Google's Work with China Eroding US Military Advantage, Dunford Says | Hacker News Reader

Google's Work with China Eroding US Military Advantage, Dunford Says

military.com

153 pointsJerry297 comments

This article seems like a lot of speculating and throwing wild theories at the wall. It a big eye-catching headline with very little substance.

I understand how Google's unwillingness to participate in DoD programs can impact the US military, but I don't understand the Google/China connection.

Does anyone know what the "artificial intelligence venture" is referring to? Is it Dragonfly? I don't see how an exploratory program to bring Search, being developed outside of China, applies at all to this situation.

My guess is the DoD/USGov is going to be opposed to any transfer of any ai/ml technology to China. I tend to think that most ai/ml news is hyped and highly speculative, but if the leadership in the US is not sophisticated enough to understand the hype cycle, any ai technology that could be put in a military drone is going to be heavily regulated.

Understanding of the hype cycle or not, the trouble is that our government is looking less legitimate by the day because it does not recognize and respond to threats such as climate change and a shift away from democracy that's been funded by our own corporations.

Yes, when you invest in China you are investing in communism. You might think you are getting a fast one because workers have no human rights, but try taking your money out and you will see what they think of property rights.

>Understanding of the hype cycle or not, the trouble is that our government is looking less legitimate by the day because it does not recognize and respond to threats such as climate change

The government doesn’t recognize and respond to climate change because the voters don’t recognize and respond to climate change. I would guess on a market cap weighted basis, most corporations are in favor of climate change legislation, there is not overwhelming popular support for it.

This is not really what the data shows. In the U.S., for example, the large majority of voters recognize global climate change as serious and impending problem. Where voters “don’t respond to climate change” is when they are asked if they’re willing to make general, probably painful changes in the name of potentially mitigating the effects of climate change. That shouldn’t be a surprise, though, since they exhibit the same pattern every time they’re asked about their desire to experience specific immediate pain toward the goal of reducing long-term deleterious effects.

AI is such a new field and China invests so heavily that they may end up leapfrogging US researchers anyways if the US doesn't up its funding: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18265230/china-is-about-t...

The greatest trick the military ever pulled was convincing the populace that the "others" were about to overtake them. It's been going on for decades.

Highly suggest looking at the stark difference in the two biggest military budgets on Earth.

Google also has an AI research center based in Beijing that hires Chinese employees.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/12/google-opening-an-office-f...

If it’s anything like their old Wudaokou office, there is a huge firewall between the work done in that office and the others.

Yeah, when I was there the China office largely worked on products for the Chinese market, and they lacked access to many things that Googlers in the rest of the world took for granted (like full access to the monorepo). It was more that some executive would throw a project over the wall to Beijing, a team there would work on it, most of the time the results of that work would stay in China (and be directly applicable to google.cn), but occasionally the exec would bring the tech back for U.S. engineers to work on.

I had regular contact with engineers in Zurich, Ireland, South Korea, Brazil, Israel, and Australia while I was there, but the only direct contact I had with the Beijing office was through a Mountain View expat (ethnically Croatian) who was leading a team there.

I worked in Wudaokou office before (after Google-xit). Basically access to user information (logs) would be limited from there. However you'll have no problem working on systems which not touching users directly (infrastructure / doc link analysis) etc.

Access to most of the monorepo's fine. Project stability was a problem but that exists in all small remote offices which is far away from mountain view.

The DoD thinks that China's military will use the technologies developed by Google@China, so the DoD is bringing attention to China's own military-industrial relationship with private sector companies (ironic, in many regards).

Since Google is from the US, the DoD is expressing a bit of "How could you do us like this, fam?" after Google's recent withdrawal from DoD projects.

What's interesting is that mega-corps, like Google, could in theory position themselves like "stateless" capitalist corporations. This is not complete a reality in the present, but it's evident the growing influence huge corporations like Google have on the US government. It's a different type of working relationship than, say, Gazprom with Russia for example.

> This article seems like a lot of speculating and throwing wild theories at the wall

The article is on 'military.com', would you expect anything less than speculative clickbait warmongering?

