I work at Google but opinions are my own.
This is actually the thing I don't understand. Could you or someone please kindly explain it to me?
What is "evil" about working with the military or developing weapons?
I've seen this whole "Google is betraying its 'do not evil' by working with the military" as fact so many times but I've yet to get a better explanation for why it's actually evil besides some variation of "the military is bad"
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-oba...
It’s not the military that is evil, it’s this particular program in the eyes of many.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333
Disclaimer: I am also fortunate to work at Google and my opinions are my own.
I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs?
The distinct advantage of drones is to safeguard the lives of military personnel by not putting them in harms way. You can make an argument that this fact makes using military force politically easier, but I think the blame for that is once again on the military/political leadership and not the drones themselves.
If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing.
Drone strikes, as they are used, are a more evil way of taking out identified targets of other nationalities. I find the concept of a nation state summarily assassinating people a bit troubling, but drone strikes make it even worse by making it imprecise and cheap.
Drone strikes without on the ground operators create huge collateral damage [0].
When operating in a civilian area, it's far less precise to handle the targeting based on a video stream and to send in a hellfire missile rather than have on the ground operators identify the target and pull the trigger.
Effectively, they are using civilian casualties as credits to buy military lives and convenient and rapid force projection capabilities. Any calculus that considers innocent lives as accepted collateral - when you have other options that are just more expensive or difficult can be considered evil.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
Uh, actually, now that you mentioned it, that would be even more scary.
That would be totally consequence free assassination device. At least the civilian casualties put some lid on the tendency to wantonly fly around in glorified RC planes murdering people.
The way I see it, if you are intending to assassinate a person (i.e. kill them not part of a military engagement) you could at least have the decency to have operators on the ground, with visual range to the target to pull the trigger. That's skin in the game. That's proper balancing of the calculus.
When you remove the chance of your own guys getting hurt, you are lowering the threshold to apply deadly force.
The whole point of due process and so on is to guarantee human rights for all and more importantly, put checks and balances on the actions of the political leaders.
When it suddenly becomes "ok" to kill people in automated fashion around the globe, that's a serious threat to all civil liberties regardless if one is a US citizen or not.
I think a free and open society is the only reason US has any credibility in claiming a moral high ground and things like eliminating targets on the disposition matrix [0] without due process erodes that high ground quite effectively.
I completely agree with your last three paragraphs. But once again, none of that is specific to drones. It is true whether the trigger is pulled by special forces soldier from feet away, from an manned aircraft thousands of feet in the air, or a pilot in trailer hundreds of miles away.
My main opposition is to the factory like efficiency in which these extra-judicial executions are carried out by the drone pilots in a cost effective manner.
It gives me associations with other human organizations in the past which have carried out their mission with cruel detachment and efficiency.
I can't really put my finger on it, but it's just something I feel Stalin or Himmler or Robespierre would have totally agreed with.
Automated elimination of the enemies of the state? Wonderfull!
My opinion on the topic has not translated into a reduction in automated warfare as a policy. On the plus side, independent of my opinion, technology has moved forward so that given similar circumstances, the embassy would at least have a chance that a drone pilot would realize during visual confirmation that the target has a big Chinese flag out front.
There's no significant difference between a drone-strike and a conventional airstrike by a manned aircraft, at lest when it comes to targeting, precision, etc.
Drone-strikes might even be better than conventional airstrikes because the pilot may have less workload (therefore more focus) during the strike part, meaning fewer errors and mistakes.
But there's a significant difference in the sense that drones are the only way these strikes are conducted. Manned strikes would be more risky, since they expose a pilot, and less practical because manned aircraft can't be "parked" over a target for anywhere near as long as a drone. And whatever the legality of the situation, the political reality is that manned strikes look substantially more like an act of war.
So the difference is that many of these strikes wouldn't happen without drones. It's not about how the bomb is delivered, it's about whether we're assassinating people without a declaration of war in the first place.
I have been against politicians who support this, though every presidential nominee for at least 12 years has supported it. But political opposition isn't limited to the voting booth. If a horrible act can be blocked by means reduction then dissuading people from enabling the means is a way to change politics.
You claim that a person on the ground is going to get better identification but they need to be hidden rather far away so that they aren't noticed and aren't hit. This reduces the typically achievable accuracy substantially from the theoretical maximum. Manned aircraft can't stay on target because of refueling needs, speed, and how loud they are, so you have very narrow windows of opportunity. Most ordnance from manned aircraft are also much larger than those used by drones, so manned aircraft typically have larger blast radius and can kill many more unintended people.
