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Comment by charleslmunger | Hacker News Reader

What technology is google producing for the military?

Boston Dynamics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, produced the WildCat robot for DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program[0].

[0] http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/dso/programs/maximum_mobility_...

Most of that work was done before Google bought the company, and Google is not renewing those contracts.

Google is not a defense contractor. As frequently beaten as a dead horse on HN, Google sells ads, not weapons.

DARPA funds lots of projects that eventually get inherited by the private sector. SIRI funding at SRI was provided by DARPA, does that make Apple a defense contractor?

Guilt by association usually produces bad analysis.

That's somewhat misleading. Boston Dynamics made those robots for DARPA before Google acquired them. After Google acquired them, they announced that they would not seek further military contracts in the future.

I would guess that many HN readers tripped over the Boston Dynamics example because it doesn't seem to fit with this talk's overall theme of surveillance. Of course we all recognize Google is doing a tremendous amount of mining and predicting, but they aren't sending out cat-bots to collect the data, which makes it a bit of a non-sequitur.

FTA:

>One of the technologies the NSA uses for this feat is made by Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (‘PittPatt’), now owned by Google. We underestimate how much a company like Google is already part of the military industrial complex. I therefore can’t resist showing a new piece of Google technology: the military robot ‘WildCat’ made by Boston Dynamics which was bought by Google in December 2013.

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