
Google Is Said to Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees - Bhilai
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html
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ocdtrekkie
Existing discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892)

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strainer
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.

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.

Thankyou Googlers for showing up for resolution.

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pascalxus
In the end, who-ever ordered that work is still going to get what they want.
They'll just hire it out to someone else, no?

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sjm-lbm
That's one of the strange problems here. It'll probabally get farmed out to a
less technically proficient team which, ironically, could lead to an increase
in the loss of innocent life.

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anyfoo
That could be the outcome, yes, or the outcome could be entirely different. It
could be that the projects gets farmed out to a less-than-competent contractor
that is willing to work on it, with a result that is so spectacularly bad
(along any given dimension, not just how many innocent lives are affected)
that the project dies.

That, too, is a complete guess and just one of many hypothetical outcomes. I
don't think there is _any_ sufficient ground to infer that "if Google does not
do it, it will be worse".

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reilly3000
It seems like most of the commenters in this thread accept that military AI is
inevitable, somebody will do the work. Could we collectively make a different
choice? It’s a damn important choice to make.

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oblong
> could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes

They prefer inaccurate drone strikes that kill innocents?

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gowld
How does NYT software allow a backwards "smart quote" to get published?

> ”So, we are working on it,

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deno
Unicode copy-paste

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melling
In capitalism, someone else fills the void in a profitable market.

Will it be another large company or a startup?

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Analemma_
"If we don't, someone else will" is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.
Literally anything will happen in a capitalist market, if someone is willing
to pay for it. Does that mean everything that someone will pay for is ethical
and you shouldn't bother trying to abstain from it?

If you want to be pragmatic about it, the fewer people who are willing to do
X, theoretically the higher the price goes, possibly to the point where no one
wants to pay to do X anymore. So refusing to do X is not just an empty
gesture.

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asdsa5325
> "If we don't, someone else will" is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free
> card.

True, but at the same time, "let's not do this" also isn't an ethical get-out-
of-jail-free card. Google engineers can act all high and mighty morally, but
guess what: it doesn't matter at all either way.

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jonathanyc
What Google engineers are doing in this situation is strictly better both in
the utilitarian and in the Kantian sense. Saying “it doesn’t matter at all
either way” is a non-argument.

