You'd think that killing people would be covered by "Do no evil"
It's not directly killing people. That's like saying helping improve GPS satellites kills people because weapons systems use GPS and would benefit from increased accuracy.
Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
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Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#12Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
Corollary: plenty of skilled engineers with fewer moralistic constraints will jump at the chance to do interesting work for high pay. For a company as large and wealthy as Google, they can continue to raise offer salaries until they are adequately staffed.
There is a school of thought that recommends “moral” people doing “immoral” work because if those people left then other “immoral” people will take those jobs and more readily implement “immoral” features. So the “moral” engineers have an incentive to stay and act as a front line against “immoral” actions, or at least have an insider’s position for whistleblowing.
Military drones are here to stay, and whether or not the US builds them, other military powers certainly will.
Ultimately, I don’t think this changes anything.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#13Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
Corollary: plenty of skilled engineers with fewer moralistic constraints will jump at the chance to do interesting work for high pay. For a company as large and wealthy as Google, they can continue to raise offer salaries until they are adequately staffed. There is a school of thought that recommends “moral” people doing “immoral” work because if those people left then other “immoral” people will take those jobs and…
It at least makes a statement. It may not prevent the work from being done, but at least these people have washed their hands of it.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#14> runs contrary to Google's ethos -- the mantra "don't be evil" has long been at the heart of Google's principles Thinking that the military of your own country is "evil" seems a bit puerile to me. Watching too many movies and TV shows can have that effect.
> Thinking that the military of your own country is "evil" seems a bit puerile to me.
How true this is in a specific case depends on what that country’s military is doing at the time; categorically dismissing the idea that a nation's military can reasonably be seen as evil by a citizen seems more than a bit naive to me.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#15> runs contrary to Google's ethos -- the mantra "don't be evil" has long been at the heart of Google's principles Thinking that the military of your own country is "evil" seems a bit puerile to me. Watching too many movies and TV shows can have that effect.
Watching too many movies and too much TV has the converse effect - for the most part, visual media is full of nationalistic ra-ra nonsense.
The US military (As have all other militaries that have done anything of note) has done some ridiculously evil things. The drone strike program isn't the worst of them by any means, but it's not its brightest moment, either.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#16You'd think that killing people would be covered by "Do no evil"
In 2015 Alphabet changed their motto to "do the right thing". If you interpret "right" as "correct", then "doing the right thing" can mean 'correctly' bombing civilians.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#17I once worked for a large industrial group in Europe. The kind that has a bit of a piece of every little pie there is - military, transportation, etc. I was pretty happy working there .. until I got a demo from the 'defence' group.
They demonstrated the willingness to push the company's technology into heinous, heinous territory. The kind of thing where a drone would be able to follow a single person in a crowd, and target them for execution - unguided, of course.
I quit the next day. Those of us who make technology, need to be very sure we see that it is not used destructively against the human species. The responsibility is very, very high. And, the danger is extreme. These people were revelling in the fact that they could develop targeted assassination drones and sell them to any country in the world.
Heinous.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#18Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
Corollary: plenty of skilled engineers with fewer moralistic constraints will jump at the chance to do interesting work for high pay. For a company as large and wealthy as Google, they can continue to raise offer salaries until they are adequately staffed. There is a school of thought that recommends “moral” people doing “immoral” work because if those people left then other “immoral” people will take those jobs and…
It changes the answer you give to your kid's question: "Daddy/Mommy what do you do at work?"
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#19Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
Hard to tell if those people were planning on leaving anyway, and just wanted to make a splash. How many people quit each week in a company with 90,000 employees?
Only a small percent of engineers at google are AI experts. Sure, more people use it, but they probably just make a service call and get some magic results back.
Re: Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project
#20> Google recently sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference, for instance. Of course, there would be no conscientious objectors if it were a liberal event
People who disagree with you often disagree with each other as well. This doesn't come through in a media (of all political leanings) that tends toward a narrow set of well-funded viewpoints.