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from the im-sorry-dave-im-afraid-i-cant-do-that dept.
Google is selling the Pentagon some Machine Learning / AI training solution so their drones and sensors can pick out the good stuff from all the crap stuff being recorded by their massive surveillance apparatus on a daily basis. Most companies would probably be super pleased by selling something to a customer. Not the Google-employees. Apparently their solutions should only be used for "good", or not being evil or something and Pentagon is clearly "evil" in their eyes.
Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google's involvement.
Google's pilot project with the Defense Department's Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
Google's Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry's concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. "There's a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly," he said. While Google says its involvement in Project Maven is not related to combat uses, the issue has still sparked concern among employees, sources said
Project Maven, a fast-moving Pentagon project also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), was established in April 2017. Maven's stated mission is to "accelerate DoD's integration of big data and machine learning." In total, the Defense Department spent $7.4 billion on artificial intelligence-related areas in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Are the employees at Google starting to become a problem for Google and their eventual bottom line with their political agendas? Are they getting in the way of doing actual work? When or if is there such a line?
https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmorris on Saturday March 10 2018, @11:38PM (1 child)
All you have told the wise with that statement is that you believe that position so strongly that you don't think it is political. Whether a position is "legitimate" or not is entirely unrelated to whether it is also a political one. You are (unconsciously or cunningly) trying for the "My political position is beyond politics" gambit. Sorry Charlie, premise rejected. You guys popularized "The personal is political" and "everything is political" so too late trying to mark off some positions as outside of politics. If questions of War and Peace aren't political, if fight or surrender, build weapons or not, aren't political discussions then what passes for one in your definition? Whether we should be cutting the dicks off of six year olds?
Moving to the big picture this case illustrates the Impossibility of SJW Convergence. As any institution converges ever closer to the ideals of Social Justice it loses the capability of carrying out whatever original mission it had. Google can't even produce quality Evil anymore. The only division yet to feel the impact is the ad serving, probably because the advertisers are themselves already SJW converged to the point there is as yet no conflict between Google and the advertisers. In fact it is pressure from advertisers that is enabling the SJWs to swing the banhammer with such abandon.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Sunday March 11 2018, @04:19AM
My mistake. I meant political as in Democrat vs Republican, not political in the broader sense. Should have made that more clear.
Pacifism is not an inherently leftist position. It is more of an axis of its own that has historically been the providence of the very religious. At least until during the Vietnam war it also became the providence of young people who didn’t want to be drafted to slaughter civilians on the other side of the world for flimsy reasons.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?