I emailed Richard, the author of this article, with the question: "What Robotics projects is Google helping the Chinese govt develop or leaking through a CCP cell?"

I am very curious, as I think the HN community would be.

I do not want to rehash the other arguments: if it is true Google would be hypocritical for assisting China or the lack of details what this General accused Google on possibly leaking through a CCP cell to do business in China.

Also, how true are the claims that companies need a CCP cell (accused by a US official of leaking IP to a foreign) that could lead to IP theft? Would allowing a political party to have access to your trade secrets compromise the obligation to keep the legal protections under US law?

Wouldn't your question be more appropriate for the Joint Chiefs Chairman who actually said the quote? The article writer is reporting what was said at an event. It wasn't an interview or Q&A where questions like that could have been asked.

That is why I am asking the reporter who reported his words. So he can ask the question to the general or to the Congressional reps that grill the general. He posted his email, so I asked him.

Reporters have privileged access to executive branch and interact with Congress all the time. They help filter out the noise and get to substance of matters.

Also, getting the media more involved in technical matters and getting them to ask more detailed questions from HN's discussion would benefit us all as a country (at least for us Americans and our allies).

I think one general issue is that Google has an AI center in China, and I'm sure there is 0 doubt from the intelligence community that the information Google's employees there have access to, etc is being infiltrated by Chinese spies. Not to mention just general projects Google is involved in within China itself, and its willingness to pay a price for entry (which is Chinese custom for foreign companies.) So, Google is being a bit of a "useful idiot" in their aiding of the Chinese government, and I believe prior quotes from the Pentagon are saying their aid is "indirect."

People can say it's "not the same" because it's just an AI center, instead of a direct military application. But...that's not really how AI is applied, the AI from the AI center within China can be used for military purposes. And given that it is a black box that the US is not directly involved in (unlike China,) the general premise of Google's aiding of China seems pretty apparent.

I like your speculation.

Google's face recognition tech is the first tech that comes to mind of being a real issue (esp with Googlers).

I think this is something people need to discuss more.

Like, why is the US govt allowing companies to get US military contracts that allow CCP units access to their research centers?

Those CCP units are more a red herring than anything. The relevant law says "The grass-root organizations of the Communist Party of China in companies shall carry out their activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China." [1], which doesn't automatically imply that they get special access to anything. I think it's more a measure to boost membership than anything (the term "grass-root" is a strong hint).

I also wouldn't be too sure that Google employees outside China aren't spying for the CCP as well, and pulling out of China wouldn't protect against that.

Worrying about an AI research center in China only makes sense from a perspective of those Chinese researchers being more likely to later apply their experience at Chinese companies than if they moved to the US to work for Google, whereafter they might stay and continue working in the US.

[1] http://www.china.org.cn/english/government/207344.htm

If ever there were a reason to get politicians on the side of breaking up Google (or any other tech company), I imagine this would be it.

I agree that a breakup of Google might be wise for a host of reasons, but how would a breakup help in this particular case? Some or all of the daughter companies could continue these kinds of relationships post-breakup.

I would think a government response to control this kind of activity would involve some form of deglobalization -- such as export controls or other regulations.

Scatter the cockroaches.

That's optimistic. It could just as well be seen as another excuse to throw even more money at the defense industry. "Google works with China now, so we need to triple the size of our surface fleet."

Now ask yourself, which one seems more attractive to a cynical US politician who wants to bring in more jobs for his state? Does a senator from Texas or New York advocate for splitting up Google because it will open the market for other tech businesses that could choose to headquarter in Texas or New York, but will probably also choose California? Or will they decide to increase the size of the surface fleet, knowing they can get parts of those ships manufactured in their states? I fear the later is more appealing to this sort of person.

Honestly, the DoD should just take a dozen of its few hundred billions and spend them on making an AI workforce. That would be a hundred times better for national security than wasting it on garbage like the F-35.

How could the Department of War (military industrial Congressional complex) profit from that?

If so that motivation would apply to politicians in many countries and not just the US. Multi-national companies are starting to look a lot less stable.

That was always the flaw in the multi-national company concept. Even if you are completely in the cloud your people still have to live somewhere and perhaps more importantly, your money has to sit in some country somewhere.

