Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Perhaps the illusion of globalization is making us perceive Google, Facebook and other international giants as global companies. Although, geniuses from around the world have significant contributions in the success of these technology companies, after all, they are loyal only to profit and the USA. When a war breaks loose, these data monsters are one of the best weapons against the opponents.
If doing so shaves a few percent off the error rate that's saving innocent lives, but it's also becoming an essential part of a process that kills innocent people?
I'd prefer standing against the slaughter.
Why do you draw the line at "directly attacked"? We have laws that make it a crime to conspire to murder. I don't think it's unreasonable to go after people who are conspiring to attack the US or US citizens.
Thank goodness the world is just slightly too big to be manipulated into a two-party deadlock.
That would depend on how closely that country's interests and values are aligned with my own. This is what arms export regulations are intended to address.
Because if they do, then they avoid the negative outcomes you describe.
You know what, most employees of Google or Facebook would vehemently disagree, including American citizens.
In fact, say anything like that in Google's internal groups and I'm sure some lawyerfolk will descend down on you, hissing "Would you please stop talking about what you have zero ideas about?" (These days it might even involve HR. After all, saying to half of your coworkers that their work amounts to being a fifth column wouldn't go too well...)
Blind had a poll and it showed the exact opposite, with a strong majority for Maven.
I suspect most of those Googlers who are OK with building a robot for Pentagon will probably be OK with building another for, say, the German military. (Why not? It's double the profit.)
During WWII the US was freeing the world from oppression; now it's more seen as the oppressor. The side you're on is pretty important (as it was during WWII).
This is even more true in the case of drone operations and so-called "AI" assisted actions, where operators sitting safely in air-conditioned facilities in the California desert can decide to remotely kill people with no risk to themselves.
I very much understand why a normal Google employee would prefer to have no part in that. Google understands it too, since it actively tried to keep the deal secret and minimized its impact when it became known.
So, generally and from what I understand about US drone operations, these strikes target people like ISIS and other Islamic extremists. Following this, in a general sense, the sides are the US and terrorist religious extremists.
The way you frame your point makes it sound like your on one side or the other. If that is the case, I would much rather be on the side of the US than the extremest who murder people for arbitrary reasons.
If that is not the way you meant for it to be framed, please correct me.
> This is even more true in the case of drone operations and so-called "AI" assisted actions, where operators sitting safely in air-conditioned facilities in the California desert can decide to remotely kill people with no risk to themselves.
Why does the risk to the warfighter matter? Would you rather they send infantry to go and assault the target? Why wouldn't you want to minimize the risk to the soldiers in the field by using tech to hit a target rather than men on the ground?
While that is the official reason/target, the question of who actually gets killed in those drone strikes is a contentious issue:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-peopl...
"without IBM's machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler's camps could have never managed the numbers they did." (This is the opinion of the writer of "IBM and the Holocaust" [0])
I bet Google is not looking forward to going down into history as:
"without Google's AI, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of TPU's, whether located on-site or off-site, the US's drones could have never managed the numbers they did."
Google is a different beast altogether. Recent events have shown that every aspect of our lives can be controlled by data.
Imagine a situation where Google can supply weapons to support human rights violations and simultaneously keep such information from reaching the masses.
Misinforming just 30% of US Population has brought people like trump to power.
Disclaimer: I work as a government contractor unrelated to Google but I chose the type of company to work for based on the TYPE of work they do. If I don't wanna build kill drones I don't work for companies known to do weapons or related engineering.
The only question for someone in the US should be "would I rather the US (and its allies) develop these weapons, or China develop these weapons, or Russia develop these weapons?".
But for the first time in history we have the tools to conduct intense warfare yet limit collateral damages and minimize cost in both human and material resources.
The engineers who worked on precision strike weapons/smart bombs should be applauded instead of ostracized, in the past we'd just carpet bomb the whole city to get rid of enemies, along with innocent civilians.
Obviously perpetual world peace without the need for weapons will be ideal, but I'm afraid I won't live long enough to see that day, so I'm totally fine with a more pragmatic approach at making war less costly than necessary.
If drones powered by AI can achieve that, I'm all for it.
On the other hand, weapons of old were used as part of actual wars. Precise weaponry seems to be making it too easy to kill off people without starting a war - like the US is doing with its drone strikes - which means it'll happen more. Also, I fear that the limit of precision strike weapons is being able to swiftly kill an arbitrary target anywhere, for cheap - which opens the way for ethnic cleansing, killing off political opponents, people harboring thoughts inconvenient to powerful people, etc.
Ultimately, I think precision weapons are better than blunt ones, but their development needs to happen in lock step with development of protection technologies - mostly social technologies, that would ensure those weapons can't be arbitrarily used by random politicians or countries without consequence. Unfortunately, it seems that in the last decades we've been losing social technologies - like the rule of law and trust in it.
And of course there's the real can of worms that most technologies have military applications and can often even be directly weaponized. Drones being an example by themselves, but of course every source of energy is another obvious one. Add most medical discoveries, or at the very least every advance in genetics. Furthermore, say a better hashmap also helps guided munitions work faster and more precisely ...
The problem with this argument is that it is self-contradictory when you analyze it thoroughly. Furthermore, reality seems to confirm that this is contradictory.
I guess everything is a double edged sword after all.
This a very good point. I agree with you. To prevent this requires people to be involved in our democracy. As a group, we need to elect people into office that have the proper moral and ethic values that empowers them to hold the military accountable for how they use these weapons. If this is the case, I believe that is would be EXTREMELY hard for the military to misuse these weapons.
This could be used as an excuse for pretty much anything.
> But for the first time in history we have the tools to conduct intense warfare yet limit collateral damages and minimize cost in both human and material resources.
And yet the invasion of Iraq was a tragedy on a mass scale. Also, by this logic should we supply dictators like Assad (president of Syria) drones and smart bombs next time there is a civil war so they can reduce the collateral damage of oppressing their own people?
If only Al Qaeda had had smart bombs. Then collateral damage would have been minimized /sarcasm /blackhumor
> The engineers who worked on precision strike weapons/smart bombs should be applauded instead of ostracized, in the past we'd just carpet bomb the whole city to get rid of enemies, along with innocent civilians.
Killing the civilians was the point of the bombing. Breaking the morale of the populace is an important strategy in total war (Such as WW2).
Also by this logic should we applaud white collar crooks for innovating to commit robbery without physical violence?
All robberies are amoral, but not all warfare are such. Imagine if we could have precision struck Hitler with a laser guided bomb instead of having to carpet bomb Dresden.
well, it's been in decline for a while now:
The recent wars are highly controversial and this is clearly recognised and protested by people working in SV.
There was fierce opposition to getting involved in all the wars that we now look back on as "just" - WW2 is the best example.
It's also one of the US's largest employers.
I am curious. In your eyes, what evil has the US military done?
However, AI weapons is something I strongly condemn. They raise many unsolved ethical questions, such as if they kill civilians who committed the war crime? How do you make sure they don't kill civilians?
If Google were revealed to be developing biological weapons or chemical weapons, I suspect you would have a different opinion.
