Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract (gizmodo.com)

Kate Conger, reporting for Gizmodo: It's been nearly three months since many Google employees -- and the public -- learned about the company's decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images of objects and people. Now, about a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the company's continued involvement in Maven.

The resigning employees' frustrations range from particular ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare to broader worries about Google's political decisions -- and the erosion of user trust that could result from these actions. Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo.

Comments

Of course

[Brett Buck]

They were all in when it was a creepy private data mining operation, but do something to support the legitimate aims of government and defend the nation, and it goes against their precious principles.

    We are creating a generation of sociopaths, who have inverted their priorities and have no notion of right or wrong.

Re:Of course

[stephanruby]

We are creating a generation of sociopaths, who have inverted their priorities and have no notion of right or wrong.

We're talking about AI being used to control drones.

It's a slippery slope. At a certain point, those drones won't need any humans remote controlling them.

And those drones definitely won't "have any notion of right and wrong".

Re:Of course

[Rick Schumann]

"Legitimate aims of government" indeed.

Thye don't want their work being used for weapons systems, that's not what they signed up for, and their moral compass dictates that leaving is the right move. Are you actually claiming that they should be punished for not living according to their own conscience, that their employer or the government should have the right to force them to do work that goes against their own conscience? If so then how un-American of you.

..oh, and never mind the fact that these so-called 'AIs' (which are pseudo-intelligent at best, not real Artificial Intelligence) will inevitably make mistakes, which will lead to non-combatants being targeted and killed. That's at the core of why these people are 'quitting in protest', and that's why people make a moral choice to not work on weapons of war.

Re:Of course

[Sarten-X]

The sociopaths are the ones using drones to bomb weddings.

Uh... The people using the drones are the ones asking for an AI to tell them "Even though the local informant said this was a training camp, it looks more like a wedding".

Re:Of course

[WoodstockJeff]

> We're talking about AI being used to control drones.

No, we're talking about AI being used for analysis of the data provided by those drones. To weed through the thousands of hours of pictures to make it easier for humans to make decisions. At least, that was the original story that caused these people to promise to resign if it happened.

It's stuff these people were already developing AI to do - just a different user base. Rather than delivery targeted advertising, it might be something else targeting them.

Re:Of course

[fahrbot-bot]

We are creating a generation of sociopaths, who have inverted their priorities and have no notion of right or wrong.

Well... do you think Presidents, Senators and House Representatives grow on trees?

Re: Of course

[GameboyRMH]

Adding an AI means there is now an unbiased process looking for alternative interpretations.

AI is not necessarily unbiased. In fact it's very good at learning biases in its training data. So if it was trained on data generated by people who tend to mistake weddings for training camps, it will do the same. The difference is that now they can blame the computer for messing up.

Re:Of course

[GameboyRMH]

You mistake the divide of this apartheid as being between Jews and Arabs when it's actually between Israelis and Palestinians.

Re: Of course

[c6gunner]

That's pretty much what already happens. Drone operators are told "we have a report of a training camp holding a meeting here... go find it". Then the op flies around looking for a meeting, sees a bunch of gathered people, and with no indication to the contrary, command orders the strike. The idea that it might be a wedding never crosses anyone's mind.

No. There are personnel separate from the drone operator who analyze the footage and advise on whether or not to engage. Video analysis is their only job, and they undergo specialized training and assessment using footage of previous missions to ensure that they're not just going to randomly blow up whatever they see.

Re:Have we passed Peak Google?

[110010001000]

Google is an advertising company. DuckDuckGo is a search service.

Re:Better just to kill everyone?

[b0s0z0ku]

You're more likely to be killed slipping in a bathtub or crossing the street than in a terrorist attack in the US. We grossly over-reacted after 9/11. What we should have done is blockaded, sanctioned, and embargoed Saudi Arabia, the source of funding for the perpetrators that caused 9/11. Would have been cheap AND effective, even if we'd have felt some pain as far as oil prices in the short run.

But no, we were just itching to use the toys that we didn't have a chance to use during the Cold War. We wasted a few trillion and made the world LESS safe.

I don't blame them

[Rick Schumann]

Allow me to explain this to those of you who don't get it: These people are 'quitting in protest' because they didn't sign up to work on weapons of war, and they have every right to quit over this because otherwise they're not living according to their own conscience. Having worked in the defense industry (by the way, what we worked on was training systems, not weapons systems; what we developed helped keep soldiers safe) it's far from the first time someone has made a decision like this, and in fact people who have objections to contributing to the development of deadly weapons of war very often make this clear when they're interviewing for a job. These people clearly did not forsee this and are now acting accordingly and do not deserve to be criticized for that.

..oh, and by the way: It's inevitable that the so-called 'AI' (inaptly named; is really not much more than 'pseudo-intelligence' at best) will make mistakes, and those mistakes will likely mean non-combatants becoming collateral damage. That's at the core of why they're quitting, and I for one don't blame them one bit.

Re:Better just to kill everyone?

[Sarten-X]

There is still a human there. Maven is just an object-recognition system, that highlights objects in (usually low-resolution) drone video feeds. For example, it'll identify whether the 20-pixel object in the back of a pickup truck is actually a goat or a machine gun. It's still a human who decides whether to actually launch an attack or not.

Re:National Defense is Critical -- Cannot Deny It.

[jeff4747]

Our own military has enough people with advanced degrees that actual military members can create next-generation technology.

Nope.

One of the requirements of military service is "up or out". You either need to earn a promotion and move to a different station, or you're "asked" to retire. And you don't get promoted in-place, you get a new assignment with a higher rank.

Those officers with advanced degrees do not get to work on the same program for 10 years...and usually not even 5 years. It's also not uncommon for officers to "temporarily" deploy in support of one of our many lovely wars. This constant churn of the development team would ensure that the new technology can't be developed.