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Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

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Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#171

Post by ceejayoz »

xp84 wrote: post #156
impulser_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't at all. Private corporations shouldn't be telling the government what it can and can't do. That's the job of the people. You want private corporation overriding your vote?

Agree. It seems on the surface convenient right now when people think the company (or rank and file employees?) are on their political “team” but they’d get less comfortable when oil companies or other “bad” companies dictate terms to the government. “We’ll provide fuel for the military if and only if you overturn the leader of $COUNTRY” (Yes, I recognize that past military entanglements do read as favors for Big Oil…

> “We’ll provide fuel for the military if and only if you overturn the leader of $COUNTRY”

A mechanism to address this exists, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#172

Post by boringg »

anematode wrote: post #28

Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.

Why is it that this line items comes up EVERY TIME an article comes out in a knee jerk reaction - its so incredibly absolute:

"Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised."

It feels like a constant campaign and the posters seem so incredibly self righteous and unthoughtful.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#173

Post by robrenaud »

anematode wrote: post #28

Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.

Is every American tax payer morally compromised?

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#174

Post by genxy »

declan_roberts wrote: post #43
anematode wrote: post #28

Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.

Thankfully Russia, China, etc have the same qualms as we do in the United States and will refused to send their brightest engineers to work on weapons so they don't become "morally compromised"!!!

People in those countries do have qualms, they are people after all and they choose to work in other fields.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#175

Post by senordevnyc »

foltik wrote: post #147
site-packages1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made another comment above. People contain multitudes. Different contexts, different choices, not everyone is in a box defined by the viewer's world view. You can't really know what's going on with someone else, in their heads, in their context, so give them some grace. Instead, this person's "friends" are "hypocrites" who were "lured" into their choices. It's very condescending. I am suggesting the poster re-exami…

You're missing the point. They're just lamenting the contrast between what their friends say (fuck tech, no kings) and what they spend their workweek in service of. It's not complicated: if these friends would take a non-society-destroying job at equal pay (who wouldn't?) then their values aren't driving the decision, money is. Fine, that's a choice adults get to make. But then own it and actually justify it on its m…

Not everyone sees AI as "society-destroying".

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#176

Post by dismalaf »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Who defines "lawful" if Google and the Pentagon disagree? > The classified deal apparently doesn’t allow Google to veto how the government will use its AI models. Seems concerning?

By definition "the law" is the set of laws that the government passes. So it's a roundabout way of saying the government can pretty much do what they want.

Also, this is probably the only acceptable arrangement when it comes to industry-government contracts. The government will always have more information than civilians.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#177

Post by mc32 »

bko wrote: post #165
tombert wrote: post #5

When my sister and I would play monopoly as kids, we had lost the manual so whenever we didn’t like the outcome of whatever happened, we would make up rules about what was right. Technically then, it was very easy stay compliant while still being able to do well because we could rewrite the rules. Also, since I was older I feel like I was able to get away with those redefinitions a lot more often…

I'd prefer our elected officials own the manual, accepting the fact that [person I don't like] could be in power and they can re-write the rules, then a private billion dollar corporation. Especially when it comes to defense.

Ha! If the Congress did diddly squat about eavesdropping on them by organizations that aren’t supposed to spy on citizens back in the Obama days (we also spied on allies’s governments but that’s kinda what all of them do) there is no hope in them reining things back at all… for mere hoi polloi.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#178

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

conartist6 wrote: post #134
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably give this a second look: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If speaking vigorously in defense of morality is wrong, I guess that's something I'll just have to live with.

You'll have to live with it somewhere else. Neither HN's administrators nor readership will tolerate that kind of behavior. If you intend to participate on Hacker News over the long term, please take up the suggestion by the other poster to review the guidelines and adhere to them.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#179

Post by tombert »

GeekyBear wrote: post #167
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big reason it's "obvious" when tech megacorps do it is because big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running and legitimized like medical, civil engineering, energy, agriculture, chemical, etc, do. If this were 3M making nasty stuff for Northrop to put in bombs and drop on brown people or Exxon scheming up something bad in Alaska or bulldozing a national…

> big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running The career officials in the Obama FTC started proceedings for an antitrust lawsuit against Google over a decade ago. The political appointees (of both parties) shut it down. It seems to me that regulatory capture has been working for Google for some time now.

I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.

Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again.

There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through.

Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.

Re: Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI

#180

Post by gwbas1c »

sailfast wrote: post #31

This all works if you assume that any action the government takes must be “lawful”. The assumption here is that the Pentagon is obeying the law and any unlawful use would go through normal reporting / violation channels - same as any illegal order or violation or whistleblower report. The Pentagon does not want Google or anyone else deciding what they can and cannot use their AI for. They’re saying we won’t break the…

I look at this as a case of "pick your battles."

In war, the civilians can't audit every move of the military. (It's impractical, both for reacting timely, and for keeping secrets from the enemy.)

If the military doesn't work with Google, they will work with someone else who might not put the same amount of pressure on the military about the practical limits on AI. Or, even worse, our enemy might use a significantly better AI that we do.

My hope is that "war" shifts to AI vs AI, machine vs machine. Calling people who work on AI for wartime purposes immoral is fundamentally immoral when AI in war replaces the need for human casulties.

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