So while their can be narrow specific situations where FAC + F35 can deliver more precision, overall a drone provides much more precision and less danger to others.
This is obviously an emotional situation and many people don't believe that it is valid to kill specific individuals, as many others have claimed on this thread.
I don't care how far up the rank of Isis or Al Kaida the person targeted is. Risking civilian casualties should not be acceptable.
A combat in a war and an assassination are two different things - I was condidering an assassination which by nature should be fine grained.
I wouldn’t personally want to work in weapons development, but I certainly wouldn’t want to work in weapons development for a military that as a result of its offensive use of its weapons is making children in the third world afraid of blue skies.
But I have a gmail and I use google maps, so I’m not really in a position to judge.
Along with the usual "If I didn't do it, someone else would".
My overall point is that drones are not a unique class of weapon. You should either have a problem with Google working on a weapons program or not. Working on drones is no worse than working on manned aircraft.
It’s intended as a deterrent.
Repeat indefinitely for all “tools”
(There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to it. The empire did nothing wrong)
You can Always justify making a bigger better gun or “tool”.
Don’t make tools you wouldn’t want used against you.
Tech engineers in particular are more than normally exposed to the ideas of weapons and responsibility of creators for their creations.
Dodging that is the opposite of being a coder/nerd.
Gas warfare was banned after WWI, but during WWI, both allies and central powers used it before it was banned. Nuclear weapons are banned... After the Allies used them twice.
International bans on intolerable weapons are a great idea. Unilateral disarmament of a useful weapon with no international ban may be suicidal.
Once again that is a political issue. If someone finds a way to suddenly reduce the cost of bullets by 50%, the response from the military shouldn’t be to buy twice the number of bullets.
>with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone
The article denies that is how the AI would be used.
Phonenumbers are the target identifier.
They literally don't know who they are killing, only people engaging in certain patterns of behavior.
The whole thing is just a vaguely statistical murder game.
Google's work will now ensure that there won't be. Even with a 100% sure target identifier, it will now correctly hit the right target just as much as it correctly demonetizes youtube videos.
No.
> If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing.
In the context of this discussion the problem would be with the weapons designers.
That said, to imply drones are just like previous weapons is naive. The ethics of warfare change over time as the weapons used to wage it change. And death in war being even more abstracted away via drones (a process began with the first thrown rock and continued up through the carpet bombing of WWII and Vietnam) is certainly worth discussing.
If nothin else drones raise the question of scale - they allow for a lot more targeted killings.
Until the day war becomes an ugly memory we should all do as much as possible to examine and understand the forms of dehumanization it produces.
Let's say your neighbor starts poisoning all the pets in your neighborhood, would you make poison for them because it's not the poison doing the killing?
Not "fine", but I think "maybe a little bit less horrified" might be accurate, because a remote video feed apparently makes it even harder to tell what you're shooting [1]:
What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.
Another former operator said similarly [2]:
Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.
“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ “
Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
Though in any case it seems like quite an awful argument that distancing yourself from whom your killing should be fine because killing-isn't-okay-anyway-so-whatever.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
No, that wouldn’t matter obviously. Drones are only relevant because that’s what they are using: if it were helecopters and google were being asked to make computer-vision enhanced helecopter dashboards to make the program more efficient and more lethal people would have similar concerns.
This program in particular is troublesome because they have decided since it is out of self defense[0] it can be done outside of a congressionally declared war without public oversight[1] and to even target American citizens if the executive branch alone secretly determines they are linked to Al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization[2]. It has also been documented hitting first responders to ensure a target is not rescued [3] which would be called a war crime if anyone else did it.
Project Maven expands this new (in my view, extralegal) kind of warfare by making it more lethal and more automated. It scales this program up in a way that, say, making bullet proof vests for soilders or even tanks does not, because those are used in old fashioned congresssionally declared wars.
[0] https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Egan...
[1] https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/08/15/opinion/oconnell-targeted-k...
[2] http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-dro...
/s/guns/drones
That statement won't last long term.
Evil things like making better weapons for people who kill innocent civilians.
Oh, so we don't need these weaponized AI developements then? But I suspect that with the AI you could more easily escape responsibility by blaming the software. Who faces the consequences when an autonomous drone bombs a school? "Oops, sorry, it was a bug."
because of uncontrollable collateral damage. Same with mines that can't be deactivated.
Drones, on the other hand, promises precise strike, with little to no collateral damage.
If killing of "enemy combatants" can't be stopped, why not make it as precise and accurate as possible, and prevent collateral damage?
