
Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage - fraqed
https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533
======
Barrin92
This really is something

>"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 _kill people incorrectly_ ,”

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.

~~~
manfredo
> 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.

Sure, it's valid to disagree with Google's involvement in this project, but I
find it incredibly hard to justify the claim that private enterprises
traditionally don't equip armed forces. Providing technology and hardware to
armed forces is something that private companies have been doing for
centuries. Heck non-state groups selling arms to armed forces likely predates
the existence of states as we know them. Most armies prior to the modern era
were militias that privately purchased their own equipment.

This project is "assisting in killing people" to at most the same degree that
developing munitions guidance, military radar systems, and sonar are
"assisting in killing people" (I'd argue less since this technology is purely
about reviewing reconnaissance data, not about the actual deployment of
weapons) and private companies have been developing those systems for over a
century.

~~~
no_back_pain_01
That's not a very apt analogy. Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral
service bordering on a public utility. They collect vast amounts of personal
information / intelligence because people willingly give it to them.

Google assisting in drone strikes is like the military using the electrical
grid to electrocute people in their homes or delivering lethal poisons via the
Starbucks Rewards program.

What if your favorite cereal brand started participating in assassinations?
It's not inconceivable to deliver poison that way. What if, due to a software
error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned
Cheerios.

There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-
militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime,
"preventative" military campaign.

~~~
rdtsc
> Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public
> utility.

That is not an accident. They worked overtime to construct that image.

Yet it might come as a little surprise that they are more in bed with the
government than Northrop Grumman, Verizon, Goldman and Comcast:
[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000067823)
they spent about $18M in lobbying last year outspending all those other "evil"
companies so to speak.

Schmidt was directly involved in Hillary's campaign and there is a picture
circulating of him at one of 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)
that coupled with the "killing people the right way" is all you need to know
what Alphabet stands for and where it is headed.

> There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-
> militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime

I claim that there isn't in the sense that once a company becomes large enough
it will start participating in killing people "the right way" as Schmidt put
it. That happens regardless if we still want to have that cutesy, colorful,
not-evil search company image. Amazon (AWS) is selling billion dollars worth
of services to the CIA, I am sure that's not for cat pictures and buying
books. Microsoft's hands I am pretty sure are not exactly clean either, etc.

~~~
pferde
And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly
and without any moral qualms offer their products to whomever who can pay for
them, be it a terrorist, a government agent, or a common run-of-the-mill
criminal, each of who then goes to perform their horrible acts, aided by the
purchased product.

These manufacturers are playing both sides and should definitely be kept an
eye on, I tell you!

~~~
rdtsc
> And let's not forget all those car or clothes manufacturers who shamelessly
> and without any moral qualms

Good point. Not just moral legal as well. There is a whole bunches countries
companies cannot do business with because of embargoes. In many cases it is
because of terrorism. Depending on what technology there are also export
controls to watch out for.

------
abraae
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.

Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad.
There are good times to use weapons.

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.

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.

~~~
rxhernandez
> Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad.

In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were
not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the
last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].

Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of
unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator
Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.

1\. [https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-
than-20-mil...](https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-
than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051)

~~~
credit_guy
Your link attributes the 2.5 million victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide to
the US. How does that make any sense?

~~~
3131s
It's fairly obvious that if not for US military activity in the region, US
backing of Lon Nol, and the massive covert US bombing campaign in Cambodia,
that Cambodia would have never been destabilized to the point that a fanatical
regime like the Khmer Rouge could have come to power. A lot of Cambodian
people would make that connection too, just so you know.

~~~
credit_guy
So let me see if I got this right. The US is in a mighty struggle to stop the
expansion of communism, a communist faction takes control of Cambodia and
proceeds to kill one in four people, and this is US’s fault?

------
natecavanaugh
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.

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.

~~~
pluma
> It is possible this can help save lives.

Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not
save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't
prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being
killed. You _can_ prove a lot of people (including people most normal human
beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the
target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved
any other way.

Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to
justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But
mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the
possibility of saving American lives.

~~~
natecavanaugh
This may get me some downvotes, but I imagine that the same ethical issue
exists with any weapon. Guns and bullets exist to kill, and in both human
society and the animal kingdom, elimination of a few people can increase the
overall population and livelihood of the entire group.

I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their
use.

However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is
the elimination of death of people or animals. Sure, you could take a bullet
to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive
ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in
how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their
redemption.

But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while
searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is
better than widespread killing. My big worry isn't so much the killing part
(not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking
murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance
employed in the name of security.

That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to
say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking
collectively rather than individually there).

