I'm glad this attitude didn't exist in the 1940s. Otherwise we all might be speaking German.
Clearly. This is probably the reason half of us are speaking Korean and the other half is speaking Vietnamese.
Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it bad that I have this cognitive dissonance of being fine with hating specific insurance companies but not the concept of insurance more generally?
Insurance as a concept is great. “Pay a little every month so that you won’t have to pay a lot when something unexpected happens”. The problem is when they ignore that and expect you to pay a lot when the unexpected does happen, as they look for any loophole available through which to get out of their obligation.
There's that, and also the question of whether private insurance is the right model for healthcare.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#83Off-topic: 2008 ... everyone was using G product (in my env at least). Imagine saying back then "10 years from now Google will provide military with artificial intelligence".
This was an obvious outcome to me. I'm a Googler, previously worked for a national lab (non confidential, but the military was free to use our free software products), and I always expected that one of the end games of a US company with advanced ML would be selling it to the US government.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably they believe this should not be done at all.
Getting back to my original post, it doesn't matter if they believe it shouldn't be done at all. Machine learning will be utilized for defense/war/security, it's only a matter of when/by whom. Would these Alphabet employees prefer the machine learning contracts to go to Lockheed Martin/Amazon where ethics are not a priority, or would they have rather kept the development in house?
There are limits to the idea of trying to get inside and change the organization from within. To take the idea to a ridiculous extreme, you wouldn't tell someone that they should join ISIS and change it from within because Islamic terrorism is going to happen with or without them.
I'd also question your bedrock assumption, that Google has much higher ethical standards than Raytheon. Why should we think this beyond "don't be evil" branding?
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#85“about a dozen employees”. The 'maven' story was published in early march, it’s an 80k employee company, that is not even a blip within their natural turnover rate.
> several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions It's a significant amount of people if all of these people are close to or part of the project being discussed. I wouldn't expect Mike from the Angular team to resign over a project he knows little about so I don't think the employee count is re…
I agree that the nature of their employment isn't being made clear and I'd argue that this was done to mislead, if the author had knowledge that people close to the project resigned they would have published it in the headline.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without insurance, much of all business and life cannot be risk managed and is not viable in any way. Pretty silly POV
I don't disagree with you- insurance does perform an essential function in risk management. However, this doesn't mean that individual actors in this space have always performed in the "best" way. Not to mention the nature of insurance in general is adversarial against the customer- if you pay out on too many policies you're underwater.
>Not to mention the nature of insurance in general is adversarial against the customer- if you pay out on too many policies you're underwater.
Like any business, “dollars in” has to be greater than “dollars out” in the long term. This seems to be a controversial train of thought when it comes to insurance for some reason.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#87Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting back to my original post, it doesn't matter if they believe it shouldn't be done at all. Machine learning will be utilized for defense/war/security, it's only a matter of when/by whom. Would these Alphabet employees prefer the machine learning contracts to go to Lockheed Martin/Amazon where ethics are not a priority, or would they have rather kept the development in house?
There are limits to the idea of trying to get inside and change the organization from within. To take the idea to a ridiculous extreme, you wouldn't tell someone that they should join ISIS and change it from within because Islamic terrorism is going to happen with or without them. I'd also question your bedrock assumption, that Google has much higher ethical standards than Raytheon. Why should we think this beyond "d…
Your ridiculous extreme is non-nonsensical as it is a straw man to intimate any equivalency between ISIS and Alphabet's machine learning division. As well, the Department of Defense often has open bidding for contracts for defense technologies. If Alphabet is competing for a contract, you can almost certainly be guaranteed that another corporation is bidding for the same contract.
Individual employees have a say in how products are developed, it is not like employees must adhere to a rigid medieval orthodoxy or otherwise suffer death/decapitation/torture/rape.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions It's a significant amount of people if all of these people are close to or part of the project being discussed. I wouldn't expect Mike from the Angular team to resign over a project he knows little about so I don't think the employee count is re…
I agree that the nature of their employment isn't being made clear and I'd argue that this was done to mislead, if the author had knowledge that people close to the project resigned they would have published it in the headline.
The reason they don't include the roles of the people who resigned is likely because those people are anonymous sources, and revealing their position risks revealing their identities.
Re: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it embarrassing to work for an insurance? Most insurances exist for a reason and are vital for most people/businesses. It's often said that insurances can be boring to work for but never heard that the sector has a terrible reputation.
> Most insurances exist for a reason and are vital for most people/businesses. It's often said that insurances can be boring to work for but never heard that the sector has a terrible reputation. C'mon, you've never heard of any part of the insurance sector having a terrible reputation? > According to a recent Harris Poll, health and life insurance companies are among the least-trusted companies in the US. Just 7% of…
That's life insurance and maybe health. That's still only part of the whole sector. It's quite easy to explain why property insurance is useful.
Social media at 6% is interesting though, does that include tech companies like Facebook?