This will really hurt their enterprise cloud business. Google has shown to have a bunch of employees who will leak confidential discussions to the press and try to PR damage their employer. If you are a large company looking for a home, that is exactly the kind of environment you want to avoid.<p>In addition, many of the large US companies have a military component. Examples are GE, Boeing, United Technologies. How many of those companies want something like what happened with Maven to happen to them.<p>Finally, the success of this project will further embolden Google employees to use these same tactics of leaking and hurting Google's image in the future. Given how things progress, the next protest is likely to be about something that is even more gray area than Maven.
This sends a more powerful message than if the corporation had just avoided the work in the first place. I am hopeful and inspired by the employees stand.<p>Lights are shining through the cracks in the conflict dominated narrative of these times, and we have never had greater means to analyse and resolve our troubles with each other and with our environment.<p>Thankyou Googlers for showing up for resolution.
Dystopia was hiding behind official lies, while already being in the works: "The emails also show that Google and its partners worked extensively to develop machine learning algorithms for the Pentagon, with the goal of creating a sophisticated system that could surveil entire cities. ... 'the wisdom and strength of our people will bring about multi-order-of-magnitude improvements in safety and security for the world' ... Google intended to build a 'Google-earth-like' surveillance system ... Google’s artificial intelligence would bring 'an exquisite capability' for 'near-real time analysis'" paired with drone-killing.<p>[added for the down-haters]<p>Examples of the lies:<p>- concerned employees were told that Google’s DoD contract was worth only $9 million<p>- "Google downplayed its work, saying it had merely provided its open-source TensorFlow software to the Pentagon"<p>In the name of building real-time, total surveillance in support of automated killing by drones.
While there are good intentions here, what happens if China and Russia military get ahead of US military in this technology due to us limiting ourselves
Engineer's that were working on this should quit and form their own company to continue the work. Whether the drones can autonomously fire or not is a legislative issue. Cloud cert would be a big issue unless they can resell AWS which I believe already has it.
So is Google going to keep up this trend of self-criticism? Or have we finally found out how google defines "evil," and it's only things that involve literal killing?
The thing I think everyone needs to remember for the future is that Google is only backing off on Maven because of the bad PR. They aren't suddenly growing a conscience, and you can be sure that given the chance to secretly get involved in a horribly unethical program for hundreds of millions of dollars is still definitely an option for them.
They are building real-time, total surveillance in support of automated killing by drones, supported by almost all of Google's existing commercial projects (Earth-wide mapping, detailed street maps, business directories, phone-tracked location...).<p>The NSA programs disclosed by Snowden seem childish by comparison.
Anyone else have a problem with this? Someone else will be doing this work in place of Google, as it is inevitable that AI and defense will merge. So for those reasons, IMO, it is childish to quit and try to not assert some ethical control over something while you can.<p>Maybe the next co. who fills the contract will be the one where the AI engineers who quit now work?<p>TLDR: Get the program killed, or control it on your terms ethically. Don't pass it off on the next highest bidder.
I imagine that in the 2-3 years this contract run, Google shared most of what they needed to share with the Pentagon in order to catch-up to the company's current AI capabilities.
Congrads google activists you have hurt your employer's business and business prospects and prevented your colleagues from working on really interesting AI applications relegating their life's work to sorting photo albums.<p>Oh, and none of that will make a difference because a competitor of yours will pick up the slack and be in a position to offer really interesting work to attract and retain researchers.