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In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI (medium.com)
On Tuesday, Microsoft expressed its intent
to bid on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract -- a contract that represents a $10 billion project to build cloud services for the Department of Defense. The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what technologies Microsoft would be building for the Department of Defense. At an industry day for JEDI, DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II explained the program's impact, saying, "We need to be very clear. This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department." This has ruffled a few feathers inside the Redmond-based software giant. In an open letter published Saturday, an unspecified number of Microsoft employees stated their disapproval. They wrote: Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of "empowering every person on the planet to achieve more," not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position. Like those who took action at Google, Salesforce, and Amazon, we ask all employees of tech companies to ask how your work will be used, where it will be applied, and act according to your principles.
We need to put JEDI in perspective. This is a secretive $10 billion project with the ambition of building "a more lethal" military force overseen by the Trump Administration. The Google workers who protested these collaborations and forced the company to take action saw this. We do too. So we ask, what are Microsoft's A.I. Principles, especially regarding the violent application of powerful A.I. technology? How will workers, who build and maintain these services in the first place, know whether our work is being used to aid profiling, surveillance, or killing? Earlier this year Microsoft published "The Future Computed," examining the applications and potential dangers of A.I. It argues that strong ethical principles are necessary for the development of A.I. that will benefit people, and defines six core principles: "fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable."
With JEDI, Microsoft executives are on track to betray these principles in exchange for short-term profits. If Microsoft is to be accountable for the products and services it makes, we need clear ethical guidelines and meaningful accountability governing how we determine which uses of our technology are acceptable, and which are off the table. Microsoft has already acknowledged the dangers of the tech it builds, even calling on the federal government to regulate A.I. technologies. But there is no law preventing the company from exercising its own internal scrutiny and standing by its own ethical compass. Further reading: Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition.
We need to put JEDI in perspective. This is a secretive $10 billion project with the ambition of building "a more lethal" military force overseen by the Trump Administration. The Google workers who protested these collaborations and forced the company to take action saw this. We do too. So we ask, what are Microsoft's A.I. Principles, especially regarding the violent application of powerful A.I. technology? How will workers, who build and maintain these services in the first place, know whether our work is being used to aid profiling, surveillance, or killing? Earlier this year Microsoft published "The Future Computed," examining the applications and potential dangers of A.I. It argues that strong ethical principles are necessary for the development of A.I. that will benefit people, and defines six core principles: "fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable."
With JEDI, Microsoft executives are on track to betray these principles in exchange for short-term profits. If Microsoft is to be accountable for the products and services it makes, we need clear ethical guidelines and meaningful accountability governing how we determine which uses of our technology are acceptable, and which are off the table. Microsoft has already acknowledged the dangers of the tech it builds, even calling on the federal government to regulate A.I. technologies. But there is no law preventing the company from exercising its own internal scrutiny and standing by its own ethical compass. Further reading: Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition.
I wonder what these same employees would do when China comes knocking on their freedom.
China has no interest in "attacking our freedom".
America has 170,000 troops in East Asia. China has none in North America.
If you did you already actively gave approval for military action. Sorry but trying to pretend you are too good of a person when you already voted for a president that takes unilateral military action in nations we are not at war with. That is active consnet folks. If you say pull the trigger refusing the make the bullets is just lying to yourself.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I really wish we could all be naive hyper-liberal globalist-humanists. I would jump on that bandwagon in a second if the whole world went in that direction at the same time. But it isn't. There are really bad actors in this world who would like to destroy all our rights, freedoms, and our safety, even our lives. And the nation is the container of those things. If we do not take actions to protect the container of everything we have and are those things will spill out, destroyed. So, feel smug, hyper-liberals, but you will be responsible for your own demise. And yes boys and girls, sometimes you as a nation have to kill those people trying to kill you. That's the real world. Grow up.
E Proelio Veritas.
Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of "empowering every person on the planet to achieve more," not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality
It's for this very reason that these employees should quit. I mean...the USA is a "free" country, no?
Why would you quit if doing so would do nothing to prevent the very thing you objected to? It only makes sense to quit after you make your objections clear and they ignore them.
You should be glad this is the land of the free because people like you are free to say the absolute dumbest things without being jailed. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This submission screams political interest piece courtesy of msmash.
How is it a political piece and not an story on ethics? This is of genuine interest to the people who are interested in IT. How should people who don't work in a traditional defense industry react when they are asked to work on a project that is described by DOD's chief management officer as "about increasing the lethality of our department"? Do you think that this story should have been swept under the carpet?
I wonder how many heads would explode if these people were told that war has been waged for tens of thousands of years and Donald Trump is just the current president keeping the arms sharpened.
These aren't stupid people. You aren't going to teach them anything by pointing out that war isn't a new thing. But just because war has been waged for thousands of years does not mean to that they want to play a part in killing people. And the message in the letter is not that they object to working the Trump administration (there are plenty of government contracts that Microsoft bids for that doesn't generate a backlash).
Nor are they advocating that the JEDI program should not exist. There message is simply that they do not want to be part of it.
Two things:
1) if they don't want to be part of it, then they can always leave MS for some other company...
2) "There message" --- their message? where message?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They reject Trump for ethical, not political reasons. They do not want to empower him because he is dangerously unethical, not because he is a Republican.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Type mismatch - expected parameter of type dictator, found icecream. Bailing near line 473.
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