
Google Employees “Outraged” Their Tech is Used to Build Better Killing Machines - cmurf
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/google-employees-outraged-their-tech-is-being-used-to-build-better-killing-machines
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tadfisher
I'm confused; would better image classification not reduce the potential for
civilian casualties and other unnecessary collateral damage? I don't think the
government would stop drone strikes if Google weren't involved, in any case.

~~~
michaelt

      would better image classification not reduce the
      potential for civilian casualties and other
      unnecessary collateral damage?
    

Richard Gatling, inventor of the first successful machine gun, wrote he hoped
his invention would make war more humane, by reducing the need for large
armies with the resultant exposure to battle and disease [1].

Fritz Haber, "father of chemical warfare", believed that deploying poison gas
in WW1 would shorten the war, and thereby save lives [2].

It would seem people who work on military tech in the hopes of saving lives
are often disappointed.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling#Gatling...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling#Gatling_gun)
[2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/16/chlorin...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/16/chlorine-
the-gas-of-war-crimes)

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NiklasMort
they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a
better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which parks
their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

~~~
rdtsc
> they are outraged because they all initially signed up to "make the world a
> better place" and obviously you do that by working for a megacorp which
> parks their 30 billion $ offshore cash on Bermuda

And they are more in bed with Uncle Sam than pretty much any traditional
"evil" company. They spent $18M in lobbying just last year. More than
Northrop, Lockheed, Verizon or Comcast. If that's not enough the same Schmidt
that wants to kill people "correctly" was prancing around Hillary's campaign
events wearing a "staff" badge
[https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae...](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-6a12-d435-a9ff-7f5ae4080001).
He picked the wrong door of course, but had she won, they'd be no doubt Google
would have gotten a decent chunk of the hundreds of billions spent on defense
every year. I can just imagine a nice friendly voice interface: "Ok Google.
Let's fly to such and such village in Afghanistan"

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jamespo
You think their staff are that naive?

~~~
rdtsc
>You think their staff are that naive?

Sorry, can you expand a bit. Not sure what you mean.

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varunramesh
In the article, a Google spokesperson states that "The technology flags images
for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only." The "killing machines"
statement in the headline seems like an exaggeration when it should really
refer to "surveillance machines."

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rqs
The reason for it currently to be "for non-offensive uses only" is NOT because
making the machine to automatically kill someone is unethical, but because
it's is not accurate enough to only hit valid targets (May hit deployer and
friendly).

So yeah, may be now it's "for non-offensive uses only".

Few years in, it will be "human control the kill trigger".

Then, eventually, it will be "human deploy the device, then it fires and kills
all by itself, just like a fire-and-forget missile, plus it can hit multiple
targets and be reused."

The dark side of technical advancement.

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grx
They are outraged _now_? Do they know how much power Google concentrates by
hording and analysing user data? And how much political/economical influence
this introduces? IMO this is way more dangerous than the military exploring
killer machines - because it's subtle and under the radar.

Related: if you decide to release your software as open source you give up any
possibility to control who uses it. Licences like the GPL do not allow
restrictions to civil usage only. And even if they would, how could you
enforce it?

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pmoriarty
Are any of the outraged employees actually doing anything about it, like, say,
resigning from Google to work for companies that don't act as enablers for the
military?

~~~
dmitrygr
Not many companies in the bay pay provide google-level-of-interesting projects
to work on or google-level total comp.

Yup, sadly, the yuppie Nuremberg defense.

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tnolet
Google is planning to open a campus in the middle of Berlin’s alternative
Kreuzberg district, one block down from my office. There have been many
protests and this will certainly be a boost for the protesters

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debatem1
The sentiment in this thread is so odd to me. Whether you believe Google is a
force for good or evil in the world, the fact that many of its employees
demand that it be a good one should be positive, yeah?

(As a disclaimer, I worked for Google several years ago and generally feel
that it walked the walk ethically. Of course, maybe that just means my moral
compass is skewed...)

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BinaryIdiot
> When news of the pilot project, which is the company’s first with the
> Defense Department’s Project Maven, was circulated on an internal mailing
> list, some Google employees were reportedly “outraged” and “concerned” that
> the company would offer its services for drone-related surveillance
> technology.

I worked for multiple government contractors in the DoD space up until a few
years ago and Google worked with us on MULTIPLE contracts. They're outraged
and concerned now? What were they 5 years ago?