War and military research throughout history have done many good things for quality of life, even back to the days of Archimedes fearing the Roman invasions, when it is more about defense not offense. This here ARPA/DARPA decentralized network of the internet is one of those good things along with self-driving cars, wifi, even microwave ovens come from radar research...and many others.
But what could possibly go wrong when military/war artificial intelligence is combined with all your data and knows everything about you? We have seen Terminator and heard about Skynet. What if what it knows about you is wrong or spoofed?
The ramifications could be much less than worst case Skynet but you can plainly see the way Youtube automation is even just for copyright, you gotta ask yourself, will it get everything right? Will YOU be deemed an opponent and a 'bad guy'? When the machine does it there is also a level of liability taken away.
Defensive military/war tools are one thing and lots of good from bad throughout history, but when defense is pre-emptive offensive actions like drones, the line gets fuzzy. Are we Archimedes or the Roman soldier that killed him?
Someone made a video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM
Dailymotion (French company) mirror:
I don't know the details, probably everything will be verified by a human (for now) and we're maybe talking only structures and patterns instead of persons.
But things may evolve quickly. AI can already drive a car and diagnose some illnesses better than humans can (there was a recent article about AI detecting melanoma).
The step to "decide who to kill better than a human" is awfully close. Personally I'm not against it all if better really means better. It's just crazy that cutesy Google with their maps and emails are now doing this.
It's shocking enough that Intercept would pounce on it. If it was Raytheon nobody would care.
I wonder if they'll update their terms & conditions. "Any selfies may be used to kill you". Al Qaeda better (not) be using Google Photos.
It is question of ethics and values. Plenty of companies and people were totally fine profiting from holocaust.
US is killing thousands of people in countries we are not in war with with no trial.
In my opinion everyone in the world should have the same rights as us. Otherwise it is just hypocricy and we just live a huge lie.
How would anyone feel in America if somebody was killed without trial by foreign nation?
Also this behaviour long term is completely self defeating. Military wise nukes make everyone equal? Are we planning to keep nukes out of hands of our enemies for centuries or we just planning to kill everyone who is against our policies?
Do you mean helping in the sence FB helps us socialize and Google helps us search?
Helping without expectation of reward and incentivizing further business?
Not a pro bono work from the looks of it so profit is expected and good place in future competition with other contractors.
Perhaps I am nitpicking but "help" doesn't belong here.
If the whole world begins to see Google as a weapon then they will take defensive measures.
WW2 was different; the nazis had invaded most of Europe, were committing genocide, etc.
Don't forget, there's another side to building weapons: the better your weapons, the lower your threshold for starting a war. AI weapons are especially dangerous: they permit politicians to start wars without risking citizen's lives, thus reducing the natural incentive in democracies to avoid war. Now put that power in the reins of Trump. Does it sound good?
April 2018: We developed all that technology by reading your e-mails and analysing your daily life, now we will make military gear with all the expertise we know about the world and the human population so that political actors can kill more efficiently. No biggie.
PS: We control the information flow, we can start and stop political conflicts by selectively displaying information but we would totally not use it to sell military gear. Oh, we also don't claim to be not evil anymore but no biggie. We also have established political ties and spend tons of money on lobbying but we would definitely not extract wealth by starting political conflicts and selling gear that is designed to contain the specific conflicts to the people in power that we spend a lot of money to keep in touch. No biggie.
I see that claim thrown around a lot but nothing ever backs that up.
There's a study conducted by Facebook about controlling emotions by means of content curation. If Facebook can do it, Google too can do it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
Google is the dominant search engine and these days they even host the content through AMP and they own the most popular web browser and mobile computers operating system. They have not only the means to reach people and curate the content generated by other people, they can also change the content created by other people(AMP pages) and disguise their actions(since they control the app that displays the content).
Let's travel in time and go back to the WW2 days and mention Hitler as any proper online political discussion would eventually do.
Don't you think that it would be very convenient for Hitler if he had a way to show "how awful Jews are"? Wouldn't he loved it if Germans search results about economical crisis or gas prices would display how "greedy Jewish bankers are destroying the lives of honest German workers" or any other political or cultural Nazi propaganda?
Unless we switch to cryptographically signing all the content we create and learn to distrust any content that's not signed and have a way to verify that the signed content curation is not politically influenced, giants like Google and Facebook would have the power to make/break countries, start/stop lynches or even genocide.
There's a reason why China doesn't allow search results about Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and all the governments are trying to find a way to control the information flow.
Companies that supported holocaust on Poles and Jews did nothing wrong, because they were helping military?
After being called out, both companies posted an apology/explanation on their websites, where they claimed they didn't know that building a deep packet inspection system for Iran would result in human rights violations.
After having been developed for Iran, the system was also sold to Egypt. This is one reason why the Black Mirror-esque tracking/surveillance situation in China should scare everyone: This system now exists. Consider the inefficiency of government IT projects when they need to be built, compared to when they can be bought. I don't know if China would sell it, of course, but the mere existence and that it can now be deployed elsewhere, which is of course still no small task because a lot of it is probably very specific to China, but even then, scary as hell.
But I digress. So you say they helped their military with pride during WWII (what side was Siemens on, btw?)
Is there really nothing wrong with Siemens developing DPI infrastructure for a country that is known for its human rights abuses? (Siemens claiming not knowing what it would be used for is either a bullshit excuse or a dangerous lack of foresight).
So is there also really nothing wrong with Google developing AI for flying military robot plane-missile-things for this other country that is also known for human rights abuses? (just not on its own citizens, usually)
Anyway, my point is, it doesn't matter whether a corporation supports its own military/country when developing technology that comes strong ethical questions (which is the case for military drones, or DPI).
Google should consider their own choice in the light of whether this technology will be used for good things, not just whether the military of the particular country they're developing it for considers it a good thing, because usually the military considers whatever grants them more power to be good things.
Google should also consider that there is no "when a war breaks loose", that's not how the world works today. Besides, the USA claims to be currently "at war" anyway.
So when they develop modern weapons for the US military, they should consider that in the light of what the US military is doing right now and what it has been doing recently, not in the light of them taking the noble high ground in a hypothetical future war situation that conveniently has a clear "good side" and a clear "bad side".
Because before that hypothetical future war will happen those weapons WILL have been used for whatever the US military pleases currently. And that's not always good things.
Maybe you see if, you substitute 'military' for it's historic contributions to mankind: "I don't see anything wrong for a company of a particular country helping «an organization that is specialized in killing and very likely to perform torture, rape and genocide»"
Or is it that police can drop literal bombs on Black neighborhoods and few will ever know about it?[1]
Or is it that when I'm in the US, I'm more likely to be murdered by police than to be murdered by anyone while in Japan?
Or is it that Chicago has a murder rate 5x that of Somalia?
Or WMD lies? Gulf of Tonkin lies?
You may love this, but does everyone?
Wolf Blitzer said he does: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...
But hey, it's a private company, no harm, no foul.
Sure, it’s fine but let’s call a spade a spade. Will Google update their global T&Cs to say “we are an American company serving American national interests and by using our services you agree to your data being used for that purpose”? Of course they won’t!
