Google Employees “Outraged” Their Tech is Used to Build Better Killing Machines | Hacker News Reader

Google Employees “Outraged” Their Tech is Used to Build Better Killing Machines

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46 pointscmurf48 comments

I'm confused; would better image classification not reduce the potential for civilian casualties and other unnecessary collateral damage? I don't think the government would stop drone strikes if Google weren't involved, in any case.

It boils down to how much you trust the US government to use this technology ethically. Also "they'd do that anyway" is not a very good argument wrt ethics.

I don't want my email provider to also become a defense contract (with all the corruption that entails).

Also, I seem to recall Google promising not to become a defense contractor when they purchased Boston Dynamics, exactly because there was a backlash against them over that possibility. I also remember they went back on that promise literally months later when they started testing AR stuff with the military.

Anyway, saying "Google is only helping the US government kill fewer innocents" is like saying "IBM was only helping the Nazi classify the people who really deserved to die in the gas chambers."

So yeah, if Google can help it (and it certainly can), it should stay the f-out of military contracts. It doesn't want to go that road. I for one would certainly make an effort to use Google's servers less and less if it does.

I mean, how long will it be until it starts offering a firehose to our data to the U.S. government, especially in "times of need" or because it wants to win some other big contracts with the government? Google has certainly been guilty of doing that (look how much more aggressive it has become against alleged copyright infringements with no proof ever since it started selling music and movies).

  would better image classification not reduce the
  potential for civilian casualties and other
  unnecessary collateral damage?

Richard Gatling, inventor of the first successful machine gun, wrote he hoped his invention would make war more humane, by reducing the need for large armies with the resultant exposure to battle and disease [1].

Fritz Haber, "father of chemical warfare", believed that deploying poison gas in WW1 would shorten the war, and thereby save lives [2].

It would seem people who work on military tech in the hopes of saving lives are often disappointed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling#Gatling... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/16/chlorin...

Better image classification might also cause them to make more attacks, overall raising civilian casualties.

As someone largely opposed to war, I would be upset to discover my work was being used for those purposes. It's bad enough that I'm forced to pay for it. I don't think that's what happened here though, and "the megacorp I work for also works with the military" would not surprise me.

Look at the Aleppo mosque bombing to see how US classifies drone images. It's basically a height of a person (proxy for age). I'd say it can't help, if they train it on how they currently classify images with no feedback from the ground. It may be good for PR though, and to help justify the killings. "Look, we use Google's world class AI technology!"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/06/07...

they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which parks their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

> they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which parks their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

And they are more in bed with Uncle Sam than pretty much any traditional "evil" company. They spent $18M in lobbying just last year. More than Northrop, Lockheed, Verizon or Comcast. If that's not enough the same Schmidt that wants to kill people "correctly" was prancing around Hillary's campaign events wearing a "staff" badge https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae.... He picked the wrong door of course, but had she won, they'd be no doubt Google would have gotten a decent chunk of the hundreds of billions spent on defense every year. I can just imagine a nice friendly voice interface: "Ok Google. Let's fly to such and such village in Afghanistan"

You think their staff are that naive?

>You think their staff are that naive?

Sorry, can you expand a bit. Not sure what you mean.

In the article, a Google spokesperson states that "The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only." The "killing machines" statement in the headline seems like an exaggeration when it should really refer to "surveillance machines."

The reason for it currently to be "for non-offensive uses only" is NOT because making the machine to automatically kill someone is unethical, but because it's is not accurate enough to only hit valid targets (May hit deployer and friendly).

So yeah, may be now it's "for non-offensive uses only".

Few years in, it will be "human control the kill trigger".

Then, eventually, it will be "human deploy the device, then it fires and kills all by itself, just like a fire-and-forget missile, plus it can hit multiple targets and be reused."

The dark side of technical advancement.

They are outraged _now_? Do they know how much power Google concentrates by hording and analysing user data? And how much political/economical influence this introduces? IMO this is way more dangerous than the military exploring killer machines - because it's subtle and under the radar.

Related: if you decide to release your software as open source you give up any possibility to control who uses it. Licences like the GPL do not allow restrictions to civil usage only. And even if they would, how could you enforce it?

Are any of the outraged employees actually doing anything about it, like, say, resigning from Google to work for companies that don't act as enablers for the military?

Not many companies in the bay pay provide google-level-of-interesting projects to work on or google-level total comp.

Yup, sadly, the yuppie Nuremberg defense.

After those shares vest, perhaps.

Google is planning to open a campus in the middle of Berlin’s alternative Kreuzberg district, one block down from my office. There have been many protests and this will certainly be a boost for the protesters

The sentiment in this thread is so odd to me. Whether you believe Google is a force for good or evil in the world, the fact that many of its employees demand that it be a good one should be positive, yeah?

(As a disclaimer, I worked for Google several years ago and generally feel that it walked the walk ethically. Of course, maybe that just means my moral compass is skewed...)

> When news of the pilot project, which is the company’s first with the Defense Department’s Project Maven, was circulated on an internal mailing list, some Google employees were reportedly “outraged” and “concerned” that the company would offer its services for drone-related surveillance technology.

I worked for multiple government contractors in the DoD space up until a few years ago and Google worked with us on MULTIPLE contracts. They're outraged and concerned now? What were they 5 years ago?

Most of the large tech companies do government contract work for the DoD but it seems like Silicon Valley just forgets this over and over and over again.

Here's the news started with a more pleasant and palatable headline - Google lends it's AI to the entity that invented the internet, transistor, and many other fundamental technological breakthroughs, the DoD.