That is they are precise in targeting a specific location but they blow up everyone at that location?
Let's not even talk about double tap drone attacks. The second drone kills everyone attempting to help the wounded. Talk about do no evil...
Here is a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mi...
In case your question is serious: There are still some of us who believe in peace as an end-goal for us humans, as a race. See Kant's "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Peace:_A_Philosophic...) for a more detailed view on the subject. "Working with the military or developing weapons" are two activities that strongly work against achieving that goal (even though there would be some who would say that in the short term they do the opposite, i.e. that the military's purpose is to bring peace).
Otherwise you have the crusades.
Well, that definitely seems to be the purpose of the US military.
The US is the most aggressive military on Earth. There's no peace in its presence.
We've seen Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica, and now Pax Americana.
There could be shining utopia without military conflict in the future, but personally I'd rather not take the risk during my lifetime. Many equally matched opponents has historically resulted in brutal warfare.
The Pax Romana was 200 years of relative quiet after 700 years of effectively constant war, and followed by another 200 years of war. The thing most historians stress is just how far from peaceful it was. In practice, Roman-held lands were at peace because all resisting inhabitants were already dead, and peace on the border constituted a period of slowed conquest and retrenchment. As soon as the political situation deteriorated, both domestic fighting and foreign glory-seeking resumed.
The Pax Mongolica followed what was per capita the single bloodiest war of conquest in human history, wiping out perhaps 10% of Earth's total population and killing literally every person in several nations. The conquest stopped basically thanks a succession crisis. In return? About 200 years of relative peace and good administration, before the black plague fragmented the khanate. (And if we want to get cynical? The improvements to trade and travel under super- and hyper-powers are a key vector for pandemics. It's not sheer coincidence that disease ended the khanate.)
The Pax Britannica... well, it was accomplished mostly with vicious oppression and butchering local populations until resistance stopped. In return, we got about a century of quiet empire, ending in a global war and yet another world-shaking pandemic (this time, the Spanish Flu).
The history of imperial peaces is one of temporary quietude after an empire has killed off the opposition and reached a pause in its wars of conquest. Fighting remains on the edges, and the peace usually ends in yet another bloodbath as suppressed violence is unleashed - and often as disease wipes out large portions of the empire. It's peace by comparison, not absolute quality.
(The one thing to be said for the Pax Americana is that it's been comparatively bloodless. Even across a double-dozen shadow wars and conquests, the act of conquest was vastly gentler than its predecessors - but the history of such things does not inspire hope.)
Fair point. I guess my thought was that empires increase the risk of pandemics, since they tend to come alongside expanded travel and trade. Periods of peaceful empire see population and trade increase faster than technological growth would predict, and disease becomes a frequent limit on their durations. But it's certainly not an intended consequence, and the risk would be rising with urbanization and technological growth regardless.
It's something that worries me about global connectivity, and I think it's a widely underestimated risk. But it's hardly a risk I could hold against Pax Americana; in an era of consumer plane travel nothing short of utter isolationism would constrain the risk. At least in a relatively peaceful world we have proactive monitoring and countries that can work together on treatment and vaccines.
You don't end war by starting with the assumption that there aren't and won't be anymore before you're successful - or you would've been already.
You mean exactly like US Military did in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria due to "terrorism" and in various Central/South American countries due to "communism"? Bush specifically supported US "bringing" (his words) peace and democracy to the Middle East.
This is not even the point. You're just reasoning very poorly. You found one "good" aspect of massive armies and then showed it as evidence of their non-evilness. But if you think more, you can see that massive armies can easily do bad to the world. The fact that they haven't done yet (which, they did) does not change this fact. If tomorrow US turns into the Fire Nation, you cannot stop it, I cannot stop it, no one can.
I'm sorry, but I think in our current world historical evidence is stacked against you.
Humans are a political species. The ultimate form of political power within a specified region is to have the most capability for the violence within the region.
Hence, if a nation state would secede all capability for violence it would effectively yield the ultimate political power to someone else.
Within this framework a state needs some force projection capability within it's territory or it will sooner or later lose it's political power.
Projecting force outside of the nation states borders or using the force to subjugate it's own population is a different thing all together. You can have too much violence, but you can't really get rid of it with the current psychological configuration of the human species.
Making this violence engine more powerful is evil, even if one accepts that a military force is 100% necessary.
How quaint - "regions" don't exist with modern weapons. To say the US doesn't have to worry in it's "region" is laughably naive.
