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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.
They should just be doing this work under a "partnership" with a heavily funded startup.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
But trust Google because they’re going to be “ethical.” Why do people still believe a single word Google says? They’re a two-faced corporation just like the rest of them.
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.
If you define "the military objectives of my side are good, and those of their side are evil", then you can justify almost anything that helps you win.
Clearly, using algorithms to pre-sort images, while useful in its own right, is just the start. The obvious followup is having drones designed such that if they're jammed, they can still attempt to carry out their mission as best as they can on their own (thus reducing or eliminating the military effectiveness of jamming as an anti-drone weapon; Russia has gotten very good at such electronic warfare).
Jesus: "Son of a
of the contractors.
Every drone in use is another work shift. AI coders enjoying gainful employment.
Think of the positive peace side of cloud computing AI code that enjoys guiding drones.
A drone painted by a local artist that maps a famers fields.
In agriculture, archaeology, city planning, normal police work, geology.
An AI can work on so much more than just images of a well disciplined enemy in a free fire zone.
Think of the later spin off and peace dividend of having an AI thats so very advanced after all that free practice.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Have you ever worked for the DoD as a contractor? I have and this nonsense about Google only doing work for the DoD that is “ethical” is laughable. The military-industrial conplex is about the least ethical group of people you can find.
Do you hear people complaining about other US corps involved with the US military?
Yes, I have. Ever heard of this thing called the “military-industrial complex?” People have been complaining about it for going on 60 years.
Maybe, but the real clue was when it was replaced with "Killing is my business, and business is good."
Have you ever worked for the DoD as a contractor? I have and this nonsense about Google only doing work for the DoD that is “ethical” is laughable. The military-industrial conplex is about the least ethical group of people you can find.
Ummm, less ethical than Google?
I find that hard to believe. At least the DoD is honest about what they do: kill the enemies of the US.
Google's entire business model is based on lying to their product while they strip-mine their privacy.
To understand the mind set passed down understand the end of ww2.
Operation Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... later the Defense Scientists Immigration Program.
A lot of US science has its original well outside the USA over generations.
The story is generations know how to sell the US gov on needing their skills.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Do you need a safe space to cry in?
You sure you have enough room in your mom's basement?
What specific military secrets have been spilled?
Ummm, less ethical than Google?
Yes, but that isn’t some endorsement to say that Google is a beacon of ethics. Far from it.
I find that hard to believe. At least the DoD is honest about what they do: kill the enemies of the US.
Honesty is not the same as being ethical. If a person is honest that they beat up young children to steal their candy does that make them ethical?
Google's entire business model is based on lying to their product while they strip-mine their privacy.
Because the DoD has never lied or done things that have invaded the privacy of US citizens? LOL. Methinks you need to brush up on PRISM, NSLs, etc.
And how is what is happening here any different? Is Google being fined, executives being improsoned or anything of that sort? Oh wait, no all that is happening is a couple of news stories criticizing their dishonesty.
Weak trollig is weak. .
>If a person is honest that they beat up young children to steal their candy does that make them ethical?
Obviously it does when compared to the bully who lies about his beating kids for their candy.
Put another way, is the criminal who confesses his crime to the police more ethical than the criminal (same crime) who doesn't? I'd say yes.
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.
If you're called before your maker when you die to be held accountable for the choices you made in your life, playing the "but whattabout" game isn't going to help you.
I'm literally more concerned about the location of my towel than I am about answering to my maker. And I'm pretty certain that I know where my towel is.
Not really trying to shift blame. Trying to do an honest accounting of how many deaths I'm responsible for. If the aircraft gun kills one person, it's easy to blame the pilot. Or to blame the guy that ordered the pilot to fire. The blame attributed to one of the guys who helped design one of the maintenance components would be pretty minimal, but I acknowledge non-zero. The specific explosive I helped with may not even be used in the nukes that'll wipe out DPRK, but IMO the crime's in the intent.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I don't get the US.
Outside of silicon valley, as a generalization? *No one cares*.
Do you hear people complaining about other US corps involved with the US military? What about US tech firms like IBM, Oracle, Sun(history here), Microsoft, and EVERYONE ELSE!
Yet, Google gets involved -- Google which I hate I might had, but to be fair.. they get involved and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
There's no story here. At all. If this is a story, then setup some website that shows all companies in the US, and all their funding, and start bitching at the top!
It's a fair point. But I think it's because people expect Google to be better than that. They started out trying to not be "evil", which shows an understanding that power can corrupt and that corporations can often act sociopathically. They seem to be going against that now. I expect Raytheon to be in the death business; I would like it if Google did better.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I knew long ago when their motto was "Don't be evil" that it was only a question of time until it changed to "Be evil to make more money" because all capitalist companies evolve into doing evil things because evil things are more profitable.
If the crimanal tells it only to reduce time in prisonn or because he is showing off, then no.
