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Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work To Grow Exponentially (theintercept.com)
In March, Google secretly signed an agreement with the Pentagon to provide cutting edge AI technology for drone warfare, causing about a dozen Google employees to resign in protest and thousands to sign a petition calling for an end to the contract. Google has since tried to quash the dissent, claiming that the contract was "only" for $9 million, according to the New York Times. Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story: The September emails show that Google's business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. In fact, one month after news of the contract broke, the Pentagon allocated an additional $100 million to Project Maven [the endeavor designed to help drone operators recognize images captured on the battlefield]. The internal Google email chain also notes that several big tech players competed to win the Project Maven contract. Other tech firms such as Amazon were in the running, one Google executive involved in negotiations wrote. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.) Rather than serving solely as a minor experiment for the military, Google executives on the thread stated that Project Maven was "directly related" to a major cloud computing contract worth billions of dollars that other Silicon Valley firms are competing to win. The emails further note that Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, "has some work loads" related to Project Maven.
Is all military work unethical? There's a lot of it and it employs a bunch of people.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.
Have you ever worked for the DoD as a contractor?
Ex-DoE contractor, centered around weapons. I did some analysis of explosive material for reliability concerns, did a lot of work on defeating improvised nukes, and did some work on a large-bore aircraft gun. I feel better about the work I do now, but I don't feel like my DoE work was unethical. The explosive in question could one day be used to detonate a nuke and kill a bunch of people; the aircraft gun could claim victims. I bear non-zero responsibility for those deaths. Making the call on whether a killing is ethical or not is out of my hands, but I accepted that. If you want to damn me, you also have to damn the people pulling the trigger, the people ordering those people around, and the tax-payers that aren't doing everything in their power to stop it.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I would tell him he is a cunt and go to hell anyway, that's where all the decent musicians went. The last thing I want to do is listen to fucken gospel music for the rest of eternity. I would rather roast in hell listening to some decent music. I would also suggest you widen your horizons and go read some Greek mythology, but that won't help if you haven't read the bible from cover to cover. You have done that, haven't you? I can count on one hand the amount of people (sadly preachers too) that have actually bothered to do that. I did, when I was a believer, and then I ran out of shit to read in the library and picked up a book of mythology. The bible is a hodgepodge of different religions and beliefs, way predating christianity. Any "maker" who allows the shit to happen in the world that does happen can go fuck himself with a flag pole. Also try reading Memnoch the Devil, an interesting look at God and the Devil.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.