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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 11 2018, @12:50AM
Oh-kay. But, let me make my own point excessively clear. We aren't nearly so invincible as we would like to think we are. I did mention that there might be 3 nation combos that would surprise even me. We seem to have won some pyrrhic "victories" in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan within my lifetime. That is, we tell ourselves that we won. But, in the final analysis, we have failed repeatedly to impose our will on even relatively small nations. Sure, we fucked those nations up, but, what did we "win"?
I'll also point out that our civilian population is exceedingly soft. As soon as any coalition against the US began to make our citizenry to suffer, many of our citizens would be ready to throw in the towel. In much of the world, "hardship" means no food, no medical supplies, no transportation, no supplies of any kind. In the US, "hardship" means your local grocer has run out of your favorite chips, or, maybe he doesn't stock your favorite diet beverage.
We have our soft spots and weak points. Osama bin Laden exploited one of those on 9/11/01. He did some very serious damage to our economy when he took down the Twin Towers, with just 21 men. Just think about that for awhile.