Google Renounces AI for Weapons, but Will Still Sell to Military
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Archimedes developed catapults and canons to fight invading Romans. Leonardo Da Vinci designed war machines, including a giant crossbow. I don’t recall the details, but many European mathematicians in the 18th and 19th centuries rushed to help their countries develop weaponry, which they saw as a sort of patriotic duty. Alan Turing helped invent the computer as part of a military effort. John von Neumann, besides also helping to invent the computer in a military effort, was also an expert in nuclear warheads and work in the Manhattan Project. Richard Feynman worked on ballistics calculations during WWII and then after Pearl Harbir he worked on enriching Uranium for the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel) and Robert Noyce created Fairchild Semiconductor, which practically created Silicon Valley and the transistor. The first transistors sold by Fairchild were used in the B70 bomber. Needless to say, the list goes on.
A lot of Facebook’s effort to track whether Russian agents purchased ads space, how they fostered dissent with controversial groups, etc. all that false under a new military “space” (neither ground, sea or air). Friends of mine who work in security hate the idea of calling it “cyber”, but “information” seems appropriate: cultivating journalists and influencers is key for instance. It’s a war against democratic institutions more than population, but it affect power quite directly.
What Google refused to do was to attach military technology from a previous era (explosive, kinetic weapons) to their own work (face recognition) because they find that abhorrent. That’s actually not the first time: the use of wild animals, poisons, children and later radioactive material and nerve agents in war has been decried by military technologists since Archimedes — generally around the idea of a cleaner violence.
I think we went from Hunter Gatherer where land ownership didnt matter to Agriculture where land ownership was everything to enlightenment to post war due to WMDs.
War will kill us all with this new technology, there are people still alive today that were born before Nuclear weapons.
Let's not be naive. "Amwrican interests" is a euphemism for "revenue and potential revenue of America's rich and powerful."
For example, history is clear on Afghanistan. A "conventional war" doesn't work there. But if you want to reap the rewards of all the untapped natural resources __and__ you're not footing the bill for the military's efforts then you simply command your puppet(s) to give it a shot. The only loss is the lives of someone else's kids.
I have news for you. In geopolitics, “interests” has always meant primarily economic interests, and economic interests have always been of greatest relevance to the rich. Take the great powers on the eve of World War 1, as an example. Britain had “interests” in Egypt. Russia had “interests” in Turkey. The United States has “interests” in Panama. Millions of people died for these “interests” in WWI. What is meant by “interests” here is business interests. Specifically, Britain seized Egypt in order to control the Suez canal, which was important because it connects the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and British merchants exported goods to Asia through the canal. All of Russia’s exports had to go through the Turkish straights (controlled by the Ottomans at the time), which connect the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The United States was interested in Panama of course because the Panama Canal was a major conduit of maritime trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Such “strategic interests” are the reason behind every war ever fought, it may not be right but it’s nothing unique to the US.
Thanks. I'm aware. It's the majority of the proles who are fooled by the masking of the euphemism, and the massive hypocrisy it creates.
The point being, it's __not__ about liberty, freedom, human rights, etc. It __is__ about economic and cultural imperialism.
The phrase is exactly the kind of language abuse that Orwell so kindly warned us about.
There's also a theory that he intentionally saboutaged the designs for some of his military machines, although I personally am not convinced by the evidence. [1]
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1415660/Leonardo-da-...
This policy is so broad it's meaningless.
PRIMARY purpose - promise us that its primary purpose is something else and we're game.
Direct Injury - AI which determines / designates hostiles and isn't installed directly on the weapon can't cause direct harm.
It sounds like the want to keep selling cloud services, which is pretty much a commodity at this point.
Even if weak, any policy is better than none.
Anyways, given Googles consumer brand I suspect any form of involvement with weapons systems would be unwise :) I'm surprised they even considered it.
Reason and morality falls apart when confronted with shareholder value.
If it were so cut and dry, I don't think they'd have a policy at all, and I think this policy is the output of a calculated risk assessment where Google determined that the effect of the PR would be greater than the cash.
Plus, there was a chunk of their staff that threatened to leave the company if they went through with their pentagon drone project [0]. I imagine it would be hard to explain that to Wall st.
0 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-01/google-wo...
Huh? It sounds like they're not changing course at all, but just spinning what their doing in a less SkyNet light.
> Which affects shareholders more? The potential negative PR or the potential government contracts?
Considering several of the most valuable companies in the world are U.S. defense contractors, I don't think there's much of question about what affects shareholders more.
Better to do a spin-off company instead..
