I wrote a little article related to this matter; I submitted it to HN on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16760768
Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#682This 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…
This idea of justifying military buildup by it's beneficial trickle down into civilian technology always struck me as very odd. It seems like an absurdly inefficient and roundabout way of funding R&D. If the government wants to invest in research they should just invest in research.
Whilst agreeing in part, the history of martially-motivated technical development through all of human history is remarkable. I'd argue it's been a vastly greater influence than so-called market motivations.
As an evolutionary selective pressure, war and military necessity are unparalleled.
Re-reading Samuel B. Griffith's translation of The Art of War, I noticed that he mentions, in 1963, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, which had only begun delivering volumes (the work remains in progress). That would include not only metalurgy, but entire volumes devoted to both martial and marine technologies.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#683Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political? The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and app…
>if I help develop A.I. that can be used for all sorts of things, one of which happens to be military-related, is the effort "evil"
There's a famous quote for this:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Borenstein
Of which I believe the meaning is yes, it's evil. It's handing a toddler a loaded gun sort of evil. If you DestroyBaghdad, you've limited the harm your program can do to what is specifically required by the situation. DestroyCity is easily misused in the wrong hands and should be carefully considered by ethical programmers.
Doctors solve this by disallowing unethical members of their profession to legally practice. Programmers should consider becoming an ethical profession, because depending on others in the field to do the right thing and police themselves hasn't been working out.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#684Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political? The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and app…
I really appreciate your thoughtful comment!
But I also wonder, if your employer asked you to provide some legal cover for something you found unconscionable -- like maybe draw up incorporation documents for organizing sex tourism to a place where it's both legal and likely to involve slavery -- would you subscribe to the same argument about how you should just do your job and not ask questions, how someone else will do it if you don't, and dutifully provide the legal services?
And if you think that hypothetical scenario is meaningfully different from this one, could you describe how? (I don't mean to try to back you into a rhetorical corner -- I'm genuinely interested in your response.)
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Only in the USA is it normal to think that people should have the right to kill in self defense. If that's the case, I don't want to live anywhere else. If someone breaks into my home in the middle of the night, they pose a deadly threat to my family. In what country would you not feel the same way? > Even more, many think they should be able to defend themselves from the state. Not all states are benevolent, nor a…
Why must an intruder, who may be there just to steal something and not harm others, immediately have to pay for their actions with their life? Do gun owners truly believe that they can band together and stop the entirety of the United States military anymore? The same people who are large proponents of the 2nd Amendment also seem to encourage a massive defense budget which seems backwards to me.
> Why must an intruder, who may be there just to steal something and not harm others, immediately have to pay for their actions with their life?
Why would a guy who grabs a cop's gun and waves it around pointing it at people for a thrill have to pay with the actions of their life when another cop shoots them?
>Do gun owners truly believe that they can band together and stop the entirety of the United States military anymore?
Do you really think gun owners would line up on the field to take on the military in the open? Ruling over a country where half of the people are supporters and the other half are armed dissidents would be impossible regardless of military strength. Just look at the failures of the last Iraq war to see how a tiny fraction of the population was able to throw off the whole thing.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#686I completely support the employees but it is criminal that this NYT article does not mention the extensive roots of Silicon Valley in Pentagon funding. SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending. Just recently in the AI space: - Siri was spun out of a Pentagon project -- look up SRI International and CALO. Its purpose: a "soldier’s servant".[1] - Autonomous driving is a direct evolution of Pentago…
Steve Blank has a great presentation on the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" and the military roots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uA2bLrl_9Q
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#687Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political? The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and app…
> In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and applications.
This is a false history. In the 1960s the U.S. was full of young people questioning whether they should just do as they were told and be a good, dutiful employee.
Since then there has been a massive campaign to roll back what was called “Vietnam syndrome” — the idea that you should consider the morality of your actions and contributions to society, not mere legality. Hence all the passionate Hollywood WWII dramatizations, the Greatest Generation, etc., portraying war as a tough but noble effort in which we must all unquestioningly sacrifice for the greater good — de-emphasizing much of the horrendous atrocities that have been perpetrated by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Iraq, support for murderous dictatorships in Central America, Indonesia, and so on.
Noam Chomsky has written extensively on this. One essay in particular is called The Backroom Boys — a reference to the chemical engineers at Dow who developed napalm within the relative peace and equanimity of a laboratory.
> Whatever this is, and however it might be defensible in "sending a message" or whatever, it is a sure way to put a company at a competitive disadvantage while accomplishing nothing practically… If it does become that way, a new form of puritanism will hold full sway to the detriment of all.
Whatever your opinion of the anti-war activists of the 1960s, puritans they were not.
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naming it 'defense' is already a huge stretch. I realize every country does this but it is as much or more about projecting power all across the globe as it is defense.
> I realize every country does this but it is as much or more about projecting power all across the globe as it is defense. I disagree that "every country" does this. Many countries in Europe and Asia do not use their defense forces as a tool for attacking other countries and getting involved in regional conflicts that were only affecting people in those countries. And countries that do it are usually just "helping"…
There was a lot of EU and NATO forces involved in the Balkans not that long ago
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#689Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political? The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and app…
Thank god, some sense! It was driving me crazy with how many irrational positions that people in this thread are holding without considering their orientation to the product (AI) and their relationship to the employer. Something I would add is that a lot of people don't understand how fundamental military R&D is to the collective progression of knowledge and technology. Take almost any common technology that we use t…
Part of the reason so much stuff comes out of military research is simply that the military has such a huge budget it can spend it on R&D.
There are definitely useful dual use technologies. But there's also a lot of military research that is almost strictly for military. Nuclear weapons research goes beyond the stuff needed for power generation, for example. Money that could have went into research in more stable, safer power generation instead went into how to make nukes small enough to be used by infantry on the battlefield
The military helps a lot by being a huge customer for a lot of this tech, but we can also cut out the middle man and just spend on r&d directly in some cases!
By discussing the morality of weapons research in a world where we already have civilization-ending technology ,we can maybe reorient ourselves to spending directly on progress in more cases. Without needing to have a military application to justify it.
This happened in the past with the neutron bomb, perhaps it can happen again with tech that could be used to help solidify a police state
Re: Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
#690Where does one draw a line these days among the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political? The military application in question is legal and is approved by a duly elected government that supports it politically. In earlier days, employees generally would see this as just doing their jobs in developing technology that their employers wanted developed and would not concern themselves about ultimate uses and app…
Your discussion of "legality" here is U.S.-centric. Google has offices in Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Turkey, U.A.E., India, and China, to name a few. How would you feel if Google worked on military technology for those countries? Would you point out that it was inevitable that their militaries would seek ways to use A.I.? Would you point out that the Turkish armed forces' activities are permitted under Turkish…
I bet neither China, nor Russia, nor the US would allow foreign citizens in foreign countries develop any serious military technology for their armies. Even their own citizens would be checked in detail before being allowed to work on it.
If a technology is not under that kind of scrutiny, chances are its military applications are... far-fetched.