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posted by janrinok on Sunday June 03 2018, @06:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-being-evil-after-all dept.

We have recently covered the fact that some Google employees had resigned because of the company's involvement in an AI-related weapons project called Maven. Many thought that the resignations, whilst being a noble gesture, would amount to nothing - but we were wrong...

Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Lucrative Military Drone AI Work To Grow Exponentially

Google has sought to quash the internal dissent in conversations with employees. Diane Greene, the chief executive of Google’s cloud business unit, speaking at a company town hall meeting following the revelations, claimed that the contract was “only” for $9 million, according to the New York Times, a relatively minor project for such a large company.

Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year.

In fact, one month after news of the contract broke, the Pentagon allocated an additional $100 million to Project Maven.

The internal Google email chain also notes that several big tech players competed to win the Project Maven contract. Other tech firms such as Amazon were in the running, one Google executive involved in negotiations wrote. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.) Rather than serving solely as a minor experiment for the military, Google executives on the thread stated that Project Maven was “directly related” to a major cloud computing contract worth billions of dollars that other Silicon Valley firms are competing to win.

However, Google has had a major rethink.

Google Won't Renew Controversial Drone Project with Pentagon Amid Employee Backlash

"Tech giant Google will not seek to renew its contract with the U.S. Department of Defense................

Project Maven is an artificial intelligence program designed to use data captured by government drones to identify and track objects viewed on surveillance footage. Google workers were concerned about how the application could be weaponized once under ownership of the U.S. military." foxbusiness.com/politics/google-to-end-controversial-drone-project-with-pentagon-amid-employee-backlash-report

As previously reported by FOX Business, Google's employees have expressed unease about creating products for the U.S. government.

Google Will Not Continue Project Maven After Contract Expires in 2019

https://gizmodo.com/google-plans-not-to-renew-its-contract-for-project-mave-1826488620/amp

Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires.

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud's business.

Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company, Greene said, adding that the decision was made at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work. The company plans to unveil new ethical principles about its use of AI next week. A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about Greene's comments.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @06:18PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 04 2018, @06:18PM (#688475)

    But like COBOL, yeah, Java is verbose.

    Even the simplest project feels like writing PIC lines in COBOL again.

    In the "bad old days" if you wanted to hit a DB and see a query result, you'd have about 4 lines of perl as an apache CGI and for low load quick hacks (aka 90% of the computing world) thats good enough. Not the fastest thing in the world but very fast to write.

    Now, no kidding, the way you do that task on Android is you have an ORM for the DB named "room" so you have a class defining the table, then a data access object class holding all (one) of the queries and other SQL the magic annotator can't automagically figure out. Then that talks to a repository class that takes you from concurrent multithread UI mode to the singleton DB thread via insertAsyncTask and the magic of the LiveData library. Next is a viewmodel class that passes thru and caches the data so you don't whack the database every time you rotate the device. Then the viewmodel class talks to a list adapter class which busts the possibly multiple query responses into individual lines on a recyclerview type list, maybe. Then theres a listactivity class which is kinda the last java of your UI to handle like floating action buttons and what callbacks to kick when you select some menu or button or whatnot. Then that activity class calls a XML layout file usually named after the activity class that handles big pix UI (like FABs or menus ..) Then that usually includes a xml file for what yer working on, usually named content_whatevs_list.xml or some such. Then that probably contained a recyclerview or other list like thing so you call another layout to handle and format items inside a recycler list.

    So lemme think ... six java classes and three XML files? Of course thats not a working app, ye need a manifest XML file to define the whole stinking circus, some kind of MainActivity that boots it up and transfers control to the list activity class mentioned above, oh don't forget the whole point was having a database connection so there's a class to maintain one DB connection, do migrations if necessary and all that rot. Of course something like SQLite is funky so you'll probably need one, some, many type converter classes to convert data types like a java date into a sqlite plain old string or similar conversions, or maybe you'll be lucky.

    Also note on android you can't do things the wrong way... your app will crash out with some bullshit about not calling DB queries on main thread, if you dare such a thing. Do it all, all of it, with Async and callbacks, or die trying.

    Figure four lines of perl in a CGI script (maybe less) to do an ugly job of dumping a sql select into a pre /pre formatted web page, which works but is pretty ugly, vs 9 or so java classes and 4 or so XML files to do about the same thing "the right way" on android. Its at least a couple hundred lines of repetitive code.

    Actually for something really simple I'd skip the perl and have a shell script with about three lines, echo Content-type text/plain; echo ; mysql -e "select * from some_bs_table where whatevs" and some other fun options etc;

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