Their spending and investment is well beyond what is necessary to keep up with the "competition"
Also quaint. China is able to leapfrog decades and trillions of dollars of US spending on defense due to modern technology advancements. One only needs to look at terrorism and militants fighting in the Middle East to realize that spending does not equal capability or effectiveness. In war games, China's sheer numbers overwhelm a technologically superior foe at a fraction of the cost.
hasn't actually been needed to enforce "ultimate political power within its region" in decades,
It is literally being used every second of every day to project power and maintain stability around the globe (not to mention daily active engagements over Syria/Iraq/Afganistan etc.). Just because we haven't had a "traditional" war in (years) doesn't' mean this power isn't a vital part of defense.
*Making this violence engine more powerful is evil, even if one accepts that a military force is 100% necessary.
Who fill this power vacuum if the US steps down? Will the world hold hand and sing peace songs if the US reduces military spending and activity?
"not to mention daily active engagements over Syria/Iraq/Afganistan etc."
That's like saying it's ok to first smash windows and then charge for replacing them and being happy about how good you are in mending broken windows. It would be better no to break the fucking windows in the first place.
While US is a stabilizing force in eastern Europe and the pacific, it has totally fucked up the lives of millions in the middle east area by it's interventionist escapades. The only charitable interpretation would be that US views world history through the narrow disfiguring lense of it's own revolution which was an astounding feat by any measure. It's as if they all believe that if you just give rebels guns then a George Washington will be magically summoned to lead the country in good order to a proper form of post-despotic administration.
Of course there are lots of other reasons to interfere in other countries, but given how easy it seems to be politically to engage in these activities I can't figure out anything else masking common sense.
I agree :) However, my point was that these regional conflicts, with "tiny* countries are anything but. Superpowers are funding these wars, and it's all part of a larger game of hard and soft power. Saying the US's only worry are nukes, is just ... insane.
"While US is a stabilizing force in eastern Europe and the pacific, it has totally fucked up the lives of millions in the middle east area by it's interventionist escapades"
Excuse my vulgarity but shit has been fucked in the middle east for over 100 years. The US din't break any windows, if anything they bombed these broken windows into dust, along with everyone else.
In 10-20 years, this same statement will apply to the Pacific as China becomes more "assertive". To say the US "got it right" here is only because China's aggression or "assertiveness" is so new.
"It's as if they all believe that if you just give rebels guns then a George Washington will be magically summoned to lead the country in good order to a proper form of post-despotic administration."
I agree this is what is "sold" to the US public and the world. However the real motivations are always monetary, even in the case of the American Revolution.
Yes, Syria, Iraq, and Afganistan are good examples of the exact opposite of that.
You're not wrong, _in theory_. A military is necessary. Maybe even a military as large as the current one is necessary. Maybe even a _larger_ military is necessary.
All of those things can be true, but these drones are not being built to dissuade China from breaking their policy of isolationism and attacking. The growth of the US military is not happening to "maintain stability".
The theory is sound, and the propaganda paints a good picture, but the reason why adding more power to that system is evil is not just because it's a military and militaries are somehow intrinsically wrong. It's because that military is being _used_ in evil ways.
Again, to make it super clear: The US needs a military, and it needs a big one. The idea that humanity could achieve peace by just losing all the militaries is nice, but unfounded. It is possible for all of these facts to be true, and yet for it not to be true that literally anything a military does is thus moral and just, yeah?
I agree to a point. US is "hooked" to war as it feeds the profits and the subsidies of the military industrial complex. Especially in the eastern mediterranean area and middle east US escapades have been hugely destabilizing.
However, given the current world stage in total with such jolly players with extraterritorial ambitions as Russia and China, I would much prefer that US was ready to aggressively project force than not. As a counterbalance.
Especially as I live in Finland, I much prefer having US backed Nato force as a counterbalance to which ever clique in Kremlin has control of the Russian military antics.
This is anything but clear cut.
Definitely agreed.
For our current world conditions to hold stable it is important that at least one of our rich, basically politically aligned western countries has a worldwide military force. The US military has gone way past merely that point, however, and that is the point at which this starts getting "evil".
There's a lot of factors stacked against us. It doesn't matter, we will continue moving towards this goal.
Refusing to assist the military develop weapons doesn't really help that goal. A weak(er) military with a lesser technological edge could actually encourage war, as countries that aren't as bound by peace-seeking principles exploit the opportunity to wage war for their benefit. Basically, military weakness is destabilizing.