- If you're American, you should support Google developing technology for the US military.
- If you're human, you should support a foreign policy that only considers military action as a last resort.
- If you're human, you should support early, aggressive, global regulation of the military applications of AI and drones. We made this mistake with nuclear. We leveled Hiroshima, we leveled Nagasaki, we fueled decades of animosity between the Soviets and the West that still plagues the world today. We need to do better next time. The biggest abuser might be the US again but it could just as easily be China.
- If you're human, you should support regulation that forbids Google from using your personal for military applications without your express and informed consent.
Substitute Google for any other tech giant's name.
The history of global regulations on the military application of useful military technologies is not too impressive. The second a shooting war breaks out those rules will be forgotten, giving a huge head-start to anyone shady enough to ignore them wholesale.
"AI" has been used in war since WW2. Strapping an IED onto a quadcopter isn't a shocking idea, and the economics of 1000+ stealth-killer UAVs vs 1 not-that-stealth Navy Boat are pretty undeniable over time...
AIs and Drones are inevitably coming to warfare -- they're here already. Economic unions that make warfare unthinkable may be a better long term bet (thanks, Trump!).
> We leveled Hiroshima, we leveled Nagasaki, we fueled decades of animosity between the Soviets and the West that still plagues the world today
Mmmm that animosity was not created by bombing two Japanese cities, among many, with a new weapon type. That animosity was a freight train that could have kept WWII going another decade, and there was a real problem of how that war might look for our side had a resurgent Russia conquered Japan early in. They took Manchuria just a few days after the second bomb, IIRC, so their threat was far from hypothetical.
Those bombs were sending a clear and distinct message to the Soviets. It worked. I'd rather have animosity than a nuclear WWIII.
I don't think that's true at all. Since WWII we've been quite successful at reducing the use and proliferation of destructive military technologies through treaties. Certainly they don't work 100% of the time and they work in tandem with other forces but they've been a key part of the solution. See https://www.armscontrol.org/treaties
So far we've been able to prevent a lot of use of bio weapons. Many have said they want to do the same with AI and have already started doing that.
Why? Americans are not humans?
The public has put their trust into Google for 20 years. We supported them. We cheered them on. We have voluntarily given them all our personal data. Our emails. Our instant messages. Our voices. All of it feeds into their massive database for them to mine.
We put our faith into them, in the hopes that they would honor their creed, that they would do no evil.
But gradually, that facade has faded away. Their accumulation of personal data, beyond what is necessary for them to perform their work. And now this. The utilization of their wealth and knowledge, to push forward the state-of-the-art in the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence.
There is nothing that will stop this. The military will find a defense contractor to do their bidding. But Google can voluntarily elect to remove themselves from this sector. Let some other company do it. Let someone else figure it out. The blood of dead innocent civilians will be on their hands. You don't see Raytheon, Boeing, or Northrop crying about it.
By doing the military's bidding, then Google is now far scarier than Microsoft ever was. For those who don't know, when they coined the phrase, Do no evil, they meant it in relation to the Microsoft Borg of the 1980s and 90s. Microsoft now seems like a sheep in comparison to Google.
I think it's time to disconnect Google from our lives. But, it's hopeless. They are everywhere.
I work at Google but opinions are my own.
This is actually the thing I don't understand. Could you or someone please kindly explain it to me?
What is "evil" about working with the military or developing weapons?
I've seen this whole "Google is betraying its 'do not evil' by working with the military" as fact so many times but I've yet to get a better explanation for why it's actually evil besides some variation of "the military is bad"
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-oba...
It’s not the military that is evil, it’s this particular program in the eyes of many.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333
Disclaimer: I am also fortunate to work at Google and my opinions are my own.
In case your question is serious: There are still some of us who believe in peace as an end-goal for us humans, as a race. See Kant's "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Peace:_A_Philosophic...) for a more detailed view on the subject. "Working with the military or developing weapons" are two activities that strongly work against achieving that goal (even though there would be some who would say that in the short term they do the opposite, i.e. that the military's purpose is to bring peace).
Others will just see it as a necessity and that every company should work and help the government when they are asked to defend the country and maintain the global status quo.
for some that conduct is a virus, for others just a symbiosis, but it's easy to see where they come both of them.
I don't work in the US. I'm not a US citizen. I don't support the actions of the US military. Hell I _really_ don't want to be involved with the weapons development branch of the US military. That is one reason why me and a lot of Googlers are opposed to this.
Would you be happy for Google to work with the military of another country you have zero control over that has very questionable motives?
That your work will be used to kill people?
I'm kind of surprised that needs spelling out.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-dron...
Now imagine removing decision making from drone operators and making the thing dumb and autonomous, so a computer vision based solution just shoots anything resembling its target.
If shit goes south, just blame the machine. It's nobody's fault. It's a plausible deniability paradise.
See, if your military or government is killing people, and you work for them, assist them, or let them, you are also killing people. We have a saying: "Imagine it's war and nobody shows up".
I fear this discussion is about if you follow the narrative that US military drone strikes are a purely defensive measure, unavoidable, or serve some greater cause. Large parts of the general public outside of the US at least are of the opinion the US military and associated mercenary companies have been (and still are?) killing (innocent) people on the other side of the world, for dubios reasons. Helping them build weapons, under this assumption, equals helping them kill people.
Even the most accurate AK-47 is intended to kill people.
You have to understand that many people both at HN and at Google are not Americans. The United States is founded on great democratic values, but in the past sometimes failed to uphold them in relationship to other countries (dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, torturing in Guantanamo and the NSA's prism program which directly affected Google).
And for anyone playing at home, the "if not us, someone else" argument doesn't wash. We as a society have to draw a line. Maybe someone else will do it, but we need to fight them and not allow it, not just take our money and put our head in the sand. Just like the backlash about the NSA putting backdoors in routers and the more recent announcement of Amazon enabling a police state by scanning and identifying faces in pictures and videos. I'm worried that this will continue to push us to some pre-crime bullshit but instead of oracles with magic powers, it will be some half ass AI based on factors like race, gender, neighborhood and time of day.
Watch this video[1] and realizing that Project Maven is contributing and enhancing the capability of the slaughter drones and knowing that current U.S. President(or future presidents) or any command chain above the drone operator( including the operator) can kill anyone (military personnel or not, in a war or not, in conflict zones or not, American citizens or not, yes there was a precedence from President Obama) with or without due process, with Google's AI, doesn't give you chills?
Yeah yeah I know if Google didn't do it someone else will. But for a company who's been claiming "Do No Evil" as motto from early on, I am holding Google at a higher standard - but obviously it has fallen from the moral highground. Hence being evil.
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/20/watch-out-for-killer-...
Then these soldiers go on site in another country risk their lives and take out specific bad guys without shooting too many bystanders.
You can then argue whether those were really bad guys and whether that specific operation needed to be carried out.
Building drones which are controlled remotely(or even worse by AI) to kill a wedding with kids where possibly a few people were the bad guys is NOT OK.
