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Comment by no_back_pain_01 | Hacker News Reader

That's not a very apt analogy. Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public utility. They collect vast amounts of personal information / intelligence because people willingly give it to them.

Google assisting in drone strikes is like the military using the electrical grid to electrocute people in their homes or delivering lethal poisons via the Starbucks Rewards program.

What if your favorite cereal brand started participating in assassinations? It's not inconceivable to deliver poison that way. What if, due to a software error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned Cheerios.

There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime, "preventative" military campaign.

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> Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public utility.

That is not an accident. They worked overtime to construct that image.

Yet it might come as a little surprise that they are more in bed with the government than Northrop Grumman, Verizon, Goldman and Comcast: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782... they spent about $18M in lobbying last year outspending all those other "evil" companies so to speak.

Schmidt was directly involved in Hillary's campaign and there is a picture circulating of him at one of campaign events wearing a "staff" badge: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae... that coupled with the "killing people the right way" is all you need to know what Alphabet stands for and where it is headed.

> There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime

I claim that there isn't in the sense that once a company becomes large enough it will start participating in killing people "the right way" as Schmidt put it. That happens regardless if we still want to have that cutesy, colorful, not-evil search company image. Amazon (AWS) is selling billion dollars worth of services to the CIA, I am sure that's not for cat pictures and buying books. Microsoft's hands I am pretty sure are not exactly clean either, etc.

And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly and without any moral qualms offer their products to whomever who can pay for them, be it a terrorist, a government agent, or a common run-of-the-mill criminal, each of who then goes to perform their horrible acts, aided by the purchased product.

These manufacturers are playing both sides and should definitely be kept an eye on, I tell you!

> And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly and without any moral qualms

Good point. Not just moral legal as well. There is a whole bunches countries companies cannot do business with because of embargoes. In many cases it is because of terrorism. Depending on what technology there are also export controls to watch out for.

From Post-WW2 to 90's Gulf War Harley-Davidson built bomb parts in the same factories the bikes were built.

Why are you not outraged about this and saying things like 'Harley assisted the military in killing humans for the past 70 years with metal casings that may be used on your softail?'

I mean why stop at google? The private industry has always been supplying the government with goods and services, some of which go to the military.

Because the precision scored Tomahawk shell casings they produced caused a net decrease in lives lost, or were used to kill members of an utterly vile regime's military.

> What if, due to a software error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned Cheerios.

Using your analogy, isn't that exactly what the Pentagon is trying to prevent by seeking Google's assistance in more innovative solutions? Otherwise, what's the alternative?

The alternative is not doing it.

Do I really need to spell out why drone strikes are already ethically questionable? Improving automated recognition will not reduce civilian casualties, it will only help justifying the strikes because instead of having humans say they identified the target based on its height they can say the computer did it (based on "deep learning", i.e. based on its height but with computers).

The analogy is highly misleading. Poisoned Cheerio deliveries would be highly targeted. Drone strikes are not. The only way drone strikes avoid civilian casualties at the moment is by defining casualties as terrorists until proven otherwise (e.g. if they're children) and not having sufficient data to accurately say how many people were killed.

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