The refusal line of thinking makes a little more sense if you assume (in this case) the US will be perpetually militarily dominant, which I think is a bad assumption. It's also kind of racist assumption, since it assumes other nationalities are incapable of technologically leapfrogging the US or negating its military advantages.
That's not to say there might be good reason to not want to work on particular weapons systems that have specific moral problems to them, but I'd feel like you'd need a lot of detailed information to make those calls.
I think the most defensible type of objection to assisting the military is at the personal ethical/religious level.
I also hope for peace but I do not believe there will be peace without our military. I suppose it's a difference of ideals but I do not see why it would be considered "evil"
Others will just see it as a necessity and that every company should work and help the government when they are asked to defend the country and maintain the global status quo.
for some that conduct is a virus, for others just a symbiosis, but it's easy to see where they come both of them.
We don’t live on a vacuum. If you create one, someone will fill it.
I am loath to think of how much worse things could be despite the idiotic wars of Obama and W., I think the world is better off with the US guiding things rather than others.
And that's the core of the issue, and that is why these political comments are on point (which otherwise would be way too political for HN). By cooperating with the imperial US military Google is directly supporting one of the most evil forces in the world, by supporting the drone program they are directly supporting a program mainly used to kill civilians in the middle east. There is nothing good about this.
Loin des yeux, loin du cœur.
Do you mean the US military is one of the most evil forces in the world or the US itself as a geopolitical actor?
Just because there exist worse oppressors than you doesn't mean you're not evil as well.
The US established itself as 'the world police' and built 900+ military bases around the globe to protect its own financial interests at the point of a gun.
Let's not pretend it does any of this shit out of altruism.
If it's not US, Russia or China on top, then it is somebody else.
What had the Romans ever done for us?!
But regardless, what were the plausible alternative realities that you think were viable options given what we know?
I don't work in the US. I'm not a US citizen. I don't support the actions of the US military. Hell I _really_ don't want to be involved with the weapons development branch of the US military. That is one reason why me and a lot of Googlers are opposed to this.
Would you be happy for Google to work with the military of another country you have zero control over that has very questionable motives?
Well yeah. The term "military grade" is one that tends to sell products.
>What's stopping the Pentagon from buying access to users data?
If there's no end to end encryption, I assume some three letter agency already has access.
Them working closely with the military would not be the reason I would choose not to use their service considering that almost all emails already go through NSA servers.
That your work will be used to kill people?
I'm kind of surprised that needs spelling out.
See Mutual Assured Destruction.
Or you can use them defensively. Killing is evil, but if someone points a gun at you, would you still feel evil if you killed them instead?
Weapons can also neutralize weapons (instead of people), e.g. missile interception.
Further, it might be possible to develop effective non-lethal weapons (military equivalent of taser).
Finally, developing weapons can also mean that weapons become safer. For instance, less collateral damage. Or weapons that can be controlled better, so they can't be used by people who shouldn't use them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-dron...
Now imagine removing decision making from drone operators and making the thing dumb and autonomous, so a computer vision based solution just shoots anything resembling its target.
If shit goes south, just blame the machine. It's nobody's fault. It's a plausible deniability paradise.
See, if your military or government is killing people, and you work for them, assist them, or let them, you are also killing people. We have a saying: "Imagine it's war and nobody shows up".
I fear this discussion is about if you follow the narrative that US military drone strikes are a purely defensive measure, unavoidable, or serve some greater cause. Large parts of the general public outside of the US at least are of the opinion the US military and associated mercenary companies have been (and still are?) killing (innocent) people on the other side of the world, for dubios reasons. Helping them build weapons, under this assumption, equals helping them kill people.
Even the most accurate AK-47 is intended to kill people.
You have to understand that many people both at HN and at Google are not Americans. The United States is founded on great democratic values, but in the past sometimes failed to uphold them in relationship to other countries (dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, torturing in Guantanamo and the NSA's prism program which directly affected Google).
And for anyone playing at home, the "if not us, someone else" argument doesn't wash. We as a society have to draw a line. Maybe someone else will do it, but we need to fight them and not allow it, not just take our money and put our head in the sand. Just like the backlash about the NSA putting backdoors in routers and the more recent announcement of Amazon enabling a police state by scanning and identifying faces in pictures and videos. I'm worried that this will continue to push us to some pre-crime bullshit but instead of oracles with magic powers, it will be some half ass AI based on factors like race, gender, neighborhood and time of day.
China & Russia are doing it. You can't fight them without ... fighting them.
Maybe we could spend our resources building systems that destroy drones instead of an arms race.
