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Comment by jadedhacker | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing they're not happy about the whole drone assassination debate going on internally. It's so disadvantageous that their staff can call the leadership outright hypocrites based on their own professed values. This makes everything so much easier for everyone.

Information on the drone program: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/

Google's complicity in Project Maven: https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project...

Google's Internal Debate: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/inside-go...

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I don't see how that squares with the article, which explains that "Don't be Evil" was simply moved from one paragraph to another.

Thanks for this. I actually had not seen this.

Very remnicient of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust.

Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a company to provide services or software to a military?

Depending on one's views, situations where it isn't acceptable could include when it is being used for autonomous weapons or extrajudicial killing.

I think it's pretty obvious: when there's an obvious military threat that would have implications for civilians (e.g. invasion, blockade, etc), the software is tailored to that need, and the military is not currently engaged in multiple offensive bloody wars based on lies with a long history of doing so.

What about non-obvious threats? Generally speaking, nations that fall behind technologically fare poorly against more advanced nations.

What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?

You're right that you can get into morally gray areas, but if the military is using applications that are available to ordinary consumers, businesses, and governments worldwide, it's not really giving them an edge now is it?

We should focus our criticism on people that are doing bad things and know it. We don't need to dive into the most murky territory in order to achieve worthy effects when there's so much low hanging fruit.

With regards to novel threats, it'd be nice if the military could justify these investments without resorting to propaganda, and outright lies. There should be a clear explanation that most people would understand the necessity of and how it works in their interest.

While I support a lower military budget and less interventionist foreign policy, the reality is that it's impossible to publicly justify some investments without revealing classified information that would put intelligence sources at risk. If we're going to have a military at all then people have to be willing to delegate those investment decisions to their elected officials and operate on a need-to-know basis.

It's not at all obvious. Politicians, philosophers, ethicists, religious leaders, and military officers have ceaselessly debated this issue since the dawn of civilization and there is still no clear consensus.

It's very simple for me: Don't.

If the military wants to use technology to enhance their killing techniques, then they should do it themselves with in-house development.

If they can't that's just too bad.

How nice for you that you have the privilege and luxury to take that moral high ground. You would think differently if you had a friend or family member in the military.

If we're going to have a military at all then our warfighters deserve the best killing technology we can provide to help keep the enemy from killing them. While the military does do some research in house, since we live in a capitalist society much of the work will always have to be done by private contractors.

> our warfighters deserve the best killing technology

Like biological and chemical weapons? Or more like Napalm buring through children? Or metal-free landmines that are even harder to remove after war?

Don't be evil is a pompous statement that suggests more power than they have. Any civilized society with functioning rule of law makes this kind of corporate statement meaningless and delusional.

Unless you are a corporatocracy and the inability of civil society to rein in the surveillance state betrays a fundamental breakdown.

The irony is if this was a Chinese company cooperating with the military on their drone program that is in active service and is killing people in far off lands as we speak there would be a global hue and cry and a frenzy of sanctions and global demonization, often by the same people defending Google now. This kind of brazen hypocrisy is what's wrong with the world today.

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