It would be nice to see some clarification on this from Google management. There's only so far you can go in high end robotics research before the pentagon comes a-knocking with wheelbarrows of freshly printed money.
in b4 "skynet"
"Dr. Raibert has said in the past that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor — it is merely trying to advance robotics technology. Google executives said the company would honor existing military contracts, but that it did not plan to move toward becoming a military contractor on its own."
If they are owned by Google and Google honors those contracts, then this is the day that Google publicly became a military contractor.
That was my fantasy upon reading the headline: "Google acquires and renders harmless army of kill-bots"
Sadly, I'm afraid it was a dream.
Besides not everyone believes DARPA is "evil".
The more important one is that by not doing new work for the military, they have just remove one of the hottest companies from the defence market.
I wonder whether the US government has ways of withholding regulatory approval of this deal because of this.
My own politics aside, there's a pragmatic concern: the NSA is part of the DoD. If Google is fulfilling military contracts, then it's going to be hard to do that and to push back hard against NSA.
Evil by whose definition is usually the question.