
Google 'to end' Pentagon Artificial Intelligence project - peterkelly
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-44341490
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merricksb
Already discussed today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209691)

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Maarten88
"executives saw the contract as a huge opportunity while being concerned about
how the company's involvement would be perceived"

Pretty damning they are concerned about how they may look to the outside
world, instead of being actually worried about the consequences of being
complicit to the development of a new breed of killing machines, and therefore
also to how they will be used.

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pfortuny
So now the motto is “do not look evil”.

That is a pretty good ethical principle.

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SeriousM
So they happily continue for the next 10 months. Well played.

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mehrdadn
Don't they have a contract with the federal government for the current period?
Are you suggesting they should be breaching it?

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jakobegger
They should just try to cancel the contract as soon as possible.

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raverbashing
Don't worry, other companies and/or militaries will do that

Do you think China will have any qualms about making selling AI enabled
drones?

I'm not saying Google is doing the wrong thing, but there are other players to
do the same thing.

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simion314
None says US should not use high tech, just that an international company like
Google doing this will have big consequences to it's business abroad and
inside US and people , employees and customers have expressed their right to
tell Google management they don't want to be involved with this.

I personally think is a bad idea that a big company like Google to be
associated with military,NSA, CIA , it will end up with losing customers
outside the US and even in US, like the Dropbox image issue where some people
quit using it (I don't remember exactly the names involved)

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HugoDaniel
1e^100 kills

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lemagedurage
More effective warfare in the right hands would kill less people. We're fine
when America keeps the military upper hand, we're fucked if nations who care
less about keeping people alive do decide that using neural nets for warfare
is a sound idea.

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dannypgh
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World's_largest_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World's_largest_arms_exporters)

Do you think this technology will really "disrupt" which nation is both the
largest manufacturer and consumer of weapons?

I think who the "right hands" are to handle military power is something that
reasonable people can (and do) disagree on...