And Switzerland isn't what it used to be for banking security.

Not sure how a broken-up google would be sharing less with China.

The US military is a total centrally planned monopoly itself. Maybe the US military should not be spending so much money on bases overseas, and trillions of dollars unaccounted for. We have 800 bases and the rest of the world has 30. The taxpayer funds all of it, but has very little say or oversight.

The smaller companies would have even less inclined to ignore a market of a billion people.

Wouldn't a breakup/decentralization of Google, or any American multinational for that matter, just hand Chinese tech giants a massive advantage since the Internet as it is now heavily favors large, centralized organizations? I don't see people arguing for the breakup of the tech giants across the Pacific even though they hardly have a better reputation when it comes to privacy, etc.

By the way, I highly anticipate that the above argument will be made by said multinationals to prevent said breakup/anti-monopoly moves.

> By the way, I highly anticipate that the above argument will be made by said multinationals to prevent said breakup/anti-monopoly moves.

Zuckerberg made that argument months ago, surprise, surprise:

https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17584482/mark-zuckerberg-ch...

> Mark Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook would pave the way for China’s tech companies to dominate

Not a surprise, this is the same argument the oil industry has used for decades to oppose any kind of anti-oligopoly legislation. Basically they state that the US curbing the size of oil companies will adversely impact national interests in the Middle East and in other regions.

does that invalidate the argument?

It is a fallacy. If having a oligopoly is bad for the economy, it doesn't matter what other countries may want to do. Why weakening your economy, to satisfy the desires of an oligopoly, will be any better?

For the local national economy, an oligopoly seems possibly worse. On the international stage, it seems blindingly obvious that breaking up your local oligopoly to compete with larger foreign oligopolies or stated owned corporations is worse.

Fundamentally, this is all about negotiating power, and the whole point of breaking up a monopoly/oligopoly is to reduce its negotiating power. But that's clearly a problem when interacting with foreign companies not subject to the same anti-trust action, and will have much greater negotiating power.

This is complicated, and the argument is not a fallacy.

Following your reasoning, we should just create and feed oligopolies to avoid, god help us, becoming "victims" of oligopolies from other countries... In other words, lets kill the competitiveness of the local economy, so that other countries won't be able to do just that. This is similar to the soldier who decides to commit suicide so that the foreign army won't have the chance to do so!

I believe you just described South Korea.

You have a point. I'm just pointing out the argument you responded to is not a fallacy, it's a real concern as well. I honestly don't know what I would do if I had decision making power on this issue.

> we should just create and feed oligopolies to avoid, god help us, becoming "victims" of oligopolies from other countries...

This basically is exactly the strategy of China, at least with respect to international trade, and it's working absolutely wonderfully for them. In part, precisely because most of their competition is fragmented and paralyzed by infighting.

> This basically is exactly the strategy of China, at least with respect to international trade, and it's working absolutely wonderfully for them.

if that is the case, then the US has no grounds on requesting the Chinese to open their markets for US firms! If the US is itself committed to empower their oligarchic companies, we should not be surprised if the Chinese create their own mega companies and close their market to the American ones.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that if we go the path of supporting mega companies, then we should just throw away the illusion of free market and understand that other countries will do the same, because they're not stupid.

> If the US is itself committed to empower their oligarchic companies,

I think this is a silly strawman and you probably know it. This argument exists on a wide spectrum, at one end is "not acting to break up large companies", and at the other is "outright state owned enterprises with unlimited funding to compete abroad". The fact that the argument applies to both does not make them the same.

It is not a strawman when we're talking about the US trying to "protect" giant and unhinged companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, ExonMobil, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. In fact what happens is the opposite, these companies are in large part controlling the country, which puts us in a similar situation as the Chinese.

It's not binary like that. having an oligopoly in O&G is a negative for local economies, but it allows for more effective pricing in international markets. not only does that mean more American O&G is purchased, it means less (Russian or Syrian or Venezuelan) O&G is purchased, which is a strategic goal and may be more important to American goals than competition within local markets

The same may or may not be true of search engine or other technologies, but to look at it from a black and white perspective is not helpful.

