Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#61

Post by otterley » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45

While I appreciate the engineers speaking out, it isn't really practical for a company the size of Google, with the resources it has, to not have programs that work with the military in one form or another. If, as an engineer, it is against your moral code to do any work that supports the military, your choices are limited to working in small companies where everyone is focused on the commercial products and services…

> it isn't really practical for a company the size of Google, with the resources it has, to not have programs that work with the military in one form or another

Perhaps not, but that doesn't necessarily imply that Google can't pick and choose what technology it sells or provides to the military. They can, for example, serve the administrative needs of the military (e.g. Google Apps), but not necessarily provide technology that directly improves their weaponry.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#62

Post by geofft » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #46

criley2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ulti…

...the US military never clashed with Stalin's military AFAIK. Even in the Korean war, the USSR only provided supplies. That standing up to Hitler also involved a peer partnership with the USSR's military.

The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...

Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#63

Post by robert_foss » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #28

robert_foss wrote: post #22

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about furthering the goals of any military. Contributing means being complicit. The fact that the military funds research doesn't change that.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ulti…

I guess that is a standpoint that would be easy to take if all governments were flawless and co-existed in peace.

But history paints a different picture, with events like Iraq, the Kontras, NSA Dragnetting just to name a very select few.

Governments are willfully violent towards its own citizens and others for what is often not much of a reason at all.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#64

Post by rabidrat » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

sqdbps wrote: post #26

celticninja wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is used by individuals whereas AWS and MS are predominantly the clients of industry, who are much less activist and much more pragmatic.

Funny, I thought the "A" in AWS stands for Amazon where I as an individual bought a thing recently using my MS Windows powered PC, again as an individual.

The "A" in AWS stands for "AWS". If you don't have a separate AWS bill then you're not using AWS.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#65

Post by otterley » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

Oh boy. Being on the inside of Maven, I can't tell you how confused these Googlers are.

If you're not going to explain for the rest of us, what was the point of this comment?

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#66

Post by thwarted » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #34

criley2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ulti…

That's a fair point but it also treats life as a zero sum game that's played in a steady-state arena where the threat of Tartars over the next hill is ever present. That's a good way to prevent progress and to defend yourself perfectly against the Last War but one would think the last 30 years of terrorism would have shown us the flaw in that. Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new f…

Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.

And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#67

Post by DannyBee » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

Oh boy. Being on the inside of Maven, I can't tell you how confused these Googlers are.

As you surely know, most people unfortunately do not follow the "gather data, then respond" model. Most stuff is unfortunately fact-free (or fact-freer than it should be)

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#68

Post by geofft » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #48

criley2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ulti…

yes your freedom wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drone bombing weddings of goat farmers in yemen (the poorest people in the world). Or maybe if we weren’t setting civilians on fire in laos or cambodia or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Sudan. Where would our freedom be without that? you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.

World War II wasn't just, either. It's simply that the Allies were less evil than the Axis. The Allies literally included Stalin. The US placed an ethnic minority of its own people in concentration camps despite zero evidence that these people were going to help an enemy country. And so forth.

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#69

Post by kbenson » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #16

This has been by far one of the most shameful things Google has done. And their excuse that "they're only analyzing images" is a joke. Analyzing the images and "identifying objects" (their words) is probably 95-99% of the job in a drone strike. So if they're trying to make people think that their role is minimal in drone strikes, they're failing hard at that. I also think Eric Schimidt, who until last December was bo…

So, honest question, what's worse, helping the military be more accurate in who they attack, or abstaining and perhaps there are more mistakes, and/or collateral damage as they choose the best times/locations to strike that they can find, not the best that could be found. On the one hand, your involvement might help limit "innocent" deaths. On the other, a more effective system might see more use, so more people overall might be killed (and it might lead to more "innocent" deaths than otherwise, even if they are a reduced percentage of the total). Additionally, there's no guarantee that other actors are not developing the same technology, and it could either be obtained by the government through them, or used against the government and its citizens by them, reducing overall safety.

Take, for example, RADAR. Should those that developed RADAR, during or just prior to WWII, and abstained because of its possible wartime use? Wikipedia says "In the 1934–1939 period, eight nations developed independently, and in great secrecy, systems of this type"[1], so those that were left out faced a real danger in the coming years if they didn't have something to compete. Yet, RADAR has been used to great effect in many weapon systems and by many countries since WWII in ways that that most would agree are horrible. Then again, it's made commercial air travel much safer than we could have hoped to achieve at this scale without RADAR.

It's a complex situation, and I think it deserves a complex discussion. Distilling it to "working with the government is bad because I don't like what the government is doing" doesn't really do it justice.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar

Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

#70

Post by mtgx » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

swarnie_ wrote: post #30

rahulmehta95 wrote: post #14

This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography (and especially as a large part of the latter subject area, invested heavily in fundamental, theoretical research). Not saying that I disagree with the employees' opinion, just that DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research sh…

Completely agree. If it isn't Google it'll be someone else. I think DoD/Pentagon put up the funding for what later became Google maps. Not to mention the GPS constellation we all enjoy using. Its a shame progress has to be made through these channels but it has proved very effective in the past.

> Completely agree. If it isn't Google it'll be someone else.

That's an excuse people without any morals often use. It's up to each one of us to do the right thing.

After all: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing” - or I would add that evil also rises when "good men" actually do the evil thing "because otherwise the bad men would do it anyway."

Google likely has the most advanced AI tech in the world right now. That means if that they allow the US government to use it, they will be directly responsible for accelerating the progress of autonomous killer robots or making them real in the first place. After all, I don't see too many other companies with AI that can learn the Go game within days and beat world champions.