Most of the large tech companies do government contract work for the DoD but
it seems like Silicon Valley just forgets this over and over and over again.

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mankash666
Here's the news started with a more pleasant and palatable headline - Google
lends it's AI to the entity that invented the internet, transistor, and many
other fundamental technological breakthroughs, the DoD.

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lenkite
This may be unpopular opinion, but nations are all researching, developing and
even deploying automated 'killing machines' anyways. Turkey is already
deploying kill drones against the Kurds in Afrin. There are automated, self-
guided artillery weapons being developed. There is an arms race on and it
doesn't make any sense to hold back unless there is world-wide treaty and
embargo at the global level.

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cm2187
If Snowden told us anything, it's that Google was accommodating direct feeds
from their users private data to the NSA. Didn't hear of employees outraged at
google's military involvement then.

~~~
dTal
I don't recall that particular revelation (a slide with an arrow from 'Google'
to 'NSA' is not proof of collusion). Inded, wasn't there some kerfuffle about
the NSA inserting taps into Google internal fibre lines? Why would they need
to do that if they had access through the front door?

~~~
cm2187
That was the first and most major revelation though: prism, which allowed the
NSA to tap directly into its user data.

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16532112)

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ironjunkie
Living in the bay, I have to say that I see more and more workers from those
big companies as complete hypocrites without any sense of self-thinking.

When you speak to them, there is so much arrogance. They are convince that
they are saving the world (give me a break, you are not).

And next to this you can see them earning a shitload of money, living in the
posh-est neighborhood of SF, and looking up on all the homeless in the city
that disturb their morning yoga.

Completely dystopian and hypocrite, That is what the big-co koolaid feel-good
marketing message has created

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I think you're exaggerating. There are definitely many people like tat, but
this is not even majority. Many of us just want to live our lives, and can't
do much about the situation in SF. No, honestly, what can each of us do? Even
if we give some money, it will never solve the problem of homeless people in
SF.

As for saving the world... I don't think anyone believes it. A founder must
speak in a certain way to get investment and the interest of the press, but at
the bottom everyone knows it's basically about making money. Of course it
helps if you're working for a startup that has some positive ambitions, it
creates good energy and makes work much easier, but that's pretty much
secondary. It's not that we're hypocrites, it's more or less the same in all
companies: you need to tell your boss you believe in the company values and
all this bs, even though in fact you don't care at all. Cool tech is another
thing: here you can really get excited if you're working on a really
interesting project.

~~~
jadedhacker
Don't give them money, give them houses. Homeless person + stable place to
live = ~0 homeless. Your retort might be, well if we did that, then people
would become homeless intentionally and we'd have to give them a house.

Well... yea, that's the idea. Without rent, the average family's budget would
increase by probably > 25-30%. We could set up schemes to rotate good
residences to people that need them (e.g. families with kids get 8 yr tenures
near schools). For houses without long waitlists, people can trade at will.
Decommodifying that sector of the market would do a world of good.

~~~
AstralStorm
Good luck with implementing this policy. The problem typically was that with
positive birth rates development was way behind demand.

Additionally where do you want to build those houses and how do you want to
prevent these areas from becoming ghettos?

~~~
jadedhacker
Birth rates are slowing. Build the houses all over the city so you don't have
concentrated poverty. If you have too much poverty in your city, then it's
time to start redistributing wealth more generally.

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zaarn
Outraged they lost the Faustian Bargain?

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bb88
Dupe

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make3
I hope peace triumphs.

~~~
cdmckay
It’s this kind of thinking that will destroy the human race.

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vinni2
Now all Google users should be outraged too!

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mankash666
Hypocrites. Maybe they should stop paying taxes too, because the military is
funded by tax income.

The military, just like Google, does the right thing an overwhelming majority
of the time. Enabling them to do their job isn't a bad thing. After all, the
military is the one providing defense against entities who'd take away
Googlers right to be outraged, and other civil liberties that modern society
enjoys, in a heartbeat.

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cdmckay
People don’t have the right to stop paying taxes, so don’t pretend like that’s
an option.

The US military does not do the right thing in the overwhelmingly majority of
situations.

Do you think the Vietnam war was a just war? What liberties were being
protected there?

Do you think the Iraq war was a just war? Has it improved life for Iraqis? Has
it made America safer?

~~~
mankash666
You think the Vietnam and Iraq wars were perpetrated by the DoD/military? They
were cooked up by your elected officials, at least get your blame-game right

