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Google Plans Not To Renew its Contract for Project Maven, a Controversial Drone AI Imaging Program (gizmodo.com)
Kate Konger, reporting for Gizmodo: Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud's business. Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company, Greene said, adding that the decision was made at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work. The company plans to unveil new ethical principles about its use of AI next week.
And we'll be here waiting to troll them here on slashdot!!!!!!
be building SkyNet.
Do a good job, and you really can get the Syrians out of Lebanon. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Couldn't have said it better. Alphabet can create as many companies as it wants. Same people, different names.
I'm really looking forward to the new drone related reCAPTCHA images. "Select all images of people in groups"
...which is all about drone-based AI assisted ... "package" ""delivery"".
I mean... I GUESS you could use this Death Ray as a weapon - but it's for PEACEFUL purposes - I swear
crazy dynamite monkey
Standard government (and business) practice when a program experiences any adverse PR: end it as soon as possible and start it up under a new name.
Homonym proper nouns are enfuriating. &angry-face;
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why doesn't Google notify DoD they are stopping work on present contract and will not be submitting any billings?
That is a legal and ethical action.
Yeah, they’ll just open a contract under a different name and hide it better.
So? What is wrong with that?
The employees aren't objecting to the project being done, only to Google doing it. So if it is done under a different name, that solves the problem.
It is silly to expect a substantial solution to a "problem" that lacks substance.
dont be such a tool you feckless cunt
Well I do not expect the Department of Defense to shrug, say "oh well..." and move along.
They will find a new partner (maybe Yahoo! Imaging or even Facebook) that might not do as well. Then when the resulting (inferior) AI decides a school bus is really an armored personnel carrier... What could possibly go wrong?
For a further example please refer to Apple maps.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
The employees aren't objecting to the project being done, only to Google doing it.
The employees are objecting to Google being a service to the defense of the country (at Google's profit).
These are not employees that ought to be listened to, and if they want to whine about it, then they ought to be sent out to find employment somewhere in the Gitmo.
And if they don't want to participate in a military project, then they should stay off of DARPAnet, I mean the Internet, or anything to do with IP, or High Speed Computing, or VLSI, or ...
It used to be that DARPA and DOD hired ppl directly. Starting under reagan, we had the big push to move towards contracting which is now an economic nightmare. In addition, we really should have a number of scientists on-board working on various new tech.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The modern Internet hasn’t had anything to do with DARPA in decades. Oh no! Someone has a different opinion. Go back to your safe space, snowflake.
Couldn't have said it better. Alphabet can create as many companies as it wants. Same people, different names.
But it won't be the same people. This new company can hire only people with the types moral attitudes that won't have a problem building military drone AI software.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Yeah, they’ll just open a contract under a different name and hide it better.
The contract was probably turned over to a minority and woman owned small business set aside. So a shell company will come in, skim a bunch of cash off the top, and then subcontract the same work back to the same people at Google. But they won't be "directly" working for the government.
That's how it works in federal contracting.
I've written software for military drones. I wrote the system that Bradley Manning stole all the data from. I wrote a system that controls weapons exports. I've written software used by border patrol to run down illegal immigrants in the desert. I worked on Healthcare.gov. Hell, I even worked for the phone company and was part of the scandal that brought down MCI Worldcom.
I sleep well at night because if I didn't do it, somebody else would.
Thank you for your service.
I would not be surprised if they will just hand over their research and do new stuff for the Chinese government in hopes they allow them back into their market. Companies, especially tech companies, tend not to really care about who is paying them, and what the technology is used for.
cool story brah!
The DoD is probably rather happy Google quit. Who would want to work on military projects with someone as unreliable and leaky as Google?
The employees are objecting to Google being a service to the defense of the country (at Google's profit).
Which country? Google is a multi-national corporation, with headquarters in Dublin, with employees based in dozens of different countries. Many of their employees of all nationalities, and many of their customers of all nationalities, object to the idea of teaching machines to hunt and kill humans, even when it is abstracted to simply "target selection" (for now).
For the right $$ amount, there's never a shortage of folks that are more than willing to do it...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Google hires people based on skin color and genitals, which leaves them with subpar engineers. I know several of them, they're fucking nuts. You don't want them working on anything important or that needs to actually get finished.
at least get the journalist's name right
https://techcrunch.com/author/kate-conger/
https://kinja.com/conger
"Kate Conger is a senior reporter at Gizmodo."