Actions seldom tell if somthing is ethical. Intentions do. You also need to keep many other things into account. And that is why legal systems exist.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
murder as in: kill against their will
murder:
the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought
You could make an argument that there's some universal law against killing, so it's all murder. Or you could argue that not even stoning adulterers is murder, since it follows the law. Either way, it doesn't mean what you said it means.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It spends unethical volumes of tax payer dollars without anything in return. That's about as unethical as it gets.
Or perhaps you are suggesting we have a responsibility to let invaders waltz into our country so they can be greeted with wine and caviar.
I have create a target recognition system using opencv and caffe. I working now on getting it to run on a RasPi by simplifying the neural net. I used blue uniforms for this first test target category..
I don't even remotely believe that. I believe that the US has had positive military objectives (Kosovo) and very negative ones (Vietnam). And beyond the objectives, sometimes the means were better and sometimes worse, especially in places like Vietnam.
But one thing I very strongly believe is that the choices about those military objectives and means needs to be made by the civil government of our society, with the advice but not control of the military, and through a real political process. Without a doubt that political process makes epic mistakes (Vietnam), but I fear even more the idea that individuals or corporations making those decisions without access to the full scope of intelligence the government has and without a democratic mandate to make those choices.
That's not that individuals don't have a right to demand to be reassigned and/or resign in (public) protest from an activity they find morally unacceptable. And to the extent that some tech employees personally believe they cannot contribute to a project with military goals, more power to them. But the over-arching decision about AI and war belongs to the political branches, not to silicon valley.
It's (basically) the same question that got asked in the Nuremberg Trials: just how much responsibility does any given individual have? Where does it start, where does it end?
I think I remember a semi-recent trial about a book-keeper who worked in a concentration camp. He certainly didn't kill anybody personally. But he worked there. He calculated how much gold could be yielded from the teeth of the inmates and all the other gritty stuff. Somebody had to do it after all, right?
At the Nuremberg Trials almost everybody denied even the slightest direct responsibility - they just followed orders.
(Speer was the exception, he acknowledged a cloudy "general responsibility" and was the only one (apart from Hess) who didn't end up at the gallows.)
Governments were always good at compartmentalizing the kind of jobs you did, so you only do one small part and maybe not even see the big picture (40k-ish people worked on the Manhattan project - but very few were aware of what they were really doing, at least until Trinity went off).
In Germany, in 1933-1945, the Holocaust was also very compartmentalized. All the death-camps were far away, in East-Poland etc. The people pushing Jews into livestock wagons weren't told what would happen to the people inside - and most were smart enough not to ask. At the camps, most dirty jobs like actually opening the valves for the were often by inmates. So, not a lot of Germans (apart from those "overachievers" that shot inmates for fun) had actually physically killed a jew.
So, I ask again: at what point does responsibility end?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
That's just what I was thinking. If the IRS can target conservatives with the blessing of the opposing administration what about anything else. How long before we start having efforts to wipe out all opposition domestically? Certain religious groups? People with mental illness? The US government does not exactly have a long history of benevolence.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
If I make a hammer how much responsibility do I bear if someone uses it to kill someone? I'd say about as much as if I make cars and someone kills someone with that. Or guns for that matter while we're on the subject. Making tools does not make you responsible for how those tools are used. Even nukes which are designed primarily to kill are also used to ensure peace through their disuse. Bad things would happen if we didn't have them making the fact that we have them a positive. If I were that I guy I would lose 0 sleep at night worrying about it. He says non-zero, but I would say it is zero. He has no control over how the things he has created are used. That's up to the people who hold them now.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
I would strongly disagree with that sentiment. We have a right to defend our interests, and that's not always just our borders. When you have training camps where jihadists are being trained to kill American citizens it is in our best interests to put a stop to that. When you have brutal dictators who are using chemical weapons on their political opponents in violation of the Geneva conventions it's in the interests of the world at large to put a stop to that as well. There are degrees. By your logic it would be unethical to go into Nazi Germany and stop what Hitler was doing.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
...and at the end of the day who cares? Weapons of war don't do anything without politicians who decide when and where they get used. It's like blaming guns and the NRA for school shootings instead of the individual who pulled the trigger.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Raytheon is in the keep your kids from getting killed by the enemy business. You can support them or not, but it's their tech that will be relied on when someone tries to save your kids. Up to us how good that tech is. Apparently you don't give a shit and would rather an enemy be in a superior position.
Would you say the same to a Pakistani mother? I'm guessing not. Funny how good things and bad things can change position, depending on one's point of view.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
how do you defend the border when your high tech weapons are sticks and stones while the enemy comes at you with nukes and tanks? there goes your opinion
That's retarded - so somehow after my body stops ticking over I am going to have an internal dialogue in which I get to argue with myself? If anything is immature it's your response. Did my comment annoy the good little christian? Go thump a bible.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.