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.