Google staff resign in backlash over its AI contracts with military | Hacker News Reader

Google staff resign in backlash over its AI contracts with military

bbc.com

128 pointssaikatsg26 comments

So 2 engineers are named, both had pretty splashy blog posts, and Liguori appears to have timed her resignation with the release of two big interviews as well.

Neither Liguori, nor Kirsch are American citizens. From what I can tell, neither even worked in America.

I guess I don't see how this is news worthy? Would anyone care at all if two American engineers quit their tech jobs because the Canadian or Japanese militaries were contracting their product?

well the Canadian and Japanese militaries are not engaged in imperialistic wars of terror currently

> I guess I don't see how this is news worthy?

At the risk of being overly reductive, a story is newsworthy if the editor decides it is. So one question you could ask is, why did the BBC editor think this was newsworthy?

Exactly. The purpose of news is not to inform you. It's to present you with a view of the world carefully curated to shape your beliefs. The BBC is notorious for their biases, but all major media channels serve the same purpose.

When they use the word "killed" (actively, by whom) or "died" (passively as if by chance), when they choose to highlight an event, downplay it, or ignore it altogether - the deeper question is not about the event itself, but the motivation behind its presentation. What do they want you to believe?

That, or to sell newspapers.

And it's untrue that "all major media channels serve the same purpose". Fox News serves very different purposes than Russia Today or Al Jazeera or NPR or …

What is true is that all media channels serve their own purposes.

I mean I'm just some dev so I'm far from a media expert, but wouldn't a story focused on the AI in warfare itself be vastly more interesting than 2 Non-American dev's who quit over it?

> I guess I don't see how this is news worthy?

BBC hasn't been "news" for quite some time now.

So 2 people are referenced in the article by name and Google has what, almost 200k employees?

At least 2 less with morals and spines

Last 2

If they had morals and spines they never would have worked there to begin with. Google has been doing evil for quite a while.

I suspect that they now have morals and spines and wealth.

Be honest. There aren’t a lot of companies with a moral compass these days. If you want a job, and you’re not working for yourself,’the odds are likely you’re working for an evil company.

The last two non-evil employees at Google.

Screw BBC's NagScreen, just use wallhop.io

https://wallhop.io/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmreyve...

So, apparently the bbc has started charging Americans.

You must not read much BBC if you're just noticing this(not that there's anything wrong with that). It's been this way for over a year at this point.

Are you saying that the BBC, which is an institution of His Majesty's Government, is issuing taxation upon Americans without representation?

Tally, ho!

Representation was one of the sliders defaulted to “off” in the cookie banner.

Hmmmm.

It's pretty late, but I think I'll be able to find an open grocery store that sells Yorkshire Tea so that I can dump it into a body of water.

This kind of extreme pacifism is exactly what Putin and Xi are hoping for.

Probably not, for all that America seems to be taking their side.

The resignations do not translate to pacifism. In regards to the worker-workplace relationship, it's a confrontational maxim.

The workers don’t seem to be pacifists. They seem to be opposed to some combination of genocide, autonomous weapons, privacy, or the military industrial complex.

Checks and balances on the ability to wage war are not a bad thing, and given the popularity of the US’ most recent entanglement I’d imagine most Americans would prefer more checks, not fewer.

"the workers" lol

I'm surprised that they did not resign in backlash from how behind Google has become in the AI domain

Reply on news.ycombinator.com