Drones facilitate political/military cop-outs.
For extra credit you can watch a few seasons of Homeland. Sure it is fiction but the issues are there.
To reiterate: even if you support working for military there is difference on what kind of weapons you work on
Some would define US military actions as just and civilian casualties (for example) as unfortunate. Others might define them as outright evil.
Almost nobody thinks they are “evil” there’s usually some kind of justification.
https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-emplo...
I think that the problem is more specific than working with the military or developing weapons, and it's important to disentangle the more broad concerns with military work versus the concerns about this specific project occurring at Google. I personally would not like to work on developing weapons but it's definitely much harder to defend a position such as "building ships for the U.S Navy is evil".
The problem with Project Maven is plugging A.I. into drones. Sure, you can argue that A.I. today is limited and the technology isn't there to make them autonomous. However, perception/object detection is a huge component of what would be needed as part of an intelligence that can run a drone autonomously.
Then you arrive at basically 2 questions
1. Is Google's participation Project Maven making it easier for the Department of Defense to develop fully automated drones, or will they always leave a human in the loop?
2. Is enabling the Department of Defense to develop automated drones ethical?
#1
Yes, Project Maven enables automated drones. Sure, the Department of Defense could get automated perception technology from somewhere else, but that is in fact what the parent post is proposing Google should let the Department of Defense do. Also, A.I. advances very quickly and if the project continues there may be other ways in which Google is enabling full automation of drones, for example reinforcement-learning based control. I personally do not trust that the Department of Defense will not develop automated drones if they have the capability to do so. This is because they will probably see it as an arms race, and automating drones will serve most of the aims of their organization far too well to be put off indefinitely.
#2
I believe it is unethical to facilitate the development of fully autonomous, intelligent weapons. It's hard to make a stronger case than the video someone else has linked elsewhere in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM -The potential for chaos and destruction is very high. -The capability to find and eliminate targets will likely precede the ability to make ethical decisions, and human ethical oversight of the kill decisions will be reduced especially if the drones are scaled up For more on this check out http://autonomousweapons.org/
I wouldn't use the word evil, but I feel it is inappropriate, since Google is a global company. We should be more precise, it is working with the military of one specific country, and developing weapons for one specific country (U.S.).
I am also an user of Google services, which also collect my personal data to provide me with more personalized experience. Ok. But what if, hypothetically, a war will break out, and army of my country will fight against U.S. army, which is helped by Google? It just doesn't feel right.
It's a tricky question since a strong military is obviously necessary to protect a nation, yet at the same time - our military's purpose has long since shifted from defensive to offensive - and those offensive actions have been of very dubious value at extreme cost, both monetary and in the loss of life inflicted and suffered.
Well, they kill people, see.
No! It's that simple.
There is a reason why we separated executive, judicativ and legestative.
But that's a lesson to be learned by blood.
What if the training data of the AI is skewed and furthers the violent oppression of a minority, who's responsible for that? Is it the data collectors? The software engineering team?
If you work on weapons which are then used to kill people, you are complicit in those murders.
AI automation of weapons and surveillance systems is probably going to kill a large fraction of living humans. I'm not talking skynet, just about automation we could easily achieve right now. Anyone who works on those systems will be complicit in the subsequent genocides.
I guess this question is only asked by those who are confident that these weapons won't be used against them.
I understand your point, but Microsoft does an awful lot of business with the military.
Last year they won a contract to put every employee in the DOD on Win 10(1).
Not sure it's particularly MORE evil for Google to supply AI support to the Military than for Microsoft to enable the office drones systematically organize weapon shipments, troop deployments, manage body counts, etc.
(1) https://www.geekwire.com/2016/microsoft-wins-927m-support-co...
Microsoft sells a product that literally anyone (but Iran and North Korea) can buy. You can buy it or not. And you can buy extended support for it (or not).
Do you really consider these the same?
There’s never been any allegations that everyone’s Word and Excel documents are being read by MS, has there? Or that they read every email sent via Outlook and Exchange? Not the same thing at all
No, it's not. That's entirely subjective. It's only a conflict of interest in the heads of people who believe the U.S. military is evil.
The problem is that Google has a different interpretation of evil than yourself, and you're struggling to cope with that reality.
Those that assign human behavig or ideas of better good to multinationals are fooling themselves.
But over the past few days I have given myself a long-term life-goal:
One day I will delete my Google Account.
I will try and make all decision in accordance with this. I already don't have a Google (or Apple) phone, I use my own domain name for email. But there are so many tiny little ways you could lock yourself in (e.g. social auth into a valuable website).
It's a big step to pull the plug and expunge Google from your life. But avoiding taking steps in the wrong direction at least buys you some time.
Working for the US military is not doing evil.
>>> The public has put their trust into Google for 20 years.
who's fault is it ?
Attempt 1) googles fault! They made an awesome product! (and even promised at the start that they “won’t be evil”.)
Attempt 2) the govts fault! They didn’t stop these firms from cornering the whole market! I don’t care that the govt isn’t prescient!
Attempt 3) my fault! I was not able to withstand or educate myself to deal with the massive amount of technological manipulation and awesome product design thrown my way!
I think blame is a non workable concept here.
Basic human decency should be the answer to why you shouldn't help kill even more.
Most of those emails are wrong.
Maven may be wrong at any price or size. But Google's characterization of it as a minor project doesn't seem contradicted by these emails.
In order to do any work for the government, you have to show that you have have done the work before to a satisfactory standard, and that you've done it for a type of agency similar to the one requesting proposals for the work.
So, while a given project might be nearly worthless, you do it so that you can say that you did it, so that you're eligible to do it again in the future. The side, but still major benefit of this is that it excludes would-be competitors from getting that qualification, adding barriers to them for getting similar work like this in the future.
Smaller companies, even companies that do exactly, or even only a given thing, often find it hard to get work doing their chosen thing because they don't have these past performances. To get their first qualified performance, they typically have to partner up with a larger company that has qualifications for work at the agency (think Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc.), and do small bits of work as a sub-contractor for them until you have enough documented performance to do the work on your own.
Whether or not these particular military contracts are worth much, it opens the door for a larger variety of contracts, which can be worth tens of billions per year.
You might find that Internet tropes about terrorism to be less than accurate.
For example, I just finished "Rise and Kill First" [1] a rather enlightening book about Israel's use of targeted assassinations going back almost 100 years. When I started reading Israel wasn't in the news, but then the whole Iran/US nuclear deal fiasco hit, and it made Netanyahu's actions all the more clear. Note, I'm not saying justified but rather that I now understand why Israel thinks and acts the way it does, and how sometimes this clashes with their normally close allies like the US.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Kill-First-Targeted-Assassinatio...
Before that, I read "Ghost Wars" [2] another beast of a book that covers US involvement in the Middle East going back to the late 1970's up to 9/11. Fascinating book about the struggle to dominate Afghanistan by regional and world powers.
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-Septe...
Before that, it was "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War" [3] about the history of the CIA and the US's foreign policy in the last 100+ years.
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Foster-Dulles-Allen-Secret/d...
