Is my moral compass off, or does war profiteering completely violate the whole "don't be evil" thing?
I hold the controversial (and often dismissed) opinion that Google is dying. I assert they are dying in part because they built a company around search advertising before they knew how to build a company, their initial success gave them the confidence and agency to create structural impediments to their ability to do anything but search advertising. And the search advertising market is not only saturated it is getting more competitive as the easy gains to be made there have already been milked for what they are worth.
I support that opinion on the meager evidence of how they more and more cravenly monetize properties that they previously kept free of such things, their repeated failed attempts at building any other business outside of search that brings anything close to the margins they need for their business model to work, and the lack of 'barriers' to other well funded and durable companies from taking away everything that is special from them. (Bing, Uber, Cruise, Facebook, Apple, Etc.) They get less and less per click and they spend more and more to buy more traffic for their search boxes as documented in their financial statements for the last decade.
They have repeatedly come under attack from outside agencies which see their use of, and exploitation of data about people as either anti-competitive or a violation of basic human rights. Those efforts have resulted in fines and legislation that has been cutting off other ways to monetize the traffic of their place in search.
From that misguided perspective, military contracts make total sense. What they have is a tremendous infrastructure that can be wielded by a relatively small number of engineers to do amazing things. For now, that capability is unique. By turning it from a cost center into a profit center (or even a less cost center) it can help them make the profits they need to keep things rolling. When I was working there I got to see what spending 4 billion dollars a year on infrastructure buys you. It rivals what nation states can field, it rivals what the US government can field. Renting that out to a price insensitive buyer for a unique asset? Sounds like saving yourself from dying to me.
I don't see how Google can go out of business in the next 10 years given their cash reserves. Eg: If they lost 2 billion dollars every year they could still keep doing that for decades.
I'm pretty confident that they'll still be around in some form 20 years from now as well.
I think the cash is an interesting challenge for its own reason though. Historically, public companies that held large fungible reserves like cash, were vulnerable to so called "Wall Street Raiders." These are people who would do the math and figure out that the assets of the company were worth more then the shares would indicate, they would buy up a controlling interest and then take apart the company, paying themselves a tidy profit. Traditionally that can't work on Google because the voting power of the class A stock is so much higher than the class B stock, however if the stock price were to crash, it becomes possible to make a play for all of that cash. The math is convoluted, and the founders need to continue their current steady sales of stock (which becomes class B when they sell it) but that flip happens before they run out of cash. I wonder sometimes if the IBM buyback of its own stock has been a plan to prevent this from happening there.
But timing the demise is secondary to the awareness on the part of the senior management that they can see their demise as a real and tangible thing. That awareness leads to stress and a willingness to do things counter to their established history in order to facilitate that survival and mitigating that threat to their existence.
The original question was "Did their moral compass shift?" and my observation is that the fear of death is a large metallic object which, when it gets too close to ones moral compass, deflects the needle in perhaps unexpected ways.
That Google's fear of dying is growing and their moral compass is being subverted in the name of survival is a hypothesis for a theory that explains their current behavior. I believe that the theory is both testable and falsifiable given information that we'll get going forward. As any good theory should be predictive, this theory predicts that as they fail to find a successful new business to supplant search advertising the ways in which they attempt to make money will become more and more disconnected from what their corporate culture claims to value. Further, if they do find a successful side business, their corporate cultural claims will re-emerge and they will once again make choices based on their cultural aspirations rather than for the sake of additional revenue.
If they continue to do more and more evil things, even after their future survival is no longer in doubt, it will show that my theory is completely wrong, they were simply evil to begin with and dying or not dying had nothing to do with the public shift in their willingness to be evil.
Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do.
No company that actually believes in the maxim "Don't be evil" would participate in such a technology, much less promote it, or worst of all, lead it.
This is just wrong and not helpful to the discussion. Have you read (or even seen thanks to YT) anything about how "drone targeting" by US forces is actually accomplished besides media outrage when a bomb misses? Mistakes are made, but targeting is far, far from indiscriminate. And being "unaccountable" is not exclusive to drone warfare.
"Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do."
If my local criminal network detonated a bomb at my local coffee shop, killing 50, 100, 200 of my friends and family members, and then proceeded to do so every week, yes - I'd encourage rocket launchers from 1000 feet, 10,000 feet or 10 feet if that was the most effective way to stop them.
As I understand it, the call for a drone kill of an insurgent target is made by the JSOC ...or... by a CIA officer in Langley. In the latter, the case for discriminate sufficiency is entirely up to the CIA and its current set of political priorities for that target, which is NOT shared with the drone team or their chain of command, nor with any non-CIA entity.
