Corporations are not people. Judge them by their actions, in the end, what matters is what happened, not intent. Almost every public institution's actions are always ascribed by some as driven by money or power, or others by high minded values.
The employees at a company can have high minded values. Even the company culture can have high minded values. But in the end, financial decisions made by companies are amoral, and what matters is, what the decisions actually were, not whether the executives were pressured into it, because ultimately, there is pressure on all sides from all stakeholders.
Giving up on $10 billion, no matter how you slice it, is a huge hit. They could have fought for it, but decided not to, based on whatever pressures they were reacting too. That's a win.
Oh nonsense, corporations are run by people. People who make deliberate decisions on behalf of the company. And implicit trust is bestowed upon these stewards of the company by the company's employees. I think theres a tacit understanding that these people will balance both shareholder value and ethical concerns. A such intent very much matters.
Look, I'm a Google employee, I really like Sundar, he comes off as a pretty authentic, caring person. But what he says in "official statements", even internal communications, like every company, is very much authored by committee, by corporate messaging, by legal, it is not his voice alone.
So if Sundar says he's doing something because it's morally right, should I believe that's the reason, because in less 'official' statements, in his own words, he comes off as a genuine person? Or, should I disbelieve it, because in more official communications, it comes off as overly parsed and triangulated?
You face the same issue with politicians. Politicians say they truly believe one thing, they announce their intent, and then when they get into office, you find their voting records quite a bit different than what you believed them to be for. I think you should judge these politicians by their actions, not their campaign speeches, not their heartfelt fireside chats, but what -- when the rubber meets the road -- they vote for. The votes don't lie, protestations of piety can.
Authentic? Perhaps to you he comes across that way. Far from it he feels to me. He seems just... well, thoughtful, I guess. To the point that he clearly insults the intelligence of the company’s employees.
Well said. When it became clear that the pentagon wanted AI imaging for AI-assisted drone strikes, instead of just Google cloud, Google Docs and other benign services, many Googlers started to speak up for what they believed was right. This wouldn’t be more than an afterthought at many other less idealistic companies.
The "intent" was to win the Pentagon contract, it is not some subjective thing here. I think when a project has an internal codename and team devoted to it it's safe to assume the pursuit and desire for Pentagon business was quite certain.
The rest of your comment reads like false equivalency and rationalizing.
Of course they wanted to win the Pentagon contract, and there's nothing wrong with that, if it is just providing G-Suite, uncustomized, or lightly customized GCP computing facilities, the same as any other Enterprise organization could purchase. What Googlers objected to in Project Maven wasn't working with the Pentagon at all, but specifically helping them to design AI imaging stuff. Sell them Google Docs or Google Compute Engine? Sure.
Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation. The non-cynical interpretation is that the contract would require them to do things their employees object to, and make them look like hypocrites given their "AI principles" document. The idea that someone would drop a $10 billion contract bid purely over getting some bureaucratic certification doesn't make sense, because for a $10 billion contract (likely the low end giving DoD budgets), you'll spend $1 billion CAPEX if you need to get it, or more likely, go through providing the documentation and audits needed (besides, I highly doubt the competitors on the contract have anything approaching Google data center security levels)
No we are talking about the same "intent." Your response was to the point being articulated in the two parent posts.
>"Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation"
No the cynical interpretation is that your company dropped out of this Pentagon business due to some moral considerations.
Believing Google dropped out due to moral considerations is by definition, the idealistic interpretation. At this point, I'm not sure we're even speaking the same language anymore, so lets end it here.
Google's management are more than happy to help the government engage in illegal assassination abroad via drone, but it's employees are not. For Google's executives, this is less to gain morality points with the public, but to retain employees who would leave otherwise.
Though another aspect is, they may have already gotten an indication from the DoD that dropping out of Maven would be held against them when evaluating the proposals. RFPs aren't just about the dollar value, and they'd certainly take into account the possibility of Googlers refusing to do the work needed to fulfill the contract.
In other words, they couldn't meet the requirements for the RFP, so they decided it was advantageous to score some morality points by dropping out...