Key point - These books look past recent events to provide an mostly complete understanding of these conflicts that you can't get with 20 minute Google searches and Wikipedia snippets.
Just like most disciplines, it's not possible to get even a basic understanding of this issue with only a year or two of study.
The email discussion is mainly about potential revenue if they were to win the JEDI contract it's not about maven or 'expecting the drone ai work to grow'.
Also worth noting that Google isn't the only contractor for maven yet they are made as such in most articles.
As for the issue at large: Microsoft and Amazon have recently surpassed Google in market value and that is largely due to cloud, they also manage to not have their employees leak internal material to the press and protest publicly, and I think Google should look into achieving that.
The reason Google are experiencing leaks and taking flak for this is that it's only Google that ever claimed to be a superior moral actor. Amazon and Microsoft, for all their faults, never claimed to be much more than tech companies that want to make money - the extent of Microsoft's moral ambition was "computers are good, let's put a computer in every home", a goal which is hard to argue with given the attendant positive consequences of computing for society.
Google, on the other hand, has frequently made the following claims:
• It won't "be evil", whatever that means.
• It has an ethics board, for AI specifically.
• That it withdrew from the Chinese search market due to being unwilling to go along anymore with the government's censorship.
• That it "believes in the empowering and democratizing effect of putting information in the hands of everyone, everywhere"
• From its code of conduct, that "everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct"
And I would say in general, having once been a part of it, that parts of Google's workforce are quite convinced of their own moral superiority. Look at the relentless feminist virtue circus around the firing of Damore, a man whose crime was merely to point out that men and women have different interests and that's why so many jobs have unbalanced ratios. The company's top management went on TV and said they were convinced firing him was the "right" thing to do.
Well you can't do all those things and then get upset when employees start leaking behaviour they feel to be unethical. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Summary: Google gets shit for working on the drone strike program for money, because (a) it has more money than it knows what to do with already and (b) it has constantly claimed to be a new kind of tech company that is ethically superior to the previous generation. Other firms lack either (a) or (b) or both.
There was a good decade where google was the coolest place to work in the country. Many of the smartest people channeled not only their time but their passion into propelling the idea of google forward based on that understanding.
Some of the brightest minds happen to be idealists and visionaries (Gates, Musk, Wales) who want to work toward a post-war future where information is abundant and there is no scarcity. Putting power into the hands of the few seems like a step in the wrong direction to us idealists.
I was nodding until this. Even if you agree with Damore, you can't pretend his argument was "men and women simply have different interests."
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
"One constraint we do have— that wasn’t part of a committee but part of the acquisition terms—is that no technology coming out of Deep Mind will be used for military or intelligence purposes." -Demis Hassabis
Google has its own AI research operation that's not the same as DeepMind. But even if it didn't, all they'd have to do is wait for some third party academics to publish a paper that improved slightly on a DeepMind paper, and then they could use it and say the "technology" didn't come from DeepMind. After all, where does tech come from? Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
I hold the controversial (and often dismissed) opinion that Google is dying. I assert they are dying in part because they built a company around search advertising before they knew how to build a company, their initial success gave them the confidence and agency to create structural impediments to their ability to do anything but search advertising. And the search advertising market is not only saturated it is getting more competitive as the easy gains to be made there have already been milked for what they are worth.
I support that opinion on the meager evidence of how they more and more cravenly monetize properties that they previously kept free of such things, their repeated failed attempts at building any other business outside of search that brings anything close to the margins they need for their business model to work, and the lack of 'barriers' to other well funded and durable companies from taking away everything that is special from them. (Bing, Uber, Cruise, Facebook, Apple, Etc.) They get less and less per click and they spend more and more to buy more traffic for their search boxes as documented in their financial statements for the last decade.
They have repeatedly come under attack from outside agencies which see their use of, and exploitation of data about people as either anti-competitive or a violation of basic human rights. Those efforts have resulted in fines and legislation that has been cutting off other ways to monetize the traffic of their place in search.
From that misguided perspective, military contracts make total sense. What they have is a tremendous infrastructure that can be wielded by a relatively small number of engineers to do amazing things. For now, that capability is unique. By turning it from a cost center into a profit center (or even a less cost center) it can help them make the profits they need to keep things rolling. When I was working there I got to see what spending 4 billion dollars a year on infrastructure buys you. It rivals what nation states can field, it rivals what the US government can field. Renting that out to a price insensitive buyer for a unique asset? Sounds like saving yourself from dying to me.
I don't see how Google can go out of business in the next 10 years given their cash reserves. Eg: If they lost 2 billion dollars every year they could still keep doing that for decades.
I'm pretty confident that they'll still be around in some form 20 years from now as well.
I think the cash is an interesting challenge for its own reason though. Historically, public companies that held large fungible reserves like cash, were vulnerable to so called "Wall Street Raiders." These are people who would do the math and figure out that the assets of the company were worth more then the shares would indicate, they would buy up a controlling interest and then take apart the company, paying themselves a tidy profit. Traditionally that can't work on Google because the voting power of the class A stock is so much higher than the class B stock, however if the stock price were to crash, it becomes possible to make a play for all of that cash. The math is convoluted, and the founders need to continue their current steady sales of stock (which becomes class B when they sell it) but that flip happens before they run out of cash. I wonder sometimes if the IBM buyback of its own stock has been a plan to prevent this from happening there.
But timing the demise is secondary to the awareness on the part of the senior management that they can see their demise as a real and tangible thing. That awareness leads to stress and a willingness to do things counter to their established history in order to facilitate that survival and mitigating that threat to their existence.
The original question was "Did their moral compass shift?" and my observation is that the fear of death is a large metallic object which, when it gets too close to ones moral compass, deflects the needle in perhaps unexpected ways.
That Google's fear of dying is growing and their moral compass is being subverted in the name of survival is a hypothesis for a theory that explains their current behavior. I believe that the theory is both testable and falsifiable given information that we'll get going forward. As any good theory should be predictive, this theory predicts that as they fail to find a successful new business to supplant search advertising the ways in which they attempt to make money will become more and more disconnected from what their corporate culture claims to value. Further, if they do find a successful side business, their corporate cultural claims will re-emerge and they will once again make choices based on their cultural aspirations rather than for the sake of additional revenue.
If they continue to do more and more evil things, even after their future survival is no longer in doubt, it will show that my theory is completely wrong, they were simply evil to begin with and dying or not dying had nothing to do with the public shift in their willingness to be evil.
Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do.
No company that actually believes in the maxim "Don't be evil" would participate in such a technology, much less promote it, or worst of all, lead it.
This is just wrong and not helpful to the discussion. Have you read (or even seen thanks to YT) anything about how "drone targeting" by US forces is actually accomplished besides media outrage when a bomb misses? Mistakes are made, but targeting is far, far from indiscriminate. And being "unaccountable" is not exclusive to drone warfare.
"Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do."
If my local criminal network detonated a bomb at my local coffee shop, killing 50, 100, 200 of my friends and family members, and then proceeded to do so every week, yes - I'd encourage rocket launchers from 1000 feet, 10,000 feet or 10 feet if that was the most effective way to stop them.
