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Comment by sureaboutthis | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this thinking is that Google is not in the "business of war" but in the business of artificial intelligence. They have written an AI engine and a customer, the defense industry, wants to use it.

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?

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I don't think that's an appropriate analogy. If steel is the commodity in this example, then general AI techniques would be the analog for Google. Here, employees are complaining about a specific project working with the DoD, not generally working on AI:

"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."

The steel industry actively supplies the military with steel products for making ships and other things used in war.

While that’s true an individual company might still elect not to do so.

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.

The problem with this thinking is that Google is not in the "business of war" but in the business of artificial intelligence.

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.

>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?

Some people don't want to take part in automated killing. It is not their duty to stop others.

And here they are doing just that.

> do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military?

It's been my observation that vehement anti-war activists seem unwilling to admit that there are threats that need to be defended against.

Mine as well. More generally, I've often observed that when the status quo is imperfect, many people are willing to opt for a worse system so long as the imperfections are different (e.g., capitalism vs socialism).

>The problem with this thinking is that Google is not in the "business of war" but in the business of artificial intelligence. They have written an AI engine and a customer, the defense industry, wants to use it.

Well, they could still always refuse that.

Google also has employees in different countries.

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.

Imagine if Russian Google workers are making something for US military? I'm pretty sure it would be considered treason under Russian laws.

I believe that the way Government contracts work does not allow non-citizens (perhaps non-residents?) to work on them.

(at least directly)

Citizen, background checks, and for DoD, secret accreditation. So the chance of a Russian employee working on a DoD project are non-existent.

You know, MDA had non-citizens working on American spy sats for quite some time... Just look at their linkedins. I don't think a man who graduated Peking university on a full time program, can become a Canadian/US citizen the next year, when he joined MDA.

Quite a lot of those guys are on work permits in Canada.

Indeed it does. Google tried to flirt with the regime back a decade ago and be say at minimum "too conciliatory" with them. Now what came out of that?

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.

You must not know how these things work. If they are working with the DOD they are probably American citizens on American soil. Especially if anything is classified, I’d put money AI is.

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.

ITAR Rules for rocketry technology is absolutely not the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

I’m a web dev and looked at federal jobs that required a citizenship at minimum and at max a clearance with polygraphs.

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.

> You must not know how these things work. If they are working with the DOD they are probably American citizens on American soil. Especially if anything is classified, I’d put money AI is.

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.

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