Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by confounded » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

pfarnsworth wrote: post #506

kiliantics wrote: post #484

And this is why tech workers need to unionise. This petition is a weak statement that probably will have no effect. Unless these workers could pose a real threat to Google by threatening a strike action, Google has no need to change anything. Furthermore, if the workers really stood by their moral convictions, they'd use their collective power to tackle the issue more directly than by just appealing to Google. Compan…

A reason why we SHOULDN'T unionize. It means that workers could potentially be politicized and forced to be a part of things that they don't believe in. Maybe right now we may agree with not militarizing our company, but what if the union starts supporting ideas that you're fundamentally against?

Can you explain the mechanics of that happening? Do you have any personal experience of unionized work?

Employees having more of a say about what they work on though collective bargaining, resulting in employees having less of a say on what they work on, seems unlikely to me.

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

#512

Post by drawnwren » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

almost_usual wrote: post #365

abalone wrote: post #195

I completely support the employees but it is criminal that this NYT article does not mention the extensive roots of Silicon Valley in Pentagon funding. SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. Just recently in the AI space: - Siri was spun out of a Pentagon project -- look up SRI International and CALO. Its purpose: a "soldier’s servant".[1] - Autonomous driving is a direct evolution of Pentago…

It starts well before Silicon Valley, Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center. http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html

I bet that number gets a lot bigger if you're willing to consider donations from the defense industry as well. I seem to remember Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's logos displayed on the donors wall in the Huang Engineering Building at Stanford.

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

#513

Post by titzer » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #245

shadofx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need for human operators to identify targets serves as a hard logistical limit to how many drone strikes can be delivered. Turning them into a machine removes that limit. Suppose you decrease error rate by 10% (optimistic), but increase volume by 20% (probably underestimated). You'll get an 8% increase in innocent deaths.

The hard logistical limit is the cost and the number of airframes.

No, it actually is the amount of eyeballs to analyze drone footage. They literally have so much footage feeding in that they can no longer review it with humans. This tech is designed to make the surveillance dragnet feeding into military decisions more automated and efficient.

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

#514

Post by dilippkumar » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #194

richmarr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you meant to imply that the 2nd amendment is a fundamental human right but if so I think that's a bit of a stretch. 'Fundamental rights' (under US law) I think is defensible as fundamental is treated as an alias for constitutional so guns are in. 'Fundamental human rights' to me implies broad and fundamental applicability, i.e. the UN declarations and covenants on human rights, which don't iterate gun…

Common law (root of UK and US law) does have the right to self defence. And this "other countries" mm a lot of this had constitutions where the citizens where given some rights by the king and not have universal rights.

I believe UK law is not as strong as US laws regarding right to self defense

[1].https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/pensioner-arrested-stabbing-susp...

[2]. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1361028/Martin-is-cl...

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

#515

Post by wang_li » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #291

alistairSH wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does encryption being classified as munitions also put it into second amendment territory? It doesn't much matter. Even if somebody made the case that "crypto is a form of 'Arms', subject to 2A protection," the 2A doesn't grant an unregulated right to own whatever "arms" one chooses. All the rights granted by the Constitution are subject to reasonable regulation. So, Congress could simply legislate a restriction on c…

It could be argued that the 2nd amendment was put in place to ensure a means of the citizenry to overthrow the government (as an absolute check on an unjust government). Unfortunately it's now just a vestige of an older time and the 2nd amendment only serves to protect the rights of gun hobbyists. The guns that a person are allowed to bear are nowhere near sufficient to take on the US military, and the modern arms su…

>The guns that a person are allowed to bear are nowhere near sufficient to take on the US military,

You're getting into spherical cow[1] territory if you think the US citizenry couldn't defeat the US military.

The US military will not be fighting the US citizenry in a hypothetical clean room, it'll be fighting in America. Who are you going to bomb, who are you going to strafe, when your opposition can quietly fade into the populace that provides your material?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

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

#516

Post by dotancohen » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

> 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 what do we have to show for it? Wikipedia is great and Youtube is entertaining, but the rest of the internet is horrible. I say that as a software developer.

Due to the wonderful internet our children now have attention spans far below the time a typical class lesson takes. The smartest brains on Earth are not building spaceships or curing disease, but rather implementing systems to get you to click on ads. Our bodies and habits are being tracked, our opinions manipulated, and our privacy is being handed of willingfully for a chat and photo-sharing platform.

Military tech _often_ has implications far beyond what the original scientists and engineers intended. Sometimes for the best. But as you allude AI to the internet, don't forget how much damage the internet is doing to us even as we enjoy it and profit from it.

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

#517

Post by Myrmornis » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

What makes you think the signatories of the google letter have forgotten that?

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

#518

Post by AndrewUnmuted » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #488

gaius wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other extreme is that some folks actually have a conscience Those people are not working in AdTech.

You want to have that conversation with them? Because some of them are right here. In fact some of them just got shot at yesterday. Is it hyperbole, or do you honestly feel that trying to connect users with products they might like is inherently unconscionable?

> trying to connect users with products they might like

It is delusional to suggest that this is the goal of ad-tech. The only people thinking about the users and the products are the creative teams that make the ads themselves.

Ad-tech, on the other hand, engages in dragnet data mining operations that serve the creative/design teams at ad agencies. The way the ad-tech industry has decided to go about things absolutely is inherently unconscionable. The unrestrained nonsense they've unleashed on the web over the past two decades have resulted in leaving nearly all internet users vulnerable to malicious code, privacy loss, and other horrible things.

> some of them just got shot at yesterday

Nice appeal to emotion there. But how do you know what the people at YouTube HQ did for a living? Do you have insider information? By all means, don't hold back.

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

#519

Post by samastur » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #374

Covzire wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gravity of the second amendment isn't arms per se, it's the right to retain enough personal power to repel a dictator from taking over the government and just as importantly, making it so that even if a dictator succeeds, the country will be ungovernable for them.

At first thought, it seems 100% absurd that an ad-hoc underpowered group of people with small arms counts for anything in the modern age. But history shows otherwise: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Empirically, every totalitarian state bans citizen firearms (Nazi Germany, USSR, Cuba, N. Korea). For "good" reason. While of course different, crypto has many of the same pros and cons as firearms, and it should be supported…

Every example of yours had plenty of external help without which I am doubtful they would have as much success.

No idea what your definition of totalitarian state is, but there certainly was not a complete ban on firearms neither in Nazi Germany nor in many of post WW2 socialist countries (e.g. hunters).

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

#520

Post by Myrmornis » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #488

gaius wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other extreme is that some folks actually have a conscience Those people are not working in AdTech.

You want to have that conversation with them? Because some of them are right here. In fact some of them just got shot at yesterday. Is it hyperbole, or do you honestly feel that trying to connect users with products they might like is inherently unconscionable?

Yes, it's inherently tasteless and makes the world a worse place. No-one needs or wants the "help" of advertisers providing suggestions about what products they might want to buy.