Google can't pull out. That'd be like being ungrateful.
Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
791–800 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#792From 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…
Why would the engineers be more burdened with the ethics of their creation over the investors, founders, managements, lawyers, execs, CEOs and government policy makers who all contributed to, promoted and made happen its fabrication by engineers?
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#793From 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…
just a reminder: you are writing this over the internet - that one was funded by the pentagon too (darpanet)
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf Here they say that the design of the internet was very much determined by the military priorities of the project (Telcos had different priorities so they came up with OSI where the link layer is supposed to be reliable, as opposed to DARPANET/IP, where the link layer/IP routing is dumb and the endpoint is smart; this allowed link layer to be pluggable and IP routers to be cheap)
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#794"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…
Pragmatist must mean greed over morality. I don't see how you can turn a blind eye to the ethically dubious actions of the US Military.
It's unproductive to cast aside as malevolent the opinions of reasonable people who disagree with you.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. As consequentialist first move, let me suggest that a first order principle for the US military is "Sweat now or bleed later". Better to work your ass off to develop superior tactics, discipline, and technology now than die later. No one hates war more than soldiers.
If soldiers hate war so much why do they join up?
The best way out of a terrible life for many poor people.
If you didn't do great in school and don't have rich parents to pay for college, the military in the US will look great with its education perks and chance to "see the world".
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#796From 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…
just a reminder: you are writing this over the internet - that one was funded by the pentagon too (darpanet) http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf Here they say that the design of the internet was very much determined by the military priorities of the project (Telcos had different priorities so they came up with OSI where the link layer is supposed to be reliable, as opposed to DARPANET/IP, whe…
There is a huge difference between creating a network protocol and designing autonomous killer drones.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. As consequentialist first move, let me suggest that a first order principle for the US military is "Sweat now or bleed later". Better to work your ass off to develop superior tactics, discipline, and technology now than die later. No one hates war more than soldiers.
If soldiers hate war so much why do they join up?
They believe in their country, what it represents, and are willing to sacrifice their life for it. In the US, it's the Constitution, to which they make an oath to upon joining.
Or they're broke, have their back against the wall, and can get good training and education through the military.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#798I 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…
>This is a national budget problem
Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley.
It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pragmatist must mean greed over morality. I don't see how you can turn a blind eye to the ethically dubious actions of the US Military.
It's unproductive to cast aside as malevolent the opinions of reasonable people who disagree with you.
It's unproductive to sneeringly cast aside the concerns of Google Employees as starry eyed activism but here we are.
Its uncontroversial to state that the US military has committed war crimes and engaged in military campaigns across the world in spite of international law. Google is working the military to expand the capabilities to carry out these attacks and to work on these projects is to either agree ideologically that the U.S. military should have these capabilities or to turn a blind eye to its uses for a cushy salary and a chance to play with state of the art toys for your day job. Between the two, the later is far more palatable to me so I feel I'm being quite generous by labeling it as greed.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#800I 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…
Libertarianism is an ideology that relies on mental gymnastics.
Every ideology oversimplifies the world. Economics are complex and humans can't reason about emergent behavior from societies of other humans very accurately.
However, if you think an ideology is has logical errors and requires mental gymnastics, you likely don't understand it well enough to intelligently criticize it.