~~~
pluma
You're making a good point about handling criminals. The US still has the
death penalty. The death penalty exists to "protect the public" but most
civilised countries have agreed that it's inhumane compared to other
alternatives. Its harm outweighs the good it does. We have also banned other
inhumane practices like solitary confinement.

Where you're wrong is that drone strikes are a necessary evil. There is no way
to measure the efficacy of drone strikes. Sure, you can determine whether the
drone strike destroyed the target and with Google's help you might even get a
machine to tell you a confidence level of whether the target was correctly
identified, but good luck proving that that drone strike even saved as much as
a single life.

What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's
nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define
who can be considered a civilian. It's easy to have zero dead civilians when
you're the one who gets to decide whether those unidentified adult males
caught in the blast radius couldn't also maybe have been terrorists all along.

~~~
natecavanaugh
Thank you for your response and I apologize for the delay in responding.

I think you're using an ineffective metric to argue against something you're
against ethically.

Here's what I mean: saying it's benefit is immeasurable is arguing for better
metrics. If it could be demonstrated that it did effectively end more
terrorists lives and saved civilians, would you be celebrating it? I think
you'd still want us as a society to invest in a more humane way of handling
it.

> What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's
> nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define
> who can be considered a civilian.

Which, in my opinion makes it immeasurable, currently. It still sounds like
your arguing for more data, not a better approach.

I think obviously drone strikes have a benefit to those who use them,
otherwise they wouldnt keep using them out of some philosophical attachment to
unmanned aircraft.

I do agree we need more and better metrics and data on both their efficacy and
civilian cost, but for me, even better would be a solution that doesn't even
need the killing.

But if you're asking for the military to abandon something in favor of a more
ethical response, you should use a better argument and show how it will lead
to less death overall. Otherwise, they'll dance around the semantics of what's
being argued.

------
booleandilemma
There is a history of large companies helping the US government, and they’re
not all defense contractors.

Why are they surprised? Google is the Bell Labs of our time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government)

~~~
IntronExon
The word used is “outraged” and not “surprised” though. I think that’s more
than just a semantic point. In fact there is no mention of surprise in the
article. I think that’s a reasonable reaction, whereas surprise is a straw
man, largely implying a naïveté which is notably absent in the article.

------
ProAm
Government contracts are extremely lucrative and usually long term, most
companies would accept this work.

~~~
pdeuchler
Most companies are run by people with souls, so I doubt this. Most
corporations though, there you might have a point.

~~~
parent5446
Not sure what you consider the difference between a "company" and a
"corporation", but I know a lot of people who work for small government
contractors that definitely have "souls". Not everybody has the same ethical
standpoint on military technology.

~~~
pdeuchler
I know many people who work for large multi-national defense contractors that
definitely have "souls" as well, but hiding behind moral relativism won't save
you from the fact that in the real world moral bright lines exist within
societal contexts. And that said, I'm fairly confident how history will see
our current drone program.

~~~
EggsOnToast
I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of moral relativism in this context when
it's incredibly relevant. Someone who believes that developing and exploring
this technology will enable us to save the lives of soldiers and better
prepare to encounter the technology in the wild is going to have very
different opinions than someone who views it as yet another tool to oppress
the third world with. Both people hold ethical beliefs that consider and value
humanitarian consequences.

Edit: I was slowed down for posting too fast so I'm adding my reply to
IntronExon here:

It's an interesting hypothetical but I'd argue its appeal is mostly in its
simplicity with little evidence to support the claim. The instances you've
cited happened either due to a failure of accurate intelligence or because
intelligence indicated the structure was being used by enemy combatants. It's
very possible to arrive at the conclusion that any unnecessary casualties
which occurred happened as a result of poor military intelligence which better
reconnaissance drones could help with. It's equally possible that someone
working on this kind of technology could see its field use against groups like
ISIS as evidence that weaponized drones are a useful tool in fighting
terrorist organizations. Obviously neither of these will be true in every
instance, but without strong evidence it's hard to believe that the matter is
as simple as "some people are just unemphatic".

~~~
IntronExon
Maybe the real difference is that some of us lack the empathy and imagination
to consider the plight of some poor bastardized having their wedding, school,
or hospital drone-striked, and some of us do. For those who can’t, this is
never an emotional issue, just a sterile cost/benefit analysis. Formthe rest
of us, worlds die in those blasts, and were partially responsible, and that
_matters_.

------
meri_dian
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.

Whoever knows about the US military budget, how feasible would this be? What
is the bulk of the military budget dedicated to?

~~~
dschuler
You could cut a number of non-essential items, even if they're not the largest
- the US Army is the largest employer of musicians in the country [0], and the
entire military spent at least $437M _in one year_ on musicians in 2015 [1].

