Existing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17208892

This sends a more powerful message than if the corporation had just avoided the work in the first place. I am hopeful and inspired by the employees stand.

Lights are shining through the cracks in the conflict dominated narrative of these times, and we have never had greater means to analyse and resolve our troubles with each other and with our environment.

Thankyou Googlers for showing up for resolution.

The other message is that google is unreliable as a business-partner because it's depending on the random emotional state of insignificant gears in their machine.

Not saying that it was wrong in this case, but folllowing recent developments at googles internal struggles, companys will ask themself one day which topic will the google-crowd angers next, and what company will suffer from it. If this continues google will suffer from it.

In the end, who-ever ordered that work is still going to get what they want. They'll just hire it out to someone else, no?

Sure, but that's the same as "if I didn't torture them, if I didn't slaughter them, someone else would have," which has failed to be enough defense to stop war criminals from being hanged.

Regardless of what comes after, you're never wrong to do the right thing.

That's one of the strange problems here. It'll probabally get farmed out to a less technically proficient team which, ironically, could lead to an increase in the loss of innocent life.

That could be the outcome, yes, or the outcome could be entirely different. It could be that the projects gets farmed out to a less-than-competent contractor that is willing to work on it, with a result that is so spectacularly bad (along any given dimension, not just how many innocent lives are affected) that the project dies.

That, too, is a complete guess and just one of many hypothetical outcomes. I don't think there is any sufficient ground to infer that "if Google does not do it, it will be worse".

I think you're falling into the perfect market fallacy. Quality AI work is not a commodity. It's entirely possible they either won't be able to find any credible bids or they'll find a bid from a less competent party and the project will have to be scaled back because they can't accomplish all their goals well enough.

You think IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon are not credible bidders?

They are the ones who bid against Google in the first place.

Not if there is absolute solidarity against that.

And there cannot be absolute solidarity if any single individual or organization caves in.

Therefore "someone else will, so I might as well" is logically incorrect; it defeats the possibility of solidarity before it has had a chance.

Maybe another shop can do it all the same, the important matter is that such a prestigious workforce as makes up Google has rejected this kind of work. Money cant buy belief in armistice that quality of publicity.

It seems like most of the commenters in this thread accept that military AI is inevitable, somebody will do the work. Could we collectively make a different choice? It’s a damn important choice to make.

> could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes

They prefer inaccurate drone strikes that kill innocents?

How does NYT software allow a backwards "smart quote" to get published?

> ”So, we are working on it,

Unicode copy-paste

In capitalism, someone else fills the void in a profitable market.

Will it be another large company or a startup?

Sure, let Palantir take it up, but there's nothing in this story that says Google won't sign a contract for a renamed initiative for non-protesting employees to work on. The article mentions a 4000-signature petition for the company not to work on warfare tech, but that's not what corporate is assenting to.

I wouldn't be surprised if an Alphabet spinoff miraculously arose to take up the challenge.

Google is one of the very few companies (and probably the only us gov contractor) that seems to actually have tech and skills to build capable AI.

So, it’s a huge void for someone else to try to fill.

It'll be a company that GV invests in....

"If we don't, someone else will" is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card. Literally anything will happen in a capitalist market, if someone is willing to pay for it. Does that mean everything that someone will pay for is ethical and you shouldn't bother trying to abstain from it?

If you want to be pragmatic about it, the fewer people who are willing to do X, theoretically the higher the price goes, possibly to the point where no one wants to pay to do X anymore. So refusing to do X is not just an empty gesture.

I took GP as a genuine question posed without taking a stand on the issue morally.

Reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite movies..."Still Life"

"Not my kind of money..."

> "If we don't, someone else will" is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.

True, but at the same time, "let's not do this" also isn't an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card. Google engineers can act all high and mighty morally, but guess what: it doesn't matter at all either way.

What Google engineers are doing in this situation is strictly better both in the utilitarian and in the Kantian sense. Saying “it doesn’t matter at all either way” is a non-argument.