I try to avoid comparisons to the Nazis (even though many more people seem to be doing it these days with Trump in power), but isn't Google basically providing the government the technology to more effectively kill people in the Middle East, too? That's what it is at the end of the day, isn't it?
History will remember Google for this - especially when its technology will be used for some horrifying stuff in the future (and it will be). Right now we haven't even seen its true consequences yet, so it's easy for some to dismiss it as no big deal.
No, the world has become a safer place for us because we live in nations with nuclear weapons, and they're a pretty good deterrent for attacks by other nations. The world is still a very unsafe place for many people, partly because of this self-proclaimed 'cop'. If you think the US has this military might for any other reason than ensuring it's own political and economical wellbeing, I'd like to know what it is. It sure isn't to "keep the peace" - they're selling a bit too many weapons to questionable figures for that.
it's become safer for everyone:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ourwor...
which obviously isn't to say that nobody dies in wars anymore.
Or maybe the US just had a problematic idea of what police should be doing, which explains a lot of our other problems.
More directly, the US has directly toppled many democratically elected governments, undermined sovereign political processes via propaganda and support for anti-democratic political groups and targeted economic pressure, supported American and multinational corporations in their unethical and often criminal behavior around the world, given money and weapons and training to armed opponents of various democratic governments (who then used those for slaughtering civilians) ...
Not to mention being one of the world’s foremost producers and distributors of small arms (that end up in the hands of local gangsters, child soldiers, ...).
As a particularly tragic example, look to the case of Guatemala. The democratically elected president of Guatemala demanded that the United Fruit Company – who owned an incredibly high proportion of all arable land in the (starving) country – sell back some portion of the land which they were not currently using at the price it had been assessed to be worth for tax purposes. Unfortunately for Guatemala, the Dulles brothers (CIA director and Secretary of State), as well as various other members of the Eisenhower administration, had a direct business interest in United Fruit. The US toppled the government, installed a friendly dictator, and kicked off 2 generations of civil war in which a shockingly high proportion (5% or something?) of all Guatemalans were killed, including the mass-murder of many villages by thugs with machetes.
It is true that the presence of nuclear weapons has prevented for the past ~70 years the break-out of another “hot” war directly between nuclear-armed states. On the other hand, if someone slips up when nuclear weapons are involved, we’ll all be screwed.
The US should not be out droning people in other countries except in explicit self defense ("they might have been going to attack us" doesn't count). That is my opinion, you are free to disagree with it. If "the goal is to kill fewer people," the best way to do that is to... not kill people.
Also, the fact that representatives I voted for voted in favor of extrajudicial killings of people in other countries is not something I'm happy about. I wish every day that the US could abolish its first past the post election system so that I could vote for candidates I actually agree with rather than being forced to vote for someone I sort of agree with.
Are you talking about UN? If not when was the last time the US took the initiative of a peace-keeping mission?
Arguably it would be more than 25 years ago, in the Balkans and even there, it can be argued that this was under the auspices of the UN.
In the 70 years you mention, US has often been the lesser evil, but especially since USSR's fall, it is not clear at all that it is a force for good. Its last strong engagement, in Iraq, was a totally evil and misguided operation that made the world less stable.
Its refusal to help in Syria before ISIS took hold there is another blow. The crass incompetence of the Bush administration on both Iran and North Korea, and the apathy of the Obama administration on NK, led to a less safe world.
US' recent interventions are sources of instability and now US' policies seem to be guided from Moscow and align more often with the views of dictatorships than that of democracies.
In such a context, wondering about the ethics of improving US army's capabilities makes a lot of sense.
Clearly they're talking about Team America: World Police.
war vs. war profiteering
the notion of voting as a proxy for consent
anything is worth it
bad people in the world, and they aren't here. they're there.
kinetic energy? targets? condescendence?
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Ignoring whether or not the world actually does, or how vehemently they might disagree, the rightness of a thing isn't measured at all by how many people think the thing is right.
Your superficial statements about ‚bad guys‘ and ‚thugs‘ that only respond to ‚power‘ led me to believe you‘ve watcht one to many movies. Destabilizing countries doesn‘t bring peace to the world.
Edit: adding stuff.
IMO, most anti-progressive views spawn from anti-USA views.
Isn't the US responsible for a lot of the instability in the middle-east and South America?
As I type this I have this vaguely plausible fear that someone in the NSA is flagging my general sentiment and incorrectly labeling me for something or the other even though I'm mostly a pacifist.
People can think what they want I guess. It just has more of an effect on the world than I thought it used to so I feel a little saddened watching this new dark age come about.
for god's sake. there are really people thinking this way.
Google is allowing their employees to be evil now
It was always at the end but until approximately a month ago, Google actually led its Code of Conduct with "don't be evil" in the very first sentence. That was removed. Then again "don't be evil" was in the second paragraph. That was removed.
Sources:
April 21, 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/i...
May 4, 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180504211806/https://abc.xyz/i...
"“Don’t be evil” has been part of the company’s corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing.” However, Google retained its original “don’t be evil” language until [late April or early May 2018]. [...] The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”"
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-dont-be-evil/
Moral compass out of sight, out of mind, is probably what the leadership must have been thinking, especially after the recent protest against Maven from a few thousand employees (which seems to have resulted only in the leadership trying to appease them by promising some secret bullshit "ethics rules")
They need to own up the responsibility for their decisions and of course be willing to put on with the media theme that "Google - the company that supplies AI tech to the military with possible usage in war". Denying that is what makes them look even fishier.
I already distrust the company for anything related to privacy. Just one more reason to hate them more.
This absurdly cowardly thinking is how people justify atrocities for money
But, cat calling a company on forums whilst there are other companies that openly build weapons is just useless in my opinion.
All businesses exist to make money but if the pushback to a publicly perceived immoral act is great enough then they won’t do the immoral things. For example, I can say as a software developer that I would prefer not to work at google over my current employer because I don’t want to do immoral things. I do have a perceived moral outlook of the company’s leadership as a whole and that’s a decision that I can make. Not sure why you seem to think that’s stupid
Also at the end of the day, nobody is absolved of guilt from doing something just because it made them money. That’s possibly the dumbest way to justify doing something as good
Being the best at deploying violence is how you defend against the chaos elsewhere. This isn't about "evil corporations" or misguided intentions, it's about human nature and how there will always be someone somewhere willing to cause harm. The only way to defeat them is by being better at it, but with the appropriate judgement to make sure its in proper defense.
AI has already been a part of warfare for decades and the value of anything other than being the best is rapidly diminishing because of the exponential advantage that modern technology produces. You either stay ahead or lose the war before it's ever begun. Given that choice, I would much rather have the strongest military with all available resources and talent rather than worry and hope the rest of the world stays friendly, until the day it isn't.
I believe the only reason American civilians like us have been able to enjoy peace is because we dropped a ton of bombs to blast tiny countries out of the sky and we also have a history of fighting wars not to win, but not to lose. If Americans are willing to sacrifice their people and resources for a tiny country in the middle of nowhere, imagine what they would do to you if you attacked them or their interests.
