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.
A good move, and it shows that internal pressure can definitely work to enact change inside a corporation.
Google employees could have improved the drone’s ability to identify civilians. Now the contract will go to another company that may not be as skilled.
Nah relax. They’re being ethical for the tree hugging peace lovers.
Fortunately, now they can do it for added funding behind closed doors and protected by law and the hippies can’t see or know about it due to secrecy legislation.
Relax. It’s gonna be all sorted
It is not unethical to defend yourself. Is it ethical to let others defend you as long as you don’t have to be a part of it? And We would have no internet without military related funding either. Just presenting a counter point to what may be an over simplistic higher moral ground.
Iapx432,
It’s true that most companies don’t get this kind of backlash for partnering with the military. If they weren’t under the spotlight, chances are google executives would still be ok with it.
Alfman –
I am not surprised my comment was unpopular. Might be invisible at this stage. I hate asymmetric war as well, like in the Middle East. However, symmetric wars tend to be a lot bloodier, but symmetric and less likely due to the equivalency deterrent. It’s a real ethical (or game theory) dilemma – unfair and more likely but less killed or fair and less likely but way more killed. Similar to the decision behind Hiroshima, still argued to this day and with regret by Oppenheimer and Einstein. Honestly I could argue either side, if I had the data. A lot depends on whether you value your own people’s lives more than those of other people’s. Clearly you value equally. I am not American so all sides in this argument are “others” to me, and I value them equally as well. Judgement avoided. If either of us had lived through a symmetric war where the only consolation was that the other side got obliterated as well, we might think differently. Apologies if I assume incorrectly on your part.
I disagree with you on the Internet. Competition would most likely have come up with multiple quasi compatible networks or a monopoly / duopoly scenario, at least for a decade or two. In fact the OS landscape since CP/M is a good surrogate for what might have happened to the network without DARPANET. Floppies would have stayed the exchange medium of choice for a lot longer, and that would have suited the main commercial computing players just fine. Way ahead of their time innovations, like Amiga in the OS frame and public key encryption in the network frame, might have stilled or been forced to hibernate shortly after birth. It is highly likely Google would not have been viable when it was, so Google (ironically) nearly certainly owes it’s existence to military funding, albeit a few causality steps removed. I realize public key encryption was actually kept a secret by British intelligence for decades, so disclaimer that alternative histories are as hard to predict as the future, but less scary because they won’t happen.
To end on a maybe less controversial note, restoration of funding to university research is a better correction than relying on the military. Remember the WWW!
Edited 2018-06-03 17:52 UTC
lapx432,
Any time we look at history in hindsight and hypothesize what changing one variable would look like, it’s inherently subjective, so you and I are entitled to different opinions on this. And while data networks and eventually the internet were revolutionary, I honestly don’t think that the military played a large role in making it popular. The technological and commercial variables were already there converging, it seems implausible to me that nothing would have filled this gap if it weren’t for the military doing it first.
A more important question (in my mind) is what influence did they have on today’s internet? Keep in mind this can be both positive and negative. Consider that alot of US infrastructure was built early on, and it’s partly for this reason that US infrastructure is notoriously behind the rest of the world (the first technology isn’t necessarily the best). I appreciate the issues with fragmentation, but at the same time having more competing technologies at the onset could have resulted in us having better technology. Alas, we can only speculate what may have changed.
Edit: Here’s a short article on the topic:
http://techland.time.com/2012/07/25/how-government-did-and-didnt-in…
Edited 2018-06-04 18:44 UTC
But we had for a decade+ mainly some number of separate proprietary networks (like mentioned recently in news about ’80s home robots CompuServe, or IIRC ~Beta (UK…)). They died out…
Indeed, there were parallel similar efforts, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES (map of the network in 1975: http://rogerdmoore.ca/PS/CIGALE/CYCL2.html )
Zilch to do with employees sentiment. Everything to do with satisfying China.
Brings hope, at a Nation not very proud of their late developments.
Moving up to Alphabet those projects. Army ethicists working seriously on the frame.
If it is, as afraid, an arms race, then there is no stop to this. Then build rightly, from the begining.
Google is just evading the storm of a mind mutiny.
Coding proeficiency -fortunately- still not commoditized.