I've seen no mention that the CIA is NO LONGER killing with drones (which became one of the established practices for drone use in Afghanistan about 5 years ago, IIRC). This program is very much one that Google would serve in targeting drones, which is why I mention it.
No doubt the CIA would claim their reasoning behind each kill order was discriminate. But if my description of SOP is correct and the CIA is still in charge of many drone kills, that makes them unaccountable in any practical sense.
For some background on CIA's targeting of drone strikes:
"Transferring CIA Drone Strikes to the Pentagon" https://www.cfr.org/report/transferring-cia-drone-strikes-pe...
The us military wants technology that justifies them not making more conservative choices, and I don’t see any moral justification for that. Drones are useful for cheaply eliminating risk to one actor, thus allowing more risky behaviour to the side that has them.
But being a cheap risk mitigator is also all they are, they bring no new strategic capability, as evidenced by how easily their use was ramped up and down, so their main effect, the one that could provide some moral justification, is making war cheaper.
Until I hear that it is, I will assume it is not, since it's much easier to achieve your mission of killing bad guys if you're also willing to kill good guys. You get more rewards for killing more bad guys, not saving more good guys.
Unfortunately that's how militaries and governments work.
Not to put too fine of a point on it but even a basic search on the topic would yield a ton of official policy doing exactly that.
There is explicit guidance and long history of minimizing civilian casualties as a goal within the DoD, and such guidance is codified in multiple legal documents under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Rules of Engagement and international treaties.
To wit: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/...
This is also taught as a basic tenet in introductory courses for new Military Officers. One example here:
https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B130936...
But are such claims really true? Does the part of the military chain of command that actually does the killing take those claims to heart, as much as pentagon spokesmen do? Do the superiors of lieutenants and privates hold them to that standard, even when the laws of conduct become unenforceable by collateral victims, as in drone strikes?
In several US wars, such claim were not taken to heart. Vietnam became infamous in US history as lacking a sound casus belli, just as the 2003 Iraq War has. In messy wars like these, one of the principal casualties is often the enforcement of the rules of war, especially when it comes to laws of conduct that are still in the course of being written, such as the proper use of drones or AI.
This lack of enforcement becomes especially fraught when novel weaponry and its use is governed not by the military under its code of conduct, but by the CIA (who now runs most drone snipery), which AFAIK lacks an equivalent martial code of conduct.
Again, you can research this for yourself and find out that yes, it's deeply embedded into the culture. This is seen the most clear when military members who break the rules and are reprimanded, discharged or jailed. You can move the poles all you like, but the data exists.
the more war you create, the larger the military, and get larger their ability to spent on “protection” and “defence”
*edit: which is certainly offset pretty substantially by the hit to the countries GDP, because yknow... war is expensive!
I think you can certainly find examples where commercial entities have played a suspicious role in that respect, but to say that simply by supplying goods or services to the military you are war mongering is completely devoid of logic.
I think that this statement has been proven wrong countless times throughout history.
I try to avoid comparisons to the Nazis (even though many more people seem to be doing it these days with Trump in power), but isn't Google basically providing the government the technology to more effectively kill people in the Middle East, too? That's what it is at the end of the day, isn't it?
History will remember Google for this - especially when its technology will be used for some horrifying stuff in the future (and it will be). Right now we haven't even seen its true consequences yet, so it's easy for some to dismiss it as no big deal.
Can you really pretend that you're developing "neutral" weapons technology in this climate?
If anything, it seems this google technology would reduce the number of civilian casualties.
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
>There are a lot of bad people in the world, and quite a fraction of countries are ruled by them. Thugs respond to power.
The US is still a good country, with a good government, but it's ridiculous to assume it immune to the same threats of tyranny as every other nation.
More directly, the US has directly toppled many democratically elected governments, undermined sovereign political processes via propaganda and support for anti-democratic political groups and targeted economic pressure, supported American and multinational corporations in their unethical and often criminal behavior around the world, given money and weapons and training to armed opponents of various democratic governments (who then used those for slaughtering civilians) ...
Not to mention being one of the world’s foremost producers and distributors of small arms (that end up in the hands of local gangsters, child soldiers, ...).