I was watching a documentary about the Schwarzman Scholars, and Schwarzman said something like out of the 4 or 5 times where a superpower was challenged by a new rising superpower, it led to armed conflict 3 times. I haven't been able to find an article to back up this claim so would appreciate if anyone could point out if it's blatantly wrong or if there's a source. Either way, there might be a new superpower.
This is completely ludicrous. There is no military threat to the US beyond nukes. Nuclear weapons have obsoleted wars between great powers. Tiny countries are zero threat to the USA. They cannot invade; they can do almost nothing. At best, they can kill a few hundred individuals at a time by sponsoring terrorism, far fewer people than are killed by vehicles in an average June.
The reason the USA starts wars in far away countries is to maintain a sphere of influence and protect a philosophy of government and running economies that keeps the USA affluent via trade. It is not, in no way, about defense of the USA; if you really think that, you've been deeply hoodwinked by some military warrior code bullshit. The USA's military program is foreign policy for, ultimately, economic reasons.
I'd love to see how many millions (billions?) the federal government has pumped into this myth.
Hell, the entire America's Army initiative was literally a recruitment tool for kids who played video games. It's depressing to think about the number of kids who eventually paid a blood tax because a state-sponsored video game convinced them to join.
AI, which is the topic here, changes that dynamic completely, and with drones and cyber warfare there is no need for world-ending firepower when you can just shutdown leadership and modern society instead.
And yes, I want the country that I'm a citizen of to stay both free, powerful and wealthy. The point is that we are on a path to building wartime capabilities that will put one country far ahead of everyone else, and I absolute want that to be my country. I would think you would want that for yours as well.
But many have actually signed treaties not to use them (I believe even to not develop certain kinds).
Actually the more advanced our technologies get the bigger the threads.
We must be able to do better than that.
And there's evidence of altruism's superiority even on a biological level. There are some species of bacteria that when they run out of food will form a protective spore to wait for better times or form a stalk to move to a new location to find food. Those whose bodies form the base of these structures are effectively sacrificed, even if they aren't intelligent enough to be aware of the act.
That said, it's simply undeniable that at the end of the day the force is the intrinsic and most rudimentary base of everything society has become.
Public parks, schools, social welfare programs, etc... All founded on a platform of violence and murder against anyone who challenges their authority.
To deny that is folly.
Except your clients are totally dependent on your product with absolute zero alternative choice.
Most military suppliers don't depend on private end customers so they can be successful without worrying about public opinion.
I think Google is becoming more and more like companies Exxon Mobile or former giants like Malboro. People absolutely need their products so they can do whatever they want.
Second, the little fact that “...On October 27, 2017, a team from Google Cloud visited Beale Air Force Base...”. This indicates they were not just doing basic research, but they were trying to (eventually) field something operationally — not just develop basic technology and hand it off elsewhere for maturation. Also, the reciprocal visit of the uniformed general [2]. The presence of a general and entourage, probably also in uniform, makes a strong impression on civilian computer technologists.
In the DoD world, there is a big difference between basic research (TRL 1-3, say [1]) versus TRL 4-5 (component demos) versus TRL 6-8 (operational tests). Basic research might be funded by DARPA and is pretty abstract, typically publishable in the open literature.
As you work up toward operations, you start to deal directly with uniformed “warfighters” and realistic test environments. It’s a very different set of expectations. I think I understand better the reactions of many Googlers to the work described.
(Note: not passing personal judgement - clearly I’ve spent some time in this milieu — just observing that this work and its trappings is not what many Googlers I have known would go for.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
[2] http://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/10883...
That's called getting your foot in the door.
I'd rather have more people working on the problem than fewer. More scrutiny should, at least, improve the work and reduce errors in the models (and, hopefully, that leads to fewer casualties)
(I'm from Israel if you're wondering)
And I think US are a minority in that the citizens despise their own government and army this much. Which really makes you wonder what's the whole point of democracy if you trust your own elected officials less than Russians trust their corrupted monarch.
Other than that, there's a distrust towards authorities which US was founded upon, which I consider healthy and beneficial. As much as it lends itself to conspiracy theories and a drive to destroy the system, it also provides checks and balances against the world's strongest superpower becoming a tyranny.
The US still has a culture around respecting the military that's quite foreign to many other countries.
Americans often offer multiple dissenting opinions because our Constitution invites us to think independently and speak critically. This is a product of our being a breakaway republic separated by revolution which then defined itself and its government just as monarchies became obsolete.
Dissent and debate is in our blood.
Edit: and the contrary is true, Americans loves their army, and they are all about that "thank you for your service" rhetoric, so perhaps just Israel top that.
Also Switzerland has conscription / compulsory draft, and among a lot of Swiss, the army is seen with sympathy.
That said, I met a couple of Israelis that left the country for good because their experience with the army was so bad. I guess that there is some "voting with legs" going on.
I think spending part of your young adult life participating in the actions and socialisation of an institution, and then living in a society where everyone around you shares that experience, creates far stronger emotional influence on people's judgements than seeing some people you don't know being shot in a far away country.
Not to imply this is only a position of the political left; it's my experience, however, that left-wing folk, including myself, are not exactly overflowing with praise for the US military...
Other citizens respect and value it.
Unfortunately, many of the former group are also dedicated liberals, and many of the latter group are also dedicated conservatives. Given the state of the culture war in the US today, its difficult to determine how much of any individual's opinion on Project Maven is driven by their opinions as an individual, and how much is driven by their allegiance to one their side in the culture war.
It doesn't help that the political right has made veneration of military service one of their core principles. The left's claim is that veneration of military service is used as a psychological wedge to lever support for military action as well, and they are probably right (for some fraction of the population).
Politically, the company could face a backlash in the form of antitrust scrutiny over search monopoly. Which Alphabet seems to be anticipating as historical inevitability. With the foresight even that perhaps breaking up large trusts is great for startup innovation ;)
But it raises the general question. If given the option of taking $ to do basic science. Regardless of the funding entities motives. Do you do it anyway? An argument can be made to always take the money and do the science. You don't know what the world will look like in 10 years. Drone AI used for surgical strikes today will probably be civilian transferred to AgTech and planting seeds tomorrow. And there is always the possibility of a breakthrough.
Among the many great examples are the Human Genome Project, the Manhattan Project and DARPA Grand Challenge. Terrestrial plutonium enrichment may turn out to be the key to deep space exploration, or space based defense. Early DOE-funded genetics research was specifically interested in answering the question: can we survive radiation induced mutations from the fallout of a nuclear war? And less than two decades after a Humvee from CMU completed 8 miles on its own in the California desert we will see fleets of semi-autonomous vehicles rolling out in major cities.
https://gizmodo.com/google-plans-not-to-renew-its-contract-f...
At some point, I thought that the main goal of these big startups with tons of claims and wishful thinking was to make the world a better place and help humanity to become a better version of itself. Instead now they create tools and weapons to "reduce collateral damages" in governemental induced wars (which have not solved anything over the last 20 years in Middle East but only increased cash flow in West pockets, made tons of death, both there and in West countries), and they have access to information related with most of the citizens at the same time. OK cool.
