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

#761

Post by cmontella » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

betolink wrote: post #731

From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper: "I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save ten…

As a roboticist at the beginning of my career working on drones, I decided then and there that I would never make "bombs", a metaphor I used to mean anything that could be weaponized. I realized a lot of the work I was doing was funded by DARPA, and I was very cognizant about my research being used in this way. And like Dr. Kearns suggests, it's not entirely black and white. Would my path planning algorithm be used to more efficiently deliver scientific payloads to the atmosphere, or would it be used to route missiles to maximize casualties? Hard to really say, but I've avoided overtly military applications (even things like BigDog, designed to carry equipment for troops).

Sometimes the distinction is even more insidious. I did work on perpetual flight for drones, and Facebook had a perpetual flight project that had the goal of bringing internet access to remote locations in Africa. Sounds humanitarian, but I also didn't want to be responsible for subjecting poor Africans to what I consider Facebook's panopticon. Or maybe it would have been a net boon for the region? It's really hard to tell a priori, so the best I have managed for myself is just to try and stay in theory, where developments are further removed from direct consequence.

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

#762

Post by fineline » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

drak0n1c wrote: post #321

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?

Symmetrical war isn't a good thing either, it's far worse - death tolls are much higher for both sides and wars last longer. See WW1. Sure, question why and when war is necessary - but when a war needs to be fought I don't think making war more symmetrical would be appreciated by anyone and result in less "coming back to bite us in the ass".

WW1 lasted from 1914-1918. The "war on terror" began in 2001 and is still ongoing in 2018, and its capacity to bite us in the ass seems undiminished.

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

#763

Post by confounded » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:52 AM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #558

confounded wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Can you explain the mechanics of that happening? It's simple - unions can force you to join, take your money, and give it to political causes you don't support. And if you're in the minority, you don't have any say in it. See Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and several more recent cases (Friedrichs v. CTA, Janus v AFSCME). Picture this - if you were a minority opinion holder in a Google Union, and the majority…

Sure, but by definition most employees will be in the majority on most employee issues. Few things are perfect, many things are useful. If your stance is consistently counter to that of other Google employees, then you probably have bigger problems with working at Google than the existence of a union.

Being in a union doesn’t preclude you from shopping around; if working on drone assasinations is personally important, consumer search-engines/ad-tech might not be the most fertile ground.

But for the employees who do work on search-engines/ad-tech, having a strong voice (and a credible threat) regarding whether that work subsidizes an extra-judicial assasination programs (sometimes targeting their own countrymen) seems like a fair idea to me.

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

#764

Post by rebuilder » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

harimau777 wrote: post #556

rebuilder wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a single right that exists inherently. Where does such a right originate? For every right that most people hold evident, you'll find people who disagree. This is why rights are codified in laws and agreements.

My belief is that natural rights are defined by God and therefore exist regardless of whether people agree with them or not. Sort of the rights equivalent of divine command theory.

To me that's kind of like the sound a falling tree makes when no-one is there to hear it. As I see it, rights exist in the context of a social framework that defines the limits of acceptable behaviour. They can be seen as actually curtailing freedoms, since if we're defining rights, we're also implying there are things an entity does not have a right to. In any case, a right is not very meaningful to me if there is no system in place to ensure it is respected.

This is, of course, not an argument about moral rigts and wrongs, just a pragmatic one about how rights work.

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

#765

Post by rebuilder » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:56 AM UTC

dilippkumar wrote: post #499

rebuilder wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a single right that exists inherently. Where does such a right originate? For every right that most people hold evident, you'll find people who disagree. This is why rights are codified in laws and agreements.

> I can't think of a single right that exists inherently. Where does such a right originate? The US was built upon the idea that rights are inherent and not granted to citizens by a government. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And yet the rights of US citizens appear to stem from a fairly elaborate system of humans interpreting the constitution of the United States.

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

#766

Post by sabmalik » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:57 AM UTC

jryan49 wrote: post #4

Maybe if they were more accurate they would kill less people?

So by that definition, it would be great to sell this technology to the "enemy" as well because then they could kill fewer people.

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

#767

Post by TuringNYC » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

random4369 wrote: post #750

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…

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation. This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for yea…

Doesn't the recent (last 10yrs) VC splash do that? Hard to tell numbers since military spending has so many routes, but i'd love to see numbers on the two channels.

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

#768

Post by drtz » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:01 AM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #741

betolink wrote: post #731

From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper: "I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save ten…

> Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. Well, given how unimaginative a leap the national socialists took from the national fumigation program to the gas chambers, I doubt there was much more to it than "take bug poison room tech, use it on humans". There's no such thing as an "engineer" in the real world, and there's almost always somebody more unscrupulous, devout, or patriotic than…

> ... there's almost always somebody more unscrupulous, devout, or patriotic than you who knows or is willing to learn what it takes to finish the job ...

If you believe that doing something is wrong, the idea that someone more unscrupulous will do it if you do not must not be used as an excuse for doing that thing yourself. Giving in to this notion will prove yourself to be the one who is unscrupulous.

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

#769

Post by pfarnsworth » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:02 AM UTC

kiliantics wrote: post #716

pfarnsworth wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm making almost $400,000 total compensation and I'm happily working on things that I love. I don't need a union to tax me and force me to pay dues to do absolutely nothing that will benefit me, besides pay themselves well. On top of that, having a union start representing itself as a political force will definitely upset me. I may be against the militarization of Google, but what if I weren't? What if I supported i…

You are exactly the kind of scum that would support militarisation if it handed you a cheque with the right amount. I wouldn't be sad (or organise with my union against it) if a drone vaporised you.

You're exactly the kind of scum that caused Trump to be elected.

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

#770

Post by sabmalik » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

I keep seeing the argument "More accurate weapons would kill fewer people". By that logic, it would be perfectly okay for Google to sell this technology to the enemy states so those guys could kill fewer Americans. This sounds ridiculous to me but it's likely I am missing something.