Sorry the only jobs we have available in GTMO are lifeguards!
liberal
I see Google leadership and employees feel entitled to a world of peace. They don't like the 'backlash' that comes with doing the hard work of preparing for the worst. The functional result of this thinking leads to The Free World ending up on the pile of Darwin Award winners.
The real world imposes backlash too, Google.
Google is a multi-national corporation, with headquarters in Dublin, with employees based in dozens of different countries.
Google's founders are US-based. All the engineering and technical innovation to make Google what it is was done and continues to be done in the US. Google is a US organization that re-organized with a foreign HQ on paper only because various countries' tax laws makes the arrangement convenient to Google's shareholders for purposes of having the company avoid payment of taxes -- Sure Google also maintains some facilities in other countries, that is to facilitate low latency access to their servers and advertising to end users in those countries, But those foreign offices wouldn't have anything to do with Google's AI developments or similar US-based projects.
object to the idea of teaching machines to hunt and kill humans, even when it is abstracted to simply "target selection"
Their project has to do with analyzing drone footage to provide information to humans more quickly. Nothing to do with autonomous killers.
Actually, it will live on under JHU APL as part of Minotaur
Google's contributions were quite helpful, but not required, per se
LOL. People are buying this public statement?
All that's happening is the project is moving into a small locked-down division of Google. There's no way they're gonna skip out on getting that big fat government pork, with guaranteed additional revenue year-to-year for continued "development."
thus quoth the maven
nevemrome
Good for Google. This is a gray area. As a former USAF software developer, I have been using my time after hours to study machine learning. I swore to uphold the constitution, and while it does not necessarily apply directly to non-citizens, I don't feel right about extrajudicial killings remotely at our leisure, especially given the high rate of non-target killings that has entailed.
If the US is attacked and this is needed in an emergency, I can see helping the US government. However, I don't think the president needs a convenient kill button to micromanage so he can decide to kill anyone he wants overseas at any time.
So they plan to deliver the software no later than end of 2019 where you click on some portrait image on the web, the AI will identify and locate the person's home based on social media and Google maps data, and then automatically launch a drone strike on that home. Testing will then commence with the critics of the project as guinea pigs.
Their project has to do with analyzing drone footage to provide information to humans more quickly.
What exactly do you think I meant by "target selection"?
Hell, the target selection is the hard part. Adding in the last bit of code to fire a missile or drop a bomb at a given target is relatively simple stuff that we've had for 50+ years.
Some other company will and maybe they won't be as moral as the google employees or maybe they will be more so however other countries/organisations are certainly doing this so who would you prefer to own that space.
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Google will open up a shell company with more ooo's to their name.
google can do it or not... it won't change anything.
its happening. If various corporate cultures want to special snowflake their way out of contracts that just leaves more opportunities for rival organizations.
yawn.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Choose which person looks like a Muslim.
Ooooh! Anonymous SJW strikes again! You go xir!
Some may say this is an arbitrary line in the sand, or one that to inclusive, but it's admirable that they have the will to draw any line at all. If what Google and big tech companies promise comes true (i.e., general AI in the next 10-20 years), then this should be welcome news to anyone who wants to see AI help humankind and not hurt it.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Previous reports said that this project was a small tier of the larger government cloud contract. This one is already signed. "Don't be evil" was removed from as the company motto. It doesn't change a thing. They are still after that 10 year contract. This article is nothing but a big PR smokescreen. You can sell this article to the people of zdnet. Not at slashdot.
Of course, Google will probably be more than happy to help China or Pakistan or the highest bidder. But the PC police say you can't help the US.
My essay has gotten little attention: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/...
Even things like this (not covered in the essay) has been hard to find more info about: https://twitter.com/berendjanw...
What exactly do you think I meant by "target selection"?
Not target selection; the work is unrelated to combat operation: not identifying "targets" in realtime - but analyzing data already aggregated and stored in the cloud. This is essentially equivalent to bulk analysis of batches of security camera footage --- they receive an enormous amount of video from their surveillance drones, so the volume of daily footage exceeds the ability of their humans to process the and find things of interest from the surveillance files.
The product of the bulk data processing would be video flagged for review by humans.
Not killer robots....