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Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#81

Post by tclancy »

mankash666 wrote: post #51

Well then, Google employees should start with moving out of the US. Because, they seem to benefit and enjoy the safety and security provided to them by the Pentagon. Grow the fuck up - part of living in a democracy is tolerating the implementation of measures one disagrees with. Republicans might oppose birth control, but companies continue to support it in their health plans. Likewise, a state of the art offensive m…

>Grow the fuck up - part of living in a democracy is tolerating the implementation of measures one disagrees with

And tolerating the opinions of others.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#82

Post by evmar »

I heard an interesting view on this. Engineers build technologies like TensorFlow and demos of object recognition, which have obvious applications in drone combat (just stuff your model into the missile targeting system). Yet then when this tech is used for this purpose they're shocked, shocked -- and as long as they're not specifically building the missile targeting systems themselves they feel like their hands are clean?

I'm not even sure what the consequence of this argument is; pretty much anything you build can indirectly contribute to the military industrial complex, even something innocuous like dev infra. But I also don't think that weak "everything is equivalent" argument means you're suddenly absolved of responsibility. One thing I am pretty sure of is that it must feel awful to waste your short time on earth on building tools specifically for killing.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#83

Post by RoutinePlayer »

Qualifying rahulmehta95's comment below a bit. The government and military ought to be accountable to the citizenry, not the other way around. Having said that, DOD will just find other companies to continue this research, so it actually behooves Google to stays on and to actually contribute in making the technology more accurate.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#84

Post by tclancy »

airstrike wrote: post #44
tclancy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if they're more accurate the marginal cost of killing people in other parts of the world will go down even more so we'll be even less likely to reflect on whether the fact we can easily use robots to kill people on the other side of the world who have no way of responding symmetrically might come back to bite us in the ass?

Nobody cares how many dimes those drones cost. War isn’t fought using the cheapest means available, but the most effective. Have you seen the size of the U.S. military budget? This country will continue to meddle in international affairs and, on occasion, get involved in bloody battles. Such is life. War is an integral part of our civilization and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. You can’t just wish…

I feel like this would all be a little more interesting coming from a different username.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#85

Post by linuxftw »

> Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

That moment when you realize your mega-corp employer's "culture" is merely just another tool to get your to do their bidding.

How do the share holders feel? I'm sure they're betting that almost every employee will stay no matter how their technology is used.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#86

Post by s3r3nity »

tzakrajs wrote: post #6
sqdbps wrote: post #2

"As Google defends its contracts from internal dissent, its competitors have not been shy about publicizing their own work on defense projects. Amazon touts its image recognition work with the Department of Defense, and Microsoft has promoted the fact that its cloud technology won a contract to handle classified information for every branch of the military and defense agencies." Google should stop hiring activists an…

"Google won't take a defense contract and has shed defense projects in the past" was a common theme at Google. Recruiters and employees actively advertised this as a feature of Google's not being evil.

Didn't Google drop its "Don't be evil" motto a few years ago?

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#87

Post by AndrewKemendo »

otterley wrote: post #65
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

Oh boy. Being on the inside of Maven, I can't tell you how confused these Googlers are.

If you're not going to explain for the rest of us, what was the point of this comment?

To communicate that the people on the inside of Google who are making these protestations are grossly uninformed about the Google-Maven relationship.

Choose to believe me or not. My background is all out there for people to see.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#88

Post by mankash666 »

tclancy wrote: post #81
mankash666 wrote: post #51

Well then, Google employees should start with moving out of the US. Because, they seem to benefit and enjoy the safety and security provided to them by the Pentagon. Grow the fuck up - part of living in a democracy is tolerating the implementation of measures one disagrees with. Republicans might oppose birth control, but companies continue to support it in their health plans. Likewise, a state of the art offensive m…

>Grow the fuck up - part of living in a democracy is tolerating the implementation of measures one disagrees with And tolerating the opinions of others.

Are you mistaking a swear word for intolerance?

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#89

Post by friedman23 »

geofft wrote: post #52
criley2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ulti…

Without defending the morality of the Hitler/Stalin/Mao governments (or of the US government), it's very much worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR and technological research continues to flourish in China. A lot of discoveries in computer science had roughly simultaneous Soviet / US discovery (the Cook-Levin theorem is a good example). There are a huge number of technology companies in China…

haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#90

Post by jacquesm »

rahulmehta95 wrote: post #14

This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography (and especially as a large part of the latter subject area, invested heavily in fundamental, theoretical research). Not saying that I disagree with the employees' opinion, just that DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research sh…

Arguments from utility do not form a solid basis to argue about morality.
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