This may be unpopular opinion, but nations are all researching, developing and even deploying automated 'killing machines' anyways. Turkey is already deploying kill drones against the Kurds in Afrin. There are automated, self-guided artillery weapons being developed. There is an arms race on and it doesn't make any sense to hold back unless there is world-wide treaty and embargo at the global level.

If Snowden told us anything, it's that Google was accommodating direct feeds from their users private data to the NSA. Didn't hear of employees outraged at google's military involvement then.

Snowden didn’t say that. It’s your invention. Snowden said the NSA had tapped into certain google backbone connections, without google’s knowledge.

My invention?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Quote: rom time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data."[111] "[A]ny suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

That's the FISA compliant public denial.

I don't recall that particular revelation (a slide with an arrow from 'Google' to 'NSA' is not proof of collusion). Inded, wasn't there some kerfuffle about the NSA inserting taps into Google internal fibre lines? Why would they need to do that if they had access through the front door?

That was the first and most major revelation though: prism, which allowed the NSA to tap directly into its user data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112

Living in the bay, I have to say that I see more and more workers from those big companies as complete hypocrites without any sense of self-thinking.

When you speak to them, there is so much arrogance. They are convince that they are saving the world (give me a break, you are not).

And next to this you can see them earning a shitload of money, living in the posh-est neighborhood of SF, and looking up on all the homeless in the city that disturb their morning yoga.

Completely dystopian and hypocrite, That is what the big-co koolaid feel-good marketing message has created

Arguably Google started or main streamed all this.

I think you're exaggerating. There are definitely many people like tat, but this is not even majority. Many of us just want to live our lives, and can't do much about the situation in SF. No, honestly, what can each of us do? Even if we give some money, it will never solve the problem of homeless people in SF.

As for saving the world... I don't think anyone believes it. A founder must speak in a certain way to get investment and the interest of the press, but at the bottom everyone knows it's basically about making money. Of course it helps if you're working for a startup that has some positive ambitions, it creates good energy and makes work much easier, but that's pretty much secondary. It's not that we're hypocrites, it's more or less the same in all companies: you need to tell your boss you believe in the company values and all this bs, even though in fact you don't care at all. Cool tech is another thing: here you can really get excited if you're working on a really interesting project.

Don't give them money, give them houses. Homeless person + stable place to live = ~0 homeless. Your retort might be, well if we did that, then people would become homeless intentionally and we'd have to give them a house.

Well... yea, that's the idea. Without rent, the average family's budget would increase by probably > 25-30%. We could set up schemes to rotate good residences to people that need them (e.g. families with kids get 8 yr tenures near schools). For houses without long waitlists, people can trade at will. Decommodifying that sector of the market would do a world of good.

Good luck with implementing this policy. The problem typically was that with positive birth rates development was way behind demand.

Additionally where do you want to build those houses and how do you want to prevent these areas from becoming ghettos?

Birth rates are slowing. Build the houses all over the city so you don't have concentrated poverty. If you have too much poverty in your city, then it's time to start redistributing wealth more generally.

I'm indeed exaggerating to make a point, and I agree with you that most of the employees jut want to live their lives.

The homeless example was probably ill-chosen as well.

That being said, where as you said most of the companies have those type of feel-good values, it is well known that it is only corporate-level marketing talk, and I would challenge you to find employees of let's say GE or Walmart really believing any of those.

But from the big tech companies (and yes mostly google), I'm still amazed to meet employees that genuinely believe those feel-good values are actually REAL. It shocks me even more that those employees are usually ultra-educated engineers. There is something deeply sad and hypocrite to claim living by those values ("make the world a better place"), but then having a lifestyle that puts them in the top 1% and look up at the rest of the country for not doing the right thing.

Now as you said, it is not all of them (not even the majority), but there is definitely a trend that cannot be ignored.

>> Many of us just want to live our lives,

So how come Google (and others) market his new shiny tools as "revolutionary", "game changing", etc. ? There must be at least a part of the shop that believes the message.

Come on, it's just marketing speak, each company has to do the same. Nobody gives a damn about these press releases. And sometimes really Google is doing something that changes the landscape, for example by deciding to work on a browser. Many times it's a failure like with Google+, but when you start you have to shout out loud how revolutionary your new tool is, that's pretty much normal. I think most people learned to ignore it just like we ignore advertising noise in our lives.

A lot of people in SV at companies both big and small think they're saving the world. What percentage really are? Do you pour this kind of scorn on the people at Juicero/Bodega or "Uber for XYX" startups too?

ETA: I see from your comments that you occasionally express mild negative sentiment toward others, but you seem to have an especially intense and constant antipathy toward Google. Let me suggest that it's disproportionate. For example, all of the Hadoop-distro vendors spew the same "saving the world" rhetoric even though they're just as much in bed with the military/intelligence community and other unsavory types.

Outraged they lost the Faustian Bargain?

Dupe

I hope peace triumphs.

It’s this kind of thinking that will destroy the human race.

Now all Google users should be outraged too!

Hypocrites. Maybe they should stop paying taxes too, because the military is funded by tax income.

The military, just like Google, does the right thing an overwhelming majority of the time. Enabling them to do their job isn't a bad thing. After all, the military is the one providing defense against entities who'd take away Googlers right to be outraged, and other civil liberties that modern society enjoys, in a heartbeat.

People don’t have the right to stop paying taxes, so don’t pretend like that’s an option.

The US military does not do the right thing in the overwhelmingly majority of situations.

Do you think the Vietnam war was a just war? What liberties were being protected there?

Do you think the Iraq war was a just war? Has it improved life for Iraqis? Has it made America safer?

You think the Vietnam and Iraq wars were perpetrated by the DoD/military? They were cooked up by your elected officials, at least get your blame-game right

defense in foreign countries?

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