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Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

theintercept.com

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Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#31
To any Google Employees reading this. Don't worry! There are SEVERAL ways you can reduce any cognitive dissonance you might be experiencing as you read more about the evils your company is committing :

+ rationalization of your own behavior : "I'm not doing this work...I'm working on projects that help people. And ads. But ads are pretty neutral compared to bombing people."

+ rationalization of others' behavior : "Bombing people isn't evil, since it's helping the military kill MORE _bad guys_ and LESS good guys. And gals. and children."

+ change your thoughts about yourself : "Maybe I'm not as good of a person as I thought I was..." [note : this one might be hardest to do!]

+ change your own behavior : Quit Google, or even better organize your fellow workers into some form of collective action (strike!) to remake the company into something that better fits your values and ethics.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#32
post #3

Is my moral compass off, or does war profiteering completely violate the whole "don't be evil" thing?

[deleted]

The rest of the world vehemently disagrees. Which should be more than enough to know it's not good.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#33
post #3

Is my moral compass off, or does war profiteering completely violate the whole "don't be evil" thing?

[deleted]

Your comment wobbles and stumbles into a large number of complicated and nuanced subject areas with the grace of a headless bird:

war vs. war profiteering

the notion of voting as a proxy for consent

anything is worth it

bad people in the world, and they aren't here. they're there.

kinetic energy? targets? condescendence?

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War will always be evil, it's usually just about whether it is a necessary evil.

I think that’s a very oversimplified opinion. Depending on the alternative, war can certainly be the moral decision. I don’t think you’d find many would who would describe The Unions war on slavery as Evil.

It wasn't a war on Slavery though, as Lincoln only took the extraordinary step of releasing the Emancipation Proclamation late in the war.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking besides the point. War != "War Profiteering". You can believe war is unavoidable and still find excess profiting from war morally repugnant

The company with the single best resources to execute on this mission is trying to help make sure the kinetic energy doesn't get off target. How is that evil, exactly?

It is evil when the target choice is immoral. Simple as that.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#36
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that depends on whether you view either profit or war as intrinsically evil.

Was IBM's providing of tech to the Nazis to kill Jewish people more effectively neutral or intrinsically evil? I try to avoid comparisons to the Nazis (even though many more people seem to be doing it these days with Trump in power), but isn't Google basically providing the government the technology to more effectively kill people in the Middle East , too? That's what it is at the end of the day, isn't it? History wi…

This isn’t a well reasoned position at all. You can’t summarily declare that all wars or actions taken by the military are morally equivalent to an ethnoreligios genocide.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

No, your moral compass is off. The US has toppled a large number of sovereign states that were not acting violently toward other nations, and installed dictators and monarchs. The US supports Saudi Arabia, one of the most authoritarian nations on earth, who backed an actual attack on US soil, and yet they invade nations with false claims of WMD and kill hundreds of thousands. To claim that the US is the police and no…

The US has a long tradition of tacitly supporting genocide, slaughter of civilians, collective punishment, torture and assassination or other extrajudicial murder of journalists and dissidents and labor leaders, mass surveillance, etc. etc. in places where “our dictator” happened to be in charge.

More directly, the US has directly toppled many democratically elected governments, undermined sovereign political processes via propaganda and support for anti-democratic political groups and targeted economic pressure, supported American and multinational corporations in their unethical and often criminal behavior around the world, given money and weapons and training to armed opponents of various democratic governments (who then used those for slaughtering civilians) ...

Not to mention being one of the world’s foremost producers and distributors of small arms (that end up in the hands of local gangsters, child soldiers, ...).

As a particularly tragic example, look to the case of Guatemala. The democratically elected president of Guatemala demanded that the United Fruit Company – who owned an incredibly high proportion of all arable land in the (starving) country – sell back some portion of the land which they were not currently using at the price it had been assessed to be worth for tax purposes. Unfortunately for Guatemala, the Dulles brothers (CIA director and Secretary of State), as well as various other members of the Eisenhower administration, had a direct business interest in United Fruit. The US toppled the government, installed a friendly dictator, and kicked off 2 generations of civil war in which a shockingly high proportion (5% or something?) of all Guatemalans were killed, including the mass-murder of many villages by thugs with machetes.

It is true that the presence of nuclear weapons has prevented for the past ~70 years the break-out of another “hot” war directly between nuclear-armed states. On the other hand, if someone slips up when nuclear weapons are involved, we’ll all be screwed.

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to make a point, it is entirely lost in the rambling.

Read The Dictator's Handbook. Then come back and tell me if I'm rambling. https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

[deleted]

Re: Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to make a point, it is entirely lost in the rambling.

Read The Dictator's Handbook. Then come back and tell me if I'm rambling. https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Thanks for the link. I'm sure we all might find more coherence in the barcode on the back than was present within the entirety of your wandering treatise.
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