In 10 years we will talk about whistleblowers killed by drones using AI as well.
How can we be sure that this is so?
- Can Trump make military decisions by himself (i.e. not choose among the ones that are offered to him by the military)?
- Hasn't it been established recently that the military have the right to refuse his orders if they are particularly crazy (see e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...)?
People voted for a government that bombs other people, that's a consequence.
They don’t seem to understand how those two things are mostly incompatible.
> The story takes place 109 years after the complete destruction of human civilization. The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer (with AI) capable of running the war more efficiently than humans.
> The machines are each referred to as "AM", which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator". Finally, "AM" stands for "Aggressive Menace". One day, one of the three computers becomes self-aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all but four men and one woman.
> The survivors live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left. The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment torturing them. AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually immortal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
*conditions apply
+ rationalization of your own behavior : "I'm not doing this work...I'm working on projects that help people. And ads. But ads are pretty neutral compared to bombing people."
+ rationalization of others' behavior : "Bombing people isn't evil, since it's helping the military kill MORE _bad guys_ and LESS good guys. And gals. and children."
+ change your thoughts about yourself : "Maybe I'm not as good of a person as I thought I was..." [note : this one might be hardest to do!]
+ change your own behavior : Quit Google, or even better organize your fellow workers into some form of collective action (strike!) to remake the company into something that better fits your values and ethics.
If a hostile foreign power was to invade your country, what would you want the response to be? To what ends and what efforts should we support the military?
There are many ethically questionable choices we take for granted, especially those of us that live in the West. Everything we consume has a taint of human exploitation, environmental damage, contributes to oppressive regimes that murder people, etc.
Where does it stop?
On the other hand, it sounds like the work Google was doing here was to improve the relative safety of autonomous drone strikes. Oh, but if these strikes remained risky and unreliable, we wouldn’t do them! Believe me, there are a dozen other large defense contractors out there that will implement this if Google doesn’t, so it’s not like it’s a binary proposition.
My point is, working for Google is not the right target on which to pin arguments for or against the ethics of autonomous drone strikes.
[1] not making additional enemies, not setting the precedent that it's ok to bomb people, not driving away allies, not undermining your narrative that you're a good guy and therefore attacking you is unjustifiable, etc. These are just off the top of my head.
I don't think Google would stop all wars by not contributing to this project. But Google, and the employees who work at Google, has power - a kind of power that's very, very different from my power as an individual when paying taxes or when voting for a federal employee (behaviors that create dissonance for me because they contribute to the war machine). I think that power can, and should, be used to prevent wars - not to make them "cleaner". The small attempt at organizing protests made by some employees at the company was a good step, but the only one I have heard of (maybe there have been others?) and I want the people who have the most access to power to start thinking about what they are doing and trying to make more positive changes.
Consume less. Be more mindful of environmental damage. Speak out against the oppressive regimes that help murder people.
We dream day and night about inventing self-driving cars and about reaching Mars (which are both nice things but without which I can easily live) but we've given up on trying to stop killing each other, and worse of all, we regard it as futile. It hasn't always been like that, for example just look at the Catholic Church's push to bring back peace in the war-torn world of the early Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_peace_traditions#The_...). For example just look at one of Thomas Aquinas's arguments regarding this:
> Peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence
Now, look at Google, an almost $1 trillion company which is one of the most successful business entities on this planet and tell me if you can say that "peace is a central motive" for them in the midst of the quest for profit. It isn't.
Wherever you want it to. This all-or-nothing approach to morality is stupid. Just because not every decision in your life may be 100% morally justifiable, that does not mean “throw all ethics over board”.
As an individual you may not want your name to be associated to evil(subjective) and you may want peace of mind. Say if my boss would ask me to do something I consider evil but it is legal I think I am strong enough and won't do it, and even advocate for my position. I also think that I have the right to talk with my colleagues and ask what they think and what can we do.
The fact that it should be illegal to kill people remotely without a trial or a declaration of war is a different problem of employees opposing working on "evil" things.
As a google engineer, you have the ability to impact this particular program in a way that you can’t impact what other military programs do.
Just as an American citizen you have more ability to impact American policy than you do Russian policy.
Make an impact where you have the power to make an impact.
I just quit my job because I was working on a DHS contract and it was getting harder and harder to ignore what they were doing to immigrants.
It’s small, but I don’t want to have to answer for what I was doing to my children.
Or for example, if I don't mug this old lady and take her handbag someone else will.
Then again, if I don't do it and you don't do it and nobody else does it, then nobody will do it at all.
Same for AI weapons- if nobody makes them there won't be none.
This has nothing to do with the use of AI in weapons systems- like it has nothing to do with cluster munitions, landmines, biological or radiological weapons etc.
The US (or any country really) can "defend" itself and its overseas interests without having to resort to such tactics.
Please don't make me say what I didn't. I'm just asking, as a non googler, am I much better than someone working at google on some of their darker project ? Objectively, everytime I do one of the things I listed above, I kill more people.
My point being, your 4 points don't only apply to google employees. Indeed, at the very least, I feel they also apply to me, a non google, chillin at my house with AC and cold water.
I pick your third bullet point. Because 1 would be lying to myself, I don't believe in 2, and I'm too weak to pick 4: I won't stop using my AC. I conclude I must be a much worst person I thought I was.
On to watching netflix, I need to know what happens next in this one very important show.
Ah the old veiled blame capitalism and blame the west argument. Except for the fact that capitalism has been nothing but a boon for the entire globe, even the non-westerners, and that western traditions and values (which are not necessarily coupled to capitalism) have been instrumental in introducing ideas and institutions that have freed a lot people globally for the first time in all human history.
Capitalism overall has been nothing but a force of good for the world:
- The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide declined by 80 percent from 1970 to 2006.
- Poverty worldwide included 94 percent of the world's population in 1820. In 2011, it was only 17 percent.
- Globally, those in the lower and middle income brackets saw increases in pay of 40 percent from 1988 to 2008.
- The world is 120 times better off today than in 1800 as a result of capitalism.
- Mortality rates for children under the age of five declined by 49 percent from 1990 to 2013.
Doesn't sound like its ruining too many lives to me. All those people should feel terrible though? Do you think the non-western Chinese sit around and pine about how terrible their people/culture is for turning on lights, wearing shoes, and enjoying climate controlled spaces? No they don't, and they shouldn't, because its ridiculously naive point of view on the world. Instead they are proud of what they've accomplished. Meanwhile some in the west are sitting at Starbucks on their mac books or smart phones whining about how terrible the "west" is while checking to see if their steady paycheck was direct deposited before they uber back to their furnished home or apartment, all without being arrested by secret police for their negative post upon arrival. Fancy that.
The US has not had a great track record here, even in my lifetime, but in a world where our adversaries are not going to have these same qualms, I think it is necessary for the US to build this technology, and if you accept that it is necessary for someone to build it, I think holding your nose and saying you want to be as far away from it as possible seems hypocritical.