As a particularly tragic example, look to the case of Guatemala. The democratically elected president of Guatemala demanded that the United Fruit Company – who owned an incredibly high proportion of all arable land in the (starving) country – sell back some portion of the land which they were not currently using at the price it had been assessed to be worth for tax purposes. Unfortunately for Guatemala, the Dulles brothers (CIA director and Secretary of State), as well as various other members of the Eisenhower administration, had a direct business interest in United Fruit. The US toppled the government, installed a friendly dictator, and kicked off 2 generations of civil war in which a shockingly high proportion (5% or something?) of all Guatemalans were killed, including the mass-murder of many villages by thugs with machetes.
It is true that the presence of nuclear weapons has prevented for the past ~70 years the break-out of another “hot” war directly between nuclear-armed states. On the other hand, if someone slips up when nuclear weapons are involved, we’ll all be screwed.
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27éta...
<https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-...
Or maybe the US just had a problematic idea of what police should be doing, which explains a lot of our other problems.
Ignoring whether or not the world actually does, or how vehemently they might disagree, the rightness of a thing isn't measured at all by how many people think the thing is right.
war vs. war profiteering
the notion of voting as a proxy for consent
anything is worth it
bad people in the world, and they aren't here. they're there.
kinetic energy? targets? condescendence?
No, the world has become a safer place for us because we live in nations with nuclear weapons, and they're a pretty good deterrent for attacks by other nations. The world is still a very unsafe place for many people, partly because of this self-proclaimed 'cop'. If you think the US has this military might for any other reason than ensuring it's own political and economical wellbeing, I'd like to know what it is. It sure isn't to "keep the peace" - they're selling a bit too many weapons to questionable figures for that.
it's become safer for everyone:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ourwor...
which obviously isn't to say that nobody dies in wars anymore.
The US should not be out droning people in other countries except in explicit self defense ("they might have been going to attack us" doesn't count). That is my opinion, you are free to disagree with it. If "the goal is to kill fewer people," the best way to do that is to... not kill people.
Also, the fact that representatives I voted for voted in favor of extrajudicial killings of people in other countries is not something I'm happy about. I wish every day that the US could abolish its first past the post election system so that I could vote for candidates I actually agree with rather than being forced to vote for someone I sort of agree with.
People can think what they want I guess. It just has more of an effect on the world than I thought it used to so I feel a little saddened watching this new dark age come about.
Your superficial statements about ‚bad guys‘ and ‚thugs‘ that only respond to ‚power‘ led me to believe you‘ve watcht one to many movies. Destabilizing countries doesn‘t bring peace to the world.
Are you talking about UN? If not when was the last time the US took the initiative of a peace-keeping mission?
Arguably it would be more than 25 years ago, in the Balkans and even there, it can be argued that this was under the auspices of the UN.
In the 70 years you mention, US has often been the lesser evil, but especially since USSR's fall, it is not clear at all that it is a force for good. Its last strong engagement, in Iraq, was a totally evil and misguided operation that made the world less stable.
Its refusal to help in Syria before ISIS took hold there is another blow. The crass incompetence of the Bush administration on both Iran and North Korea, and the apathy of the Obama administration on NK, led to a less safe world.
US' recent interventions are sources of instability and now US' policies seem to be guided from Moscow and align more often with the views of dictatorships than that of democracies.
In such a context, wondering about the ethics of improving US army's capabilities makes a lot of sense.
Clearly they're talking about Team America: World Police.
Edit: adding stuff.
IMO, most anti-progressive views spawn from anti-USA views.
Isn't the US responsible for a lot of the instability in the middle-east and South America?
As I type this I have this vaguely plausible fear that someone in the NSA is flagging my general sentiment and incorrectly labeling me for something or the other even though I'm mostly a pacifist.
for god's sake. there are really people thinking this way.
Google is allowing their employees to be evil now
It was always at the end but until approximately a month ago, Google actually led its Code of Conduct with "don't be evil" in the very first sentence. That was removed. Then again "don't be evil" was in the second paragraph. That was removed.
Sources:
April 21, 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/i...
May 4, 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180504211806/https://abc.xyz/i...
"“Don’t be evil” has been part of the company’s corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing.” However, Google retained its original “don’t be evil” language until [late April or early May 2018]. [...] The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”"
https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/i...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-dont-be-evil/
Moral compass out of sight, out of mind, is probably what the leadership must have been thinking, especially after the recent protest against Maven from a few thousand employees (which seems to have resulted only in the leadership trying to appease them by promising some secret bullshit "ethics rules")
And while I don't particularly care for this change, calling the concluding sentence of a document "a passing mention" feels forced. I would agree it's been deemphasized and should be mentioned more, but a concluding sentence is pretty central to a document. It's meant to sum up the entire document.