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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.
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.