That's just another ... weapon ;)
Watch this video[1] and realizing that Project Maven is contributing and enhancing the capability of the slaughter drones and knowing that current U.S. President(or future presidents) or any command chain above the drone operator( including the operator) can kill anyone (military personnel or not, in a war or not, in conflict zones or not, American citizens or not, yes there was a precedence from President Obama) with or without due process, with Google's AI, doesn't give you chills?
Yeah yeah I know if Google didn't do it someone else will. But for a company who's been claiming "Do No Evil" as motto from early on, I am holding Google at a higher standard - but obviously it has fallen from the moral highground. Hence being evil.
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/20/watch-out-for-killer-...
Then these soldiers go on site in another country risk their lives and take out specific bad guys without shooting too many bystanders.
You can then argue whether those were really bad guys and whether that specific operation needed to be carried out.
Building drones which are controlled remotely(or even worse by AI) to kill a wedding with kids where possibly a few people were the bad guys is NOT OK.
Drones facilitate political/military cop-outs.
For extra credit you can watch a few seasons of Homeland. Sure it is fiction but the issues are there.
To reiterate: even if you support working for military there is difference on what kind of weapons you work on
Some would define US military actions as just and civilian casualties (for example) as unfortunate. Others might define them as outright evil.
Almost nobody thinks they are “evil” there’s usually some kind of justification.
It’s not always clear cut. Trump wants to pull out and people call him isolationist. Obama tried to get involved and lit a powder keg. It’s not easy. W, sure, he messed up.
https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-emplo...
I think that the problem is more specific than working with the military or developing weapons, and it's important to disentangle the more broad concerns with military work versus the concerns about this specific project occurring at Google. I personally would not like to work on developing weapons but it's definitely much harder to defend a position such as "building ships for the U.S Navy is evil".
The problem with Project Maven is plugging A.I. into drones. Sure, you can argue that A.I. today is limited and the technology isn't there to make them autonomous. However, perception/object detection is a huge component of what would be needed as part of an intelligence that can run a drone autonomously.
Then you arrive at basically 2 questions
1. Is Google's participation Project Maven making it easier for the Department of Defense to develop fully automated drones, or will they always leave a human in the loop?
2. Is enabling the Department of Defense to develop automated drones ethical?
#1
Yes, Project Maven enables automated drones. Sure, the Department of Defense could get automated perception technology from somewhere else, but that is in fact what the parent post is proposing Google should let the Department of Defense do. Also, A.I. advances very quickly and if the project continues there may be other ways in which Google is enabling full automation of drones, for example reinforcement-learning based control. I personally do not trust that the Department of Defense will not develop automated drones if they have the capability to do so. This is because they will probably see it as an arms race, and automating drones will serve most of the aims of their organization far too well to be put off indefinitely.
#2
I believe it is unethical to facilitate the development of fully autonomous, intelligent weapons. It's hard to make a stronger case than the video someone else has linked elsewhere in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO2gcs1YvM -The potential for chaos and destruction is very high. -The capability to find and eliminate targets will likely precede the ability to make ethical decisions, and human ethical oversight of the kill decisions will be reduced especially if the drones are scaled up For more on this check out http://autonomousweapons.org/
I wouldn't use the word evil, but I feel it is inappropriate, since Google is a global company. We should be more precise, it is working with the military of one specific country, and developing weapons for one specific country (U.S.).
I am also an user of Google services, which also collect my personal data to provide me with more personalized experience. Ok. But what if, hypothetically, a war will break out, and army of my country will fight against U.S. army, which is helped by Google? It just doesn't feel right.
It's a tricky question since a strong military is obviously necessary to protect a nation, yet at the same time - our military's purpose has long since shifted from defensive to offensive - and those offensive actions have been of very dubious value at extreme cost, both monetary and in the loss of life inflicted and suffered.
Well, they kill people, see.
Are people who join the military evil? Police?
No! It's that simple.
Be consistent!
That's not consistent, that's lacking nuance. On the spectrum of things the US military does, I see the drone program closer to the former than the latter.
There is a reason why we separated executive, judicativ and legestative.
But that's a lesson to be learned by blood.
What if the training data of the AI is skewed and furthers the violent oppression of a minority, who's responsible for that? Is it the data collectors? The software engineering team?
If you work on weapons which are then used to kill people, you are complicit in those murders.
AI automation of weapons and surveillance systems is probably going to kill a large fraction of living humans. I'm not talking skynet, just about automation we could easily achieve right now. Anyone who works on those systems will be complicit in the subsequent genocides.
I guess this question is only asked by those who are confident that these weapons won't be used against them.
