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

So while it's great these protestors want to protect us from AI, those in China, Russia, India, Iran, will endure a greater threat from AI and it behooves us to be at the forefront lest we fall behind.

In other words a moratorium can only work if all participants agree and participate. Sort of like the anti nuclear proliferation treaty.

The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications. In other words, doing your job is personal and, as long as you do it honestly and work hard, you should not be faulted for doing it as requested by your employer. That was always the standard. What then is the new element from which this sort of employee-driven demand arises? Is it morality? In other words, if I help develop A.I. that can be used for all sorts of things, one of which happens to be military-related, is the effort "evil" if the employer for whom I develop it agrees contractually to provide it to the government for a wartime/military use that can kill people? Do I really make a difference for the good if I convince my employer not to do this if all this means is that the company down the street gets the contract and the military gets the same results, albeit from a different vendor? If this is so, then I assume that you as an employee can make no practical difference in making the world better by insisting that your employer forego this particular form of contracting opportunity. If you succeed, your employer misses an opportunity but the evil you see being released into the world still gets released. It just means that you do not personally contribute to the development effort by which it is made possible.

Of course, it might theoretically be possible to persuade all persons working in the field of A.I. to ban further work that directly helps the military. But that would seem a practical impossibility. Many people in all countries believe that military technology of all kinds is proper, legal, and politically supportable for purposes of self-defense or for some other overriding purpose they deem proper. And certainly, there are bad people throughout the world who are eager to use any technology that comes their way for overtly evil purposes such as misuse of an atomic bomb. Unless and until human nature is fundamentally transformed, that will never change.

So, what is the answer in a country such as the United States where people and companies have the freedom to develop A.I. for any lawful purpose and where some inevitably will do so for a military purpose of which you disapprove?

You are then left only with a political solution: use political means to gain control of the government and the military and apply the force of law to ban the military use of which you disapprove.

So this is either a personal act of futility by the Google employees or it is a case by which they cannot separate the personal from the political and thereby insist that their employer sacrifice particular economic opportunities to ensure that your personal actions do not support a political outcome of which you disapprove.

Even then, does this mean that your employer should cease working on A.I. altogether? For, just as cash is fungible, so too is technology. Every improvement you make in A.I. might have an immediate use of x for your employer but, as humans collectively do this for all sorts of improvements, the results are there for the taking in the future for military applications of all kinds. In other words, you cannot put your improvement in a box or control it so as to limit its future uses (at least not in a free society). The computing technology of recent decades undoubtedly has bettered many aspects of life but it has also greatly magnified the lethality and utility of military applications so as to make the world far less safe. And this was inevitable unless a supervening agency were to have used forcible and totalitarian means to suppress such technological development from inception. Since no such supervening agency existed or even can exist in a free society, does this mean that all engineers and technical developers have blood on their hands because, ultimately, things they have done were used for applications of which they disapproved? Of course it does not. Nor would people today working on A.I. be held morally or legally responsible for ultimate downstream uses made of their work of which they would not morally approve today.

But this brings us back full circle. In the long run, you cannot stop such uses (or misuses) made from your technical development work. Nor can you be held responsible for them even though you contributed to them in some remote degree through your work efforts. Why then should it make a difference if your direct work efforts for a company like Google are applied to a military application of which you do not approve but which is legal, politically approved by the governing authorities, and will happen anyway regardless of whether Google is involved?

The puritans of old tried controlling the morality of others by shunning and shaming and doing it to an extreme degree. They failed miserably in their efforts because humanity is what it is and followed its own course without regard to external religious constraints.

This sort of effort by Google employees is obviously different in that it is not religiously driven but does it amount to anything more than a shunning-and-shaming method for trying to impose one's sense of morality on others by signaling that this way lies righteousness and everywhere else lies evil?

If this is what "don't be evil" now means, then Google will need lots of help going forward because every cause under the sun can be used in the same way to shun and shame. We then have management by a corporate board as may be swayed to and fro by any organized protest of the moment.

Whatever this is, and however it might be defensible in "sending a message" or whatever, it is a sure way to put a company at a competitive disadvantage while accomplishing nothing practically. It may further political goals but, if those are the goals, better just to try to advance them directly and not by attempting to shun and shame your employer (and your co-workers who may disagree with you) into submission. The personal need not be political. If it does become that way, a new form of puritanism will hold full sway to the detriment of all.

You might want to read some history. E.g. history of the development of nuclear weapons.

I believe GP was referring to a few years later, when the Berlin airlift broke the Soviet blockade of West Berlin - a clear attempt by the Soviet Union to expand their spehere of control to West Berlin and eventually West Germany as a whole.

Something I would add is that a lot of people don't understand how fundamental military R&D is to the collective progression of knowledge and technology. Take almost any common technology that we use today (computers, gps, rockets, airplanes, cell phones, radios, the internet, etc) and you will find it came from military R&D and use in war.

Since AI and all its related parts are the new technological hotness, to put it mildly, it only makes sense that Google, one of the companies on the forefront of this technology, would work with the government/military to do research and find ways to apply it with their scope.