[0]
[https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2010/09/29/130212353/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2010/09/29/130212353/military-
marching-bands)

[1] [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/pentagons-bands-
battl...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/pentagons-bands-
battle-223435)

~~~
18pfsmt
That still leaves $99,563M. I'm not familiar enough with the details of the
defense budget, but when looking at budgets, in general, the focus should be
on line items that move the needle significantly.

~~~
dschuler
I guess the point I was trying to make is that there is plenty of room for
budget trimming - you could go straight to the budget for fighter jets or
soldiers or whatever the big ticket items are, but you're going to get a lot
more resistance.

------
blackrock
It looks like Google is going to be the next 800-pound gorilla in the Military
Industrial Complex.

~~~
sitkack
Then why did they sell Boston Dynamics? Or did they ...

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They tried to sell it but nobody wanted it, AFAIK. Note that when they bought
Boston Dynamics they made a big deal about not renewing military contracts
because they didn't want to be in the business of autonomous weaponry.

Look how a mere couple years has changed things.

~~~
sitkack
They sold to SoftBank btw, this was widely reported.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Oh, that's right! I remembered hearing about it, but then thought it fell
through for some reason.

Maybe I was thinking of Toyota:
[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077620/toyota-said-to-be-
in...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077620/toyota-said-to-be-in-talks-to-
acquire-two-google-robotics-companies.html)

------
nwrk
So next time resolving Google Captcha images -> increasing accuracy of US army
drones ?

Same apply to my Google Photos ?

------
cityofghosts
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.

~~~
greglindahl
Source? The article I remember about Tesla layoffs said it was a lot less than
10%, and mostly not factory workers.

------
aforty
What happened to "do no evil"?

~~~
vntok
"Do no evil" is not and has never been their motto. Their motto is and has
always been "Don't be evil".

------
z3t4
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.

------
bingobob
are they working with them as in building the system or are they just helping
them with understanding the technology like TensorFlow APIs.

~~~
ehsankia
It sounds to me more like lending their already existing Cloud AI for
analysing video.

This stuff already exists to some extent and can be used by anyone (within
Google's terms & services).

[https://cloud.google.com/video-intelligence/](https://cloud.google.com/video-
intelligence/)

------
forapurpose
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]

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.

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.

[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?

~~~
empath75
Yeah there’s a real risk of a blitzkrieg sort of situation where some country
builds a drone army that just picks a traditional army apart on the
battlefield.

Eventually someone is going to cut the cord and have truly autonomous armed
vehicles and whoever does it first is going to have a tremendous tactical
advantage.

~~~
Razengan
Why do people only talk about weapons of mass destruction and dominance in
these discussions? Why is Big, Bad & Heavy seen as the only way to win wars
and worlds?

I'd say the first group who thinks outside that box would have a major
advantage:

– Artificial viruses and other biological/nanotechnological infectious agents
that only your side has an "antidote" or immunity for, to "cleanly" wipe out
everyone else but you, without causing physical damage to
cities/infrastructure/terrain.

— Insect-like drones the size of flies or mosquitos that you remotely control
to inject poison directly into individual enemy leaders, shutting them down
before they can form or command a military opposition.

– Having a permanent presence on the Moon so that some of you can survive in
case of the whole world going tits up due to events you cannot control or plan
for.

~~~
pluma
Sound familiar?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

------
bhhaskin
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].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History)

[1]
[https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/](https://enterprise.google.com/maps/government/)

~~~
18pfsmt
Google Maps was basically pieced together from smaller companies they
acquired. From Wikipedia:

 _Google Earth was originally developed by Keyhole, Inc., a Mountain View-
based company founded in 2001. Keyhole, after being spun off from Intrinsic
Graphics, received funding from the Central Intelligence Agency 's venture
capital firm, In-Q-Tel and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in
addition to smaller capital from Nvidia and Sony._

~~~
schoen
I believe that Keyhole itself was named after a spy satellite series:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole)

(But I don't know whether there was any other connection between the company
and NRO.)

~~~
sterlind
IC-funded startups are often founded by ex-IC people. "Keyhole" was the
logical name to choose, since In-Q-Tel is more than familiar with the real
deal. it makes the VC pitch much clearer to .gov backers.

------
announcerman
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.

------
majestik
I predict the US government will start taking Net Neutrality seriously in the
next few months.

“You scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

------
dna_polymerase
So when Damore released his manifesto a lot of people wanted Google to fire
him, otherwise they would quit themselves.

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...

------
Kenji
"Don't be evil" hm?

------
dogecoinbase
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.

------
alottafunchata
Good! Thank you Google.

