’s article, I hope to answer a question that is incredibly central to hardware and technology development in the United States and the world, which is, what is the military-industrial complex? How prevalent is it in society and technological development? How does it operate? Most importantly, who funds it? (The hint is in the subtitle.)

My qualifications in answering this question are that I’ve spent about two-thirds of my career inside of this complex, a fact I do not shy away from. I think often about the ethics of my work and where the companies I work for receive funding, and what exactly they do with the funding. And I have made decisions that from the outside might seem ridiculous, like moving from one defense contractor to another in part because the first one was asking for something a little too close to weapons. …

(In case you’re wondering if this publication is really about how many hardware puns can I make before running out of titles, the answer is yes.)

It has been quite a week, or month, or year. It feels like everyday we must stare difficult things in the face, things that we probably knew before but didn’t have to confront head-on quite so often. Combined with the lack of distraction from socializing or other pre-pandemic pursuits, life can feel heavy, dark, relentless.

2019, in contrast, was a year that I felt a bit listless, laid off from a job and wandering, literally and figuratively, while I thought about what to do next. I traveled to Toronto, New York, Denver, New Orleans, making the rounds among friends and family and having new adventures, too. When I ultimately accepted a position, even that felt a bit transitory. I had the sense that (though I enjoyed the work and loved my team) it wasn’t quite the right fit for the long-term. I started to wonder about the field that I chose; I explored other things, like toying with writing more formally and getting involved in the music industry (stories for a different blog post). I interviewed for positions that were not strictly engineering, such as consulting and even finance. I had a lot of conversations with friends who felt a bit “done” with engineering. I remember a conversation I had with a close friend while visiting them in California just before the pandemic. …

When I was in grade school, I distinctly remember not really knowing what different engineering professions looked like. By high school it became somewhat clearer, but honestly, not all that much. By sophomore year of college, I had to declare my major. I knew I liked robotics and what that meant academically, but even at that time, I didn’t really know what it meant to have a job in robotics.

I find that this is even more so the case for people whose parents had professions that are far removed from STEM. My mother has a small business doing tax and accounting, and she served a bunch of other small businesses in the Chinese community. Some people did similar work to my mom — insurance, real estate, professional services that people who didn’t always speak the best English could rely on. …

Over the years, as a child who built solar-powered boats and robot arms from science kits, then as a team captain of my high school FIRST Robotics competition, as an undergraduate majoring in a Mechanical Engineering with Robotics flex degree, as an MIT Media Lab research assistant on a big (seriously, big) robotic construction platform, and finally working on DARPA robotics research and robotic applications in industry….

I have received many, many questions about robots.

Hopefully, this litany has outlined why I am qualified to explain this topic, the last qualification being, I can also write and explain things pretty well for an engineer, if I do say so myself. …