For a company that relies so heavily direct interaction with consumers, involvement with warfare is a huge risk. And the value of the contracts hardly outweigh the risks of backlash against Google primary business.
It's the same reason drug companies work hard to avoid having their drugs used for executions. The value of the contracts is low, compared to their main business which could be threatened by such a move..
Also if you look at trends over the decades it's clear that warfare is increasingly loosing it's glory. People aren't thrilled about murder and mayhem.. sure we'll have military spending for many years to come, but it's likely to loose it's popularity, and eventually fade..
So why is Google even considering to enter this market? When it's only short term and puts Google golden egg at risk? It makes no sense to me.
In other words: the status quo.
I wish they did more to help the US military with AI technology. It reduces costs of human interpretation and doesn't have the same issues with classified information in the minds of those humans.
There could be great time savings and the potential for higher reliability of image interpretation if unsure AI assessments are passed onto humans for interpretation.
I don't believe that the core of the US military is evil, and as an American I am happy to have it defending my country.
Although we are way way off that, a better, more organised, more democratic, more powerful U.N. should have that role.
I think there's a big difference here.
However, my mind was changed by the idea that if killing people is easy, and there is little risk to the operators of the equipment, it will be done all the more. Countries will go to war much less overall, if there are higher stakes. I like there being high stakes.
Modern warfare is not conducted like this. Killing is already easy but that’s not how wars are won. The trend of warfare since WWII is on precision targeting. Take a look at munitions technology and systems from then to today. The US military wants to minimize casualties and collateral damage while acheiving mission objectives.
Couldn't be more ironic. Google's core business is surveillance and serving ads - all aided by ai.
This whole thing is a joke - a bunch of know-it-all overrated and overpayed jerks pretending to know what's best for the world/country. Why and how is it assumed that they know better than lawmakers, government officials and security agencies?
At the very least, this is a vote of no-confidence against the very institutions and people instilled to defend the country and further it's interests!!
When Motorola was acquired by Google, plenty of googlers commented on how much more smarter the average Googler was. And how the new genius Google upper brass world turn Motorola into a money making machine. However, they failed miserably at building and selling good hardware, and that struggle continues to this day through their pixel, Nexus and HTC devices. So - a bunch of cocky software engineers couldn't even build and sell better phones, why'd they be right on national security?
Their motto was never "do no evil" - that's a far harder standard given that undesired side effects happen for most actions.
One's capacity for evil indeed grows greatly when one is given too much power.
Likewise, as Google's power has grown inordinately, their public emphasis on "doing no evil" has diminished
They definitely aren't better than most companies in certain corporate matters related to the employee experience (especially for those who are in one or more marginalized demographics), or in their willingness to be a defense contractor at all (back on topic for this news item). They also make plenty of product and PR mistakes.
Still, many tech companies are notably worse on many important issues: more willing to directly facilitate military weaponry and intelligence for lethal purposes, less top-notch at security, fewer and weaker privacy promises, bad at rigorously implementing and adhering to the privacy promises they do make, more in the habit of voluntarily sharing direct access to your personally identifiable data with third parties, less willing to tolerate employees complaining about privacy/security/harassment/workplace issues, etc.
Overall I think Google needs to be watched closely, forced to do the right thing by some mixture of internal external pressure, possibly split into 2-4 smaller companies, and needs to fix certain culture problems .... but I still think it's among the better of the large trendy US tech companies, alongside Microsoft. And GCP is awesome.
Disclosure: I used to work at Google, including the GCP team; my mention of Microsoft is based on second-hand information from people I know who do or did work there.
I really wonder what is the percentage of employees that read their company's code of conducts. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 5 %.
Imagine that Disney used that motto, would you still send your children to DisneyLand?
Or a restaurant saying "don't poison the guests", would you still eat there?
And yes, I'd like a restaurant to encourage its workers to take steps to ensure the food is safe.
By telling them to not poison the guests?
Do I really have to explain what's wrong here?
I still think that this problem isn’t resolved: is the problem the existence of violence, its legitimate monopoly by a democratically elected temporary dictator, or that violence is being misused by jingoistic non-sense, and that the US armed forced are controlled by corporate interests? Is evading that question the most moral stance? I feel like it’s mainly an easier one to defend, rather than the better one.
It’s not miliatary contracts I have a problem with, it’s this particular program, this particular method.
My guess is the way the deep state and military industrial complex will deal with this, is to seed new Googles - In-Q-Tel, DARPA, etc - that are more cooperative in this area, and to punish Google in various ways going forward for non-alignment (overtly or otherwise). What use to the military complex is Google if they won't fully cooperate on something like this; time to get themselves a new Google.
Call it the Joshua Project. :)