To echo the point that decentralization of big tech might be an advantage to foreign powers, wouldn't multiple companies be harder to monitor in their exchange of IP across state lines?

Breaking up "Google (or any other tech company)" is not a reasonable solution to any actual problem, I don't understand how people can casually suggest that.

What military advantage does Google give the U.S. government?

They are refusing to work with the U.S. military yet cooperating with China to help advance their AI technology. In some sense, this could be seen as leaving your own in the dust while helping "others".

Google refused to work on the machine vision for U.S. military drones that kill thousands of people (project maven). [1] Google's work in China is building an AI center to promote AI in general. [2]

These are not the same things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_arms_r...

[2] http://fortune.com/2017/12/13/google-china-artificial-intell...

which would be then used by the Chinese military to work on the machine vision for Chinese military drones that kill thousands of people.

Where are Chinese military drones killing thousands of people? That's Nato's prerogative

Is Google's AI work in China public though? If that's not the case, I see Dunford's point.

The DoD does not have a unit in Deepmind ensuring all of their findings are evaluated for potential military usage as far as I know. Whereas that's certainly going to happening in any Google AI lab on China.

Not sure, though if we are speculating, it's most likely a talent acquisition move for recruiting the best data scientists in China, rather than some conspiracy to help the Chinese military.

When they're all the same bucket...

Do you have evidence of this cooperation? Most stuff I've seen recently around cooperation between China and Google has been in creating a censored version of their search engine.

Google are not refusing. It is some of their employees that are resistant. The moment there is downturn in the job market the corporation will deal with them and resume working with USG

Looking from different angle, if Google hires a bunch of Chinese AI researchers to do civilian tech research. Wouldn't that cause a brain drain from the Chinese military and other Chinese companies?

By that token, Google publishing AI papers publicly erodes US military advantage given that China can use them to accelerate their home grown projects.

Companies are opening offices in China as a recruitment drive I bet. The whole industry is trying to buy up every last data scientist. It happens that China graduates more engineers and scientists than practically anyone else and so if you want to set up an R&D lab to snap up new recruits, setting them up near Beijing or tsinghua university isn’t a bad idea, just like foreign companies opening corporate R&D labs near Stanford or MIT.

‘U.S. companies must realize that in doing business with China, "they are automatically required to have a cell of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in that company and that it's going to lead to that intellectual property from that company finding its way to the Chinese military," Dunford said. "There's a distinction without a difference between the CCP and the government and the Chinese military."’

The argument is that the Chinese government imposes conditions that the DoD could never get away with (at least not easily and publicly), and Google is playing into their hands.

Seems like a lot of unfounded claims there. Dunford doesn't even know what projects the Beijing office is researching, for example, what if they're researching better Google Translate models for Mandarin?

All of this is red baiting. Sure, China is conducting economic espionage, overlooks domestic players stealing IP, and structures joint-venture companies to benefit their domestic economy. But it's not a playbook they invented, the US during its rise from an agrarian backwater violated British IP on a regular basis, the US also conducts espionage all over the world, including information used to seal deals for the military industrial and aerospace industries.

The real question is, how stupid do you think Google management is? After the last time they pulled out of China, do you really think they're going to host any "crown jewel" trade secret projects there?

Moreover, AI is firmly in the "publish almost everything" phase. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI, even Apple, are publishing ever major breakthrough they come up with. There's very little secrets going on. AlphaStar, BERT/Transformers, WaveNet, NMT, et al, the core underpinning of many products are being openly shared.

This is just straight up scaremongering by government spooks attempting to force tech companies into compliance on the grounds of patriotism.

You had me up till OpenAI.

Well, except GPT-2.

One of the breakthroughs in stealth aircraft came from the book of a Soviet scientist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev ). So it's not surprising that free sharing of information can inadvertently helping rivals.

One can't help but wonder if this line of thinking is in some part a consequence of Google's decision to put US government contracts on hold due to ethical concerns from its workers.

