Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqdbps | Hacker News Reader

Congrads google activists you have hurt your employer's business and business prospects and prevented your colleagues from working on really interesting AI applications relegating their life's work to sorting photo albums.

Oh, and none of that will make a difference because a competitor of yours will pick up the slack and be in a position to offer really interesting work to attract and retain researchers.

View on HN

If we cannot find better applications for so-called AI than bullshit like sorting photo albums and military applications, maybe we should not do it at all?

I am still sure there are enough industrial, medical and civil applications for Google to work on, no need to resort to "photo albums" immediately.

That’s sort of an academic answer. Perhaps Google should go straight for creating the Singularity?

Business works by creating a product that someone will pay for. Then they reinvest those profits, grow the company, etc to improve that product.

Maybe we’ll eventually get the robotic butler that consumers will pay for, but in the meantime the Apple II robotic/AI revolution has been a little slow to materialize.

But as an employee why should I like what the management wants, I think is your duty to speak if you consider that management does something bad and resign if you don't want to participate. My goal is not to make money for my boss/company, I personally get satisfaction when our customers are happy. If Google management does not like developers with this kind of ideals they should say it in their recruitment announcement that you should be OK with working with the military and spy agencies.

they do photo albums.

You do realize that most of the top-tier machine learning researchers are among the thousands protesting DoD work.

There is more than enough work, money, and intellecutalism in bringing AI to medicine, safety, transportation, supply chain optimization, law, art, music, and many other applications.

Maybe those colleagues could just go work at the competitor if thats what interests them?

The fact that everyone doesn't feel like they'd like to work on AI military drones doesn't even mean that they are opposed to them in principle.

How is it not OK for a company to collectively decide that maybe, even though killing machines are going to exist, they would rather not be the ones working on them?

Google is, after all, a company famously hurting for business and business prospects.

Nor is Microsoft or Amazon. There aren't many clients out there the size of the DoD and the cloud business is all about locking in large clients.

No but they are infamous for missing opportunities

>really interesting AI applications The AI academics and talented developers probably would find other domains more interesting then satellite surveillance and droning people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com