"Google is implementing Project Maven, a customized AI surveillance engine that uses “wide area motion imagery” data captured by US government drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motions and provide results to the Department of Defense."
However I think that the biggest difference is that Google employees have the luxury of saying that because from both a corporate and personal prespective they take zero risk.
Worst case Google let’s them go with a nice severance to avoid lawsuits and they’ll find another job by the end of the week.
Workers in a steel mill that might be lucky to even have a job don’t.
Sorry, but this just spin. If you create product X specifically designed for and marketed to vertical market Y... then you're in the business of Y, period.
Not even Google's own product people would pretend to believe otherwise.
If they did - they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
Some people don't want to take part in automated killing. It is not their duty to stop others.
It's been my observation that vehement anti-war activists seem unwilling to admit that there are threats that need to be defended against.
Well, they could still always refuse that.
Would you be okay if your AI works as American ends up in the hands of the Russian military?
Why should a German, or French, or Russian Google employee then accept that their work ends up in the hands of the US military?
EDIT: Yes, they won’t directly work on the drone program – but the drone program will more likely than not be reusing ML technology built all across Google, and everyone that worked on that now knows they are personally helping the US military-industrial complex.
There was a video of Elon Musk talking about how they can only hire Citizens at SpaceX due to government restrictions. Same concept would apply to Google and DOD Work.
Directly? No. But the Google employees working on ReCaptcha know their work on training object recognition models will help the US military, and the ReCaptcha people aren’t only US citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
Nothing in my line of work comes close to ITAR, just business process automation. I’ll put money anything with AI and DOD in the job description will require polygraphs, background interviews, citizenship etc.
After they did few token delisting of opposition websites, Russian three letter service felt they finally snapped, and that they can have their own way with them.
They had to evacuate their most valuable cadres out of there to Switzerland, by giving Swiss canton an eye watering sum for a carte-blanche from their immigration office to resettle former Russian office staff there.
Armed men in black now frequent their office on Balchug. Now, with suitcases stuffed with god knows what on them.
(at least directly)
Quite a lot of those guys are on work permits in Canada.
This is almost like people in the steel industry wanting to get out of this business of war by not selling or working on steel.
Another thing to note is, do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? Are these Googlers actively trying to persuade those countries not to work on this business of war at the same time?