It is directly related. https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1106247367177764865

The bigger issue, in my mind is the DoD acquisitions process. It is severely out of step with the speed of business, and actively prohibits investing in companies who have foreign funding, esp. Chinese money. They have created a diode that pushes engineering talent away from the Pentagon and China is more than happy to help out. On the flip side, look at our nervousness about China putting money and talent into SV. Are you so sure they're not nervous about one of our companies doing the same?

It's really interesting to think about companies siding with governments now that funding comes internationally as well.

The concept of nation states is fading and the rise of corruption and oligarchy may take hold...

Saudi Arabia has a massive investment in Uber btw... this really prevents any type of criticism of these companies or the view that they're independent or that they should prioritize any specific country.

The sunset comes for US hegemony for the same reason that China will not succeed long term, or even medium term, for that matter: Decision making that is oppositional to what technocracy would demand. I think that it's fine to take culture into decision making most of the time, but when your process turns a full 180 from what observation suggests is the proper course of action, you will run into long term issues socially, economically, and militarily, and both of these nations are going to run head long into those.

What I fear is the damage that they will cause in the run up to these failures.

> what technocracy would demand

This is a somewhat complicated issue. Remember, eugenics, humors, etc were all previously part of "technocracy" view of the world. I'm not saying we should embrace religion/superstition/etc as an answer, but decision making in the name of science/technology is not as fool-proof as many believe.

That's why I mentioned observational data as well. The examples listed did not follow observational data, or followed flawed interpretations of data.

A contemporary example of the failure to follow what would be a true technocratic ideal would be how we are handling climate change.

Good riddance to US military advantage. I don't want to live in a unilateral world.

As much as there are things that are suspect in terms of the health and privacy of humanity inherent in Google's business model, I don't know why they get singled out. I did some consulting work for a company. It is private firm that is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary that isn't an American firm. Yet it has tech in the most sensitive places within the US government and DOD. And the US defence firms? Well, they are multinationals and (for money because there is no loyalty) will provide info/data/tech to anyone. Why would they do this? Because if Iran or China or Russia catches up with us, the US government will just give them more money to stay ahead.

The out of control capitalism in the US is the biggest threat to the health, wellbeing and security of its citizens. Google is just a symptom.

And for the record, I am not a communist. I believe human being need some (healthy) competition and that you should be able to work harder or smarter and get ahead. Just not to the extremes we have developed.

Is it just google or all business? As china gets wealthier and as they develop, doesn't that also erode our military advantage? Isn't the overall economic growth a greater threat than one company, no matter how important? Not sure why Google is being singled out.

How?

What work with China?

Sure the words of a top general are newsworthy but some fact checking would be nice.

Wow, this thread is funny as hell.

Wow, the comments on that website are pretty horrible :/

Notice any pattern in the writing style and sentence structure?

I think it's ironic that partnerships with the Pentagon get axed, but projects with an authoritarian state go forward. Seems like a double standard.

It probably has to do with potential revenue. They can afford their signaling when it’s relatively small money but they can’t pass up big money.

Because power corrupts.

Which project with authoritarian state went forward?

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/google-china-censored-se...

There was an article lately here at HN showing that there is a high probability the project didn't end. It just became secretive.

Not sure what I believe personally but if there are big money involved then I'd lean to believe that Google made a PR stunt (which your article advertises) and just got employees who can keep quiet to work on Dragonfly.

LOL, the author automatically assumes CCP trusted ... Google? Who openly rebelled against it in the past?

BTW, Google might be leader in AI, but China has its own AI scene. CCP doesn't need Google, period.

It's amazing what companies will put up with if China only hints at giving them "access to the Chinese market".

https://9to5google.com/2019/03/21/nokia-7-plus-sending-data-...

https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/nokia-at-risk-of-chin...

Perverse incentives. Stock goes down if you have low growth or miss expectations, and China is such a huge unaccessible market that would be easy gains if the door was opened.

Yep, short-sighted, too. Because in a few years all of your tech will have been stolen by the companies the government forces you to work with in order to enter the market. Obviously google knows this and someone has done a cost/benefit analysis and has decided that they will be personally rewarded so it's worth it. :)

This growth-at-all-costs mindset is ultimately crippling our society. We are essentially giving away our freedoms and giving into a country that is exploiting this mindset.

Apple included: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/04/apple-...

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