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posted by janrinok on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 2) by ants_in_pants on Sunday March 11 2018, @03:19AM

    by ants_in_pants (6665) on Sunday March 11 2018, @03:19AM (#650749)

    >A company does not exist to fulfill the political agenda of its employees.

    Quite right! A company exists to pursue profits, regardless of how ethical it may be. That is why they must be abolished.

    >Poor, egoistic snowflakes.

    I know, right? Those shareholders thinking they get to decide what society does just because they have money.

    >Turns out, lots of the country doesn't actually agree with them.

    Mostly the ones in power.

    >In fact, outside of the coastal urban areas, just about no one does.

    Did you know that almost the entire population of the US lives in coastal urban areas? Shocking, I know!

    >That said, the military-industrial complex in the US has become useless.

    The point of the military-industrial complex has always been to generate profit and ensure global supremacy. In that respect, it is operating at peak efficiency.

    --
    -Love, ants_in_pants
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