Boffins urge Google to drop military deal after Googlers storm out over AI-based super-drones Hundreds of academics across the world have signed an open letter urging Google to stop working with the US Department of Defense in analysing drone footage using its AI technology for Project Maven. The open letter, which has nearly reached 300 signatures at the time of writing, was started by the International Committee for …
I agree. As Dr. Freud once and a while ago mentioned, the basic human instinct is "aggression". However, my ten cents to psychology - the basic instinct is "ignorance" and its child is "aggression". We ignore almost everything and will be aggressive until the end of this civilization. Arms' race will never stop until humanoids exist on this planet. So, activists against the war and warfare may need to wait until next civilizations comes in ... After all, there are still 1.5 billions of commies on this planet (as the result of ignorance) and such states as Russia and China will use AI in any form to get warfare advantage. Open your eyes and see imperfect world you live in.
"After all, there are still 1.5 billions of capitalists on this planet (as the result of ignorance) and such states as America and the EU will use AI in any form to get warfare advantage. Open your eyes and see imperfect world you live in.
I would write FTFY, but I doubt it's fixed even yet; we're all as bad as each other, and, as the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
They're at it, we're at it. I keep hoping for a Star Trek style world, where nobody feels the need to shoot / bomb the living hell out of anyone else just 'cos the grass in greener on the other side, but I fear I hope in vain...
(...and besides, my neighbour has a new car that I wanna drive...)
Google has long paid no attention to any kind of morals frankly I can think of arms companies that are better behaved.
Google bearly notice when half the governments in the world say you shouldn't be doing this do something, does anyone really think they are going to ignore the Pork-Barrel because people start whinging?
"A spokesperson told us before that it is using “open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data” in drone footage to aid the military."
Translation:
We will not identify "targets" as that would be morally wrong. So what we will do is identify everything that are not targets. See how nice and fluffy we are. Now where's that barrel? I've some pork to stuff in it.
...his thoughts on the Bomb seem to have been fairly nuanced. I think what drove him was fear the Nazis would first acquire the Bomb and achieve world domination. Given prewar German progress in fission and quantum mechanics, combined with what Heisenberg briefed Bohr about Germany's atomic bomb during the war - info which got back to the Manhattan Project - you can forgive Oppenheimer from being a bit terrified. Once we had VE, no bomb (yet) but still a war in the Pacific, things got tougher for Oppenheimer to noodle through. Naturally the McCarthyites destroyed the man and his reputation post-war.
Now for an absolute whore to developing weapons technology and damn the moral consequences, I give you: Edward Teller.
Teller of course played a significant role in crushing Oppenheimer as well... Oppenheimer opposed developing fusion weapons and became a proponent for international control of nuclear arms.
Icon because, well, the little silver bombs!
Oh, sure, we could fear Big Brother and Skynet walking hand-in-hand down Google Way with Cylons replacing key government until one day we find the human race is just a bunch of batteries in the matrix. Yeah. Sure. That could happen...
But I prefer to look on the brighter side: Number 5 is alive! Surely worth the risk. Right, Johnny?
"War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things"
This pithy poster, originally done by Lorraine Schneider, first appeared in 1966 in reaction to the Vietnam War. Its timeless message is as potent now as it was then.
Machines learn what we teach them. If you don't want AI robots to shoot you, don't give them guns!!??
The one thing AI that may save us from ourselves, an AI "Babelfish" providing we listen of course!!
Just don’t forget your towel.!!
"Once the Rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department say Werner Von Braun"
And of course Ike warned about the Military Industrial Complex almost sixty years ago. Not that it was new then. It's a tough call, whether you prefer:
A) The part where very effective (but expensive) weapons are developed and manufactured to defend Freedom and Democracy, only to end up winning territory for drug lords and religious fanatics,
or
B) The part where huge dollops of the defense budