This really is something<p>>"Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to <i>kill people incorrectly</i>,”<p>I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
We faced this at work recently (at our decidely sub-Google scale) when sales guy refused to bid for an opportunity at a weapons manufacturer so we had some interesting discussions around the issue.<p>Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.<p>An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.<p>And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.
Ethically, I wonder if this would be any different if Google built a similar software for consumer applications and licensed it similarly to Android being used for surveillance in both the US and far more paranoid governments.
I would imagine that this allows both Google and the US government to have far more insight and control over the direction of this and possible applications.<p>Not to dismiss the obvious ethical issues of Google having possibly harmful incentives and having their hands tied by the US government financially and legally, but all things considered, I think the main difference here is that Google is already doing this on a massively large scale for the sake of selling ads. It is possible this can help save lives.
There is a history of large companies helping the US government, and they’re not all defense contractors.<p>Why are they surprised? Google is the Bell Labs of our time.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...</a>
As a US citizen concerned with our bloated military budget but who also wants the US to remain the strongest military nation on Earth, I'd like to cut $100 billion from the $600 billion plus yearly US military budget, and allocate that money to infrastructure and social programs. We would still have by far the largest military budget in the world after this.<p>Whoever knows about the US military budget, how feasible would this be? What is the bulk of the military budget dedicated to?
It worked for the UK and the British East India company , it should work fine for America. Tesla can set up mining camps on Mars and eliminate ten percent of it's "underperforming" population every year, just like it does at it's factory.
Google's new cloud offering "flower express" you just type someones personal id, and then the Google database looks up last known position and sends a drone.
Let's be completely speculative and alarmist about the potential of AI: It could be like developing nuclear weapons first; if the US gets military AI wrong, it could quickly become a poor vassal state to the world's new superpower.[0]<p>People are alarmist and speculative because AI's potential is unknown. If the potential of the new blockchain technology is unknown then you can wait and see what happens. But given the stakes with military AI, you can't take even tiny risks; you can't wait and see if your country will be in history books as an experiment that lasted 250 years.<p>By declining to help the US military, Google engineers take that risk to a degree. But if they participate then they gain enormous leverage: Given the stakes, the US military can't afford to alienate them. I'd hope they can use their leverage to achieve related goals: Agreements banning the use of this technology against civilians, foreign or domestic, and banning sharing the tech with law enforcement. Leverage Congress into passing privacy and civil rights laws protecting Americans against abuses of the technology.<p>[0] Note that AI changes things in another way: For all human history, military power was tied to population size. In the future, with the right AI and some underground robot factories, potentially a small country could dominate. Maybe Singapore?
I am surprised that this is news. Google has done US government work for a long time. After 9/11 the newly formed homeland security wanted pictures and accurate data in regards to residential addresses in the US. At first they went to the credit bureaus and data brokers to collect and store this information due to the fact they already had researchers on the ground collecting data. Google came along with Google earth and not long after that Google street view. Think about how long it was before they where able to actually monetize google earth & maps. They perfected the art of geodata collection and was likely paid for via government grants [0] and contracts. Even today they sell access to different government agencies[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History</a><p>[1] <a href="https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/" rel="nofollow">https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/</a>
As long as there's two people left on the planet someone's going to want someone dead. Defense contracts will always be a good investment and it can let you get close to people in power more easily than by lobbying, no wonder Google is taking the opportunity.
So when Damore released his manifesto a lot of people wanted Google to fire him, otherwise they would quit themselves.<p>Where is the Google employee outrage now? I mean, this right here is bad, it has serious implications. Drone killings are the most outrageous thing the U.S. has done in a while...
Continuing to have worked for Google (as a software engineer, with other options) after 2018 will become like having worked for Uber through 2017 -- an indelible black mark on your resume.