I understand your point, but Microsoft does an awful lot of business with the military.
Last year they won a contract to put every employee in the DOD on Win 10(1).
Not sure it's particularly MORE evil for Google to supply AI support to the Military than for Microsoft to enable the office drones systematically organize weapon shipments, troop deployments, manage body counts, etc.
(1) https://www.geekwire.com/2016/microsoft-wins-927m-support-co...
Microsoft sells a product that literally anyone (but Iran and North Korea) can buy. You can buy it or not. And you can buy extended support for it (or not).
Do you really consider these the same?
There’s never been any allegations that everyone’s Word and Excel documents are being read by MS, has there? Or that they read every email sent via Outlook and Exchange? Not the same thing at all
No, it's not. That's entirely subjective. It's only a conflict of interest in the heads of people who believe the U.S. military is evil.
The problem is that Google has a different interpretation of evil than yourself, and you're struggling to cope with that reality.
> We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains
So it boils down to the simple interpretation: Is helping the U.S. military consistent with doing good things for the world? Public opinion polls conducted in 2016 indicated that 78% of Americans trusted the military to act in the interest of the public [2]. So, at least among Americans, I think it's a reasonable conclusion that a majority of people view the military as doing good.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504... (page 32)
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/18/most-america...
But the mental gymnastics on display in this thread are depressing.
Is helping the U.S. military consistent with doing good things for the world?
Google has always been a global company with most of its users and employees outside of the USA. You can't even stop yourself talking about "good things for the world" here, even though you then immediately go on to talk about Americans only.
But even if a slim majority of Americans support the Pentagon's drone strike program, the VAST majority of the world hates it:
http://time.com/2986118/drone-strike-poll-pew/
Anyway, we don't need opinion polls in this case. A definition of "evil" that doesn't include assassinating defenceless people is utterly useless and might as well be abandoned. The US isn't at war with Pakistan and Afghanistan is hardly a country to begin with, neither country has ever posed a military threat to the USA. So the drone program has simply become a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine that eats lives on the flimsiest of pretexts and based on the most damningly absurd 'evidence' (like mobile phone signals), with the obvious consequence of mass deaths of innocent people. For instance at red weddings:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/middleeast/drone-st...
... not just once, but multiple times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
I find myself so saddened by what Google has become.
I hate to call out the elephant in the room, but there are about 9,000 people who might disagree with you---3,000 we'd have to assume, because they are dead.
Nation-states don't have the excuse of "We're barely a country" when their territory can be used to launch an asymmetric attack by private terrorists on another nation. At best, that's an abrogation of responsibility. Since the Taliban was in charge at the time, I'd call 'abrogation of responsibility' way, way too charitable an interpretation.
Law enforcement can't handle international issues when the originating nation doesn't have cooperative domestic law enforcement. At that point, the issue where attacks on a nation's home soil are being coordinated in the territory of an unresponsive or hostile foreign government becomes a military calculation.
The military is a ham-fisted tool to replace the job of domestic law enforcement, but in circumstances where the alternative is "nothing," it's depressingly better than nothing.
So the drone program has a very ineffective targeting algorithm, one so bad it has absolutely catastrophic results, and we should be upset they've tried to hire the one company who spent the past two decades refining their world-class targeting algorithms? Nobody targets better than Google.
If we want to shut down the drone program, by all means I support that notion, call your legislators though I have a feeling with the current abomination of an administration in place, it's going to fall on deaf ears for a while. But in the meantime, while we are faced with the reality of a drone program, I'm elated to hear they might be getting some much needed help to stop killing innocents.
The reason it keeps happening is because there are entire divisions of the military that are paid to drone strike people and nobody, at any level of the government, has the backbone or strength to say "enough is enough". They already had multi-billion dollar targeting efforts through the NSA, the world's largest and most sophisticated SIGINT operation. It didn't do anything, it just gave them the confidence they needed to pull the trigger more often.
The drone operators kill people because that is their job. Their kill rate will not go down because of a 20% DNN driven boost to image analysis algorithms. It will go up, because strikes on things that looked like terrorists but were actually empty houses, funny shaped rocks etc will go down, freeing up missiles to use more on actual people (their goal).
Calling legislators won't help. Obama claimed he would cancel the program, but was a phenomenally weak leader who was immediately manipulated into a consensus-quo "middle ground" position of, OK, we'll keep drone striking people, but I will personally approve each one: as if his decisions couldn't be completely determined by the people controlling his access to information!
(I'm not even American, by the way).
