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A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

arstechnica.com

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Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#51

Post by some_account »

pmoriarty wrote: post #18
manfredo wrote: post #12

> "If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed," the letter reads, "we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,” My understanding from the reading I've done is that this project is…

Just because Google or the military say the tech won't be used to target and kill people doesn't mean it's true. The letter that I read[1] states: "Recently, Googlers voiced concerns about Maven internally. Diane Greene responded, assuring them that the technology will not “operate or fly drones” and “will not be used to launch weapons.” While this eliminates a narrow set of direct applications, the technology is bei…

It's not obvious to everyone that Google has close ties to intelligence agencies already?

I don't see why their promises mean something, and I don't see why some people never learn that there are no good corporations. They all exist to make money. Except the non profits. And there is tons of money in war, as you know.

Building tech that kills people is therefore playing dumb or not caring.

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#52

Post by philwelch »

posix_me_less wrote: post #50
philwelch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved. We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. And the adversaries we have faced, from Hitler to Daesh, would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction as we would. The reason asymmetric warfare works is that the…

> "Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved." Nonsense. Violence is still limited, in time and extent, by economic and political forces, and by the fact that soldiers still have some respect for life of other people, because they are in the field, risking their own life and seeing the injustices of war. But put them in control o…

> Only if you already decided on the warfare part. An alternative is to stop killing unknown people abroad and in so helping create new terrorists, and instead doing something about cooperation between the governments to stop the violence.

So your solution is to negotiate with people like Hitler and Bin Laden and to appease groups like Daesh. Ask the millions murdered in the Holocaust how that worked out for them, how Western non-violence was the solution.

While you're at it, ask the millions of South Koreans living in peace and prosperity how they feel about Western intervention to protect and even rescue them and their ancestors from the Kim regime. Ask the people of Bosnia and Kosovo whether we should have left them to the whims of Milosevic, just as we left the Tutsis to their fate.

We're not the ones who have decided on the warfare part. We're not the one who expand their reach by slaughtering boys and men while kidnapping and raping women and girls wherever they go. We're not the ones who commit ethnic cleansing and hack babies apart with machetes. That's already been decided. The only decision we have is between leaving these victims to their fate and living up to the words, "never again".

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#53

Post by robin_reala »

neolefty wrote: post #35
robin_reala wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately they’re also very effective at killing foreign nationals with nothing to do with any conflict. And if you reply with the weasel words “collateral damage” then, with all due respect, fuck you. (Sorry dang, I’ll take any downvotes as deserved, but this comment is unacceptable in my eyes).

How much of your objection has to do with the technology, and how much with the conflict itself? In other words, which question is more appealing: * Given that we're in this conflict, what should we do? * How can we prevent these kinds of conflicts in the future? Those are very different conversations. Personally I'm more focused on the second one. But we have to take care of the first one too. And it's messy.

The answer for the second arises from the first, to whit “promiscuous killing of citizens radicalises survivors”. The invisible but entirely audible presence of the drone is a reminder that a foreign power has the ability to kill you at the touch of the button for no reason that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that’s meant to protect people?

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#55

Post by pluto9 »

spraak wrote: post #46
asdfologist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So killing ISIS members is morally equivalent to beating children?

I just mean that if you're opposed to something then there aren't any times it's also a necessity. You may do it, but ultimately you view it as unnecessary. War happens, but it's unnecessary every time, even when one side initiates, it doesn't make it necessary.

It's necessary for you when the other side has decided to engage in it against you. The fact that it was technically "unnecessary" for them to start the war in the first place is rather irrelevant when they're marching down your street. The decision about whether there's going to be a war, necessary or not, has been made for you.

If you don't believe me, I'm sure there's a Kurd somewhere who would be amused to hear your theories about why their fight against ISIS is "unnecessary".

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#56

Post by candiodari »

jononor wrote: post #47
candiodari wrote: post #37

I don't get this. This is about tracking humans. If you're worried about AIs tracking humans through areal cameras ... let me put your mind at ease : this is "tutorial" level stuff. Granted. There's getting it to demoable state, and there's getting it to work under all conditions, getting it stable, getting it tested, and so on and so forth. But still, this is not exactly state of the art anymore. This ship has saile…

If the US army had or was easily able to build this they would probably not pay large sums of money to Google. There are still many challenges in creating scalable robust solutions using machine learning in computer vision, especially when high degrees of response time and robustness is needed.

Most, if not all types of machine learning networks are O(1). Keeping the response time constant is not needed.

Robustness is harder, but for this problem, not very hard.

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#57

Post by eggy »

davesque wrote: post #19
manfredo wrote: post #12

> "If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed," the letter reads, "we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,” My understanding from the reading I've done is that this project is…

I don't think that's an argument. The truth is, even if the particular applications of AI to tasks like this are innocuous in this case, they're less than a stone's throw away from things that aren't. Uses like this for technology are a perfect example of things we (we, the tech community, who have always prided ourselves on being more fair and ethical than the rest of the world) all promised we would never do . Ther…

I was following your argument until the parenthetical elitist remark about the tech community priding themselves "on being more fair and ethical than the rest of the world". Is this a truly held belief common in the tech community? Glad I don't subscribe myself to groupthink. The tech community seems to fill the news with sexual harassment and other unethical actions just as much as any other self-defined group.

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#58

Post by Jack000 »

philwelch wrote: post #30
davesque wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's an argument. The truth is, even if the particular applications of AI to tasks like this are innocuous in this case, they're less than a stone's throw away from things that aren't. Uses like this for technology are a perfect example of things we (we, the tech community, who have always prided ourselves on being more fair and ethical than the rest of the world) all promised we would never do . Ther…

It's really challenging to unpack this kind of dogmatic argument. Are you a pacifist in general? Are you against violence and military intervention in every conceivable case, up to and including Rwanda or WWII? Do you think it's good for relatively liberal and democratic countries to have less military capability than relatively authoritarian countries? The cause of human rights, freedom, dignity, and survival would…

not op but I don't think it's inconsistent to view the military as a necessary evil while denouncing the use of drones in asymmetric warfare.

I'd have no qualms about supporting my own nation in a global conflict, but ethically speaking the drone program falls on the darker side of gray.

Re: A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

#59

Post by philwelch »

Jack000 wrote: post #58
philwelch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really challenging to unpack this kind of dogmatic argument. Are you a pacifist in general? Are you against violence and military intervention in every conceivable case, up to and including Rwanda or WWII? Do you think it's good for relatively liberal and democratic countries to have less military capability than relatively authoritarian countries? The cause of human rights, freedom, dignity, and survival would…

not op but I don't think it's inconsistent to view the military as a necessary evil while denouncing the use of drones in asymmetric warfare. I'd have no qualms about supporting my own nation in a global conflict, but ethically speaking the drone program falls on the darker side of gray.

Can you expand on that?
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