We work for Google. Our employer shouldn't be in the business of war
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But honestly it is not duplicate. But whatever.
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This is almost like people in the steel industry wanting to get out of this business of war by not selling or working on steel.
Another thing to note is, do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? Are these Googlers actively trying to persuade those countries not to work on this business of war at the same time?
"Google is implementing Project Maven, a customized AI surveillance engine that uses “wide area motion imagery” data captured by US government drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motions and provide results to the Department of Defense."
However I think that the biggest difference is that Google employees have the luxury of saying that because from both a corporate and personal prespective they take zero risk.
Worst case Google let’s them go with a nice severance to avoid lawsuits and they’ll find another job by the end of the week.
Workers in a steel mill that might be lucky to even have a job don’t.
Sorry, but this just spin. If you create product X specifically designed for and marketed to vertical market Y... then you're in the business of Y, period.
Not even Google's own product people would pretend to believe otherwise.
If they did - they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
Some people don't want to take part in automated killing. It is not their duty to stop others.
It's been my observation that vehement anti-war activists seem unwilling to admit that there are threats that need to be defended against.
Well, they could still always refuse that.
Would you be okay if your AI works as American ends up in the hands of the Russian military?
Why should a German, or French, or Russian Google employee then accept that their work ends up in the hands of the US military?
EDIT: Yes, they won’t directly work on the drone program – but the drone program will more likely than not be reusing ML technology built all across Google, and everyone that worked on that now knows they are personally helping the US military-industrial complex.
There was a video of Elon Musk talking about how they can only hire Citizens at SpaceX due to government restrictions. Same concept would apply to Google and DOD Work.
Directly? No. But the Google employees working on ReCaptcha know their work on training object recognition models will help the US military, and the ReCaptcha people aren’t only US citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
Nothing in my line of work comes close to ITAR, just business process automation. I’ll put money anything with AI and DOD in the job description will require polygraphs, background interviews, citizenship etc.
After they did few token delisting of opposition websites, Russian three letter service felt they finally snapped, and that they can have their own way with them.
They had to evacuate their most valuable cadres out of there to Switzerland, by giving Swiss canton an eye watering sum for a carte-blanche from their immigration office to resettle former Russian office staff there.
Armed men in black now frequent their office on Balchug. Now, with suitcases stuffed with god knows what on them.
(at least directly)
Quite a lot of those guys are on work permits in Canada.
Whatever happened to standing up for what you believe in?
The parent said something to the effect "if they don't like it, they are free to go find a job elsewhere", and to that my reply is in the sense, "well, they are also free to voice their concerns".
AI, robotics and cloning are going to create a very, very bad world where people mean nothing. Google wants to run that world.
Let's not pretend it is anything more.
The only Silicon Valley figure that would have veered out of this almost unscathed would have been Steve Jobs.
How do you define "homeland" here? What if Google's foreign subsidiaries participate in project "Maven" in some way?
This doesn't seem "tough" to me at all.
Like Tim Cook, he wouldn't have let himself be in that position.
That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so.
>2.Being good at war is a good thing.
Not for the casualties -- and often not for the general population either. Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Would a better at Vietnam US be?
Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over, i.e. not democratic > democratic in the business of surviving. Regardless of your ideals.
It might indicate that the current environment in the US, including the legal/regulatory environment and the social environment, is structured (in some cases deliberately) to favor anti-democratic corporations, yes. (Note that at least some sources I've seen indicate that European worker coops have higher survival rates than conventional firms in the same market.)
Or it just might indicate that the democratic governance of firms in the US market is a less frequenrly tried thing, which has had less experience from which to optimize.
Or it might be a mix of both.
Until 1850s slavery had also survived as a practice. But then it wasn't...
Actually, they are democratic, but its the owners who have the vote, not the employees.
> Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"?
Yes, from the German perspective, because they wanted world domination.
The problems is you don't know from whose perspective it would be a good thing -- and which end of the gun one will face...
(Which I believe is the intent of the signatories)
The world is relatively peaceful because the US is more powerful than all other nations combined.
I'm sure if you asked the people who signed it, they would think this is a bad thing too.
This not true. The US and it's allies are constantly at war somewhere in the world. Chomsky has written extensively about this
"Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can."
But what if your users belong to an organization known for doing bad?
"But [Don't Be Evil] is also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably"
But what if the law itself is evil? And what if you are acting honorably to further something evil?
If Neville Chamberlain and his cronies had strangled the infant Nazi regime at its birth, rather than appeasing Hitler, many of those people would have lived.
Instead, the appeasement just meant that the war, when it inevitably came, was vastly more horrible and cost vastly more lives than it otherwise would have.
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of...
And then there's IBM whose Hollerith card system so effectively allowed the Nazis to document Jews. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...
That wasn't pacifism. That was a mix of avoiding the cost, a miscalculated idea about the long-term plans of Germany, and being OK with having Germany thwart the reds.
Not to mention that it could have been even worse for the victims if they had gone to war immediately, as they were unprepared ("Some recent historians have taken a more favourable perspective of Chamberlain and his policies, citing government papers released under the Thirty Year Rule and arguing that going to war with Germany in 1938 would have been disastrous as the UK was not ready.").