Obama's administration misrepresented the drone program for its "surgical precision" and "ability with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist, while limiting damage to the tissue around it" [1]. Seems to me like a targeting issue.
So I guess my question to you is: If the drone program was somehow 100% precise and it only affected people the US government deemed as "bad people", would you still be against it? If so there's no real point in our sub-discussion, as you're wanting Google to somehow shut down the drone program and I want Google to help reduce their false positive rate to zero.
As you've said, neither of us (nor Google) has the power to shut down the program, so I'd rather at least try and support doing good by reducing the deaths of the innocent until some sort of miraculous shift in US politics can result in a more permanent shuttering of the program. And I don't see that happening as even Bernie Sanders supports the drone program [2]. It's here to stay whether people like it or not, so why not focus on making it more accurate.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/05/01/151778804/john-brennan-delive...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/11/bernie-sande...
Yes! Obviously! Goodness.
Look, civilised societies have many, many checks and balances to prevent government officials arbitrarily killing people they happen to dislike. This extends to forbidding the death penalty in all the countries where I've lived. This is very important, critical in fact.
The USA routinely classifies people as "bad" without any idea of who they are, what exactly they've done (if anything) and certainly without ever thinking about why those people might have gone "bad". And it never can whilst there are people whose salary is linked to killing people.
The basic disconnect here appears to be your belief that there is a finite supply of terrorists/bad people/whatever, generated via some natural process, and the USA needs to be able to take them out with lethal force and no trials, in foreign countries. If it spends enough time, money and skill on this problem it will eventually be done, and thus the goal is to avoid killing "not bad" people whilst ensuring the "bad" people are taken out.
Whereas my view, and the view of most people in the world according to opinion polls, is that the USA arbitrarily reclassifies people as "bad" in order to keep the drone strike programme filled with targets. The more budget the various drone controlling agencies have, the more targets there will be. The supply of "bad" people is therefore infinite and drone strikes will never end, until the day the budgets for them are zeroed out.
This question is nonsense. We already have a system for determining who is "bad people" and doling out punishment in a fair way. It's called the criminal justice system. The drone program can't ever be "100% precise" because it's acting as the "executioner" of the "judge, jury, and executioner" that is US foreign policy. Even if it killed only the intended target, the targets are chosen through extrajudicial means.
If you want to counter that the US is "at war" with al-Qaida, I would ask: when does this "war" end? What are the victory conditions? Many (most?) of the people who were in al-Qaida in 2001 are already dead - yet the drone strikes continue.
Those that assign human behavig or ideas of better good to multinationals are fooling themselves.
But over the past few days I have given myself a long-term life-goal:
One day I will delete my Google Account.
I will try and make all decision in accordance with this. I already don't have a Google (or Apple) phone, I use my own domain name for email. But there are so many tiny little ways you could lock yourself in (e.g. social auth into a valuable website).
It's a big step to pull the plug and expunge Google from your life. But avoiding taking steps in the wrong direction at least buys you some time.
Working for the US military is not doing evil.
>>> The public has put their trust into Google for 20 years.
who's fault is it ?
Attempt 1) googles fault! They made an awesome product! (and even promised at the start that they “won’t be evil”.)
Attempt 2) the govts fault! They didn’t stop these firms from cornering the whole market! I don’t care that the govt isn’t prescient!
Attempt 3) my fault! I was not able to withstand or educate myself to deal with the massive amount of technological manipulation and awesome product design thrown my way!
I think blame is a non workable concept here.
The public has put their trust into Google for 20 years. We supported them. We cheered them on. We have voluntarily given them all our personal data. Our emails. Our instant messages. Our voices. All of it feeds into their massive database for them to mine.
We put our faith into them, in the hopes that they would honor their creed, that they would do no evil.
But gradually, that facade has faded away. Their accumulation of personal data, beyond what is necessary for them to perform their work. And now this. The utilization of their wealth and knowledge, to push forward the state-of-the-art in the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence.
There is nothing that will stop this. The military will find a defense contractor to do their bidding. But Google can voluntarily elect to remove themselves from this sector. Let some other company do it. Let someone else figure it out. The blood of dead innocent civilians will be on their hands. You don't see Raytheon, Boeing, or Northrop crying about it.
By doing the military's bidding, then Google is now far scarier than Microsoft ever was. For those who don't know, when they coined the phrase, Do no evil, they meant it in relation to the Microsoft Borg of the 1980s and 90s. Microsoft now seems like a sheep in comparison to Google.
I think it's time to disconnect Google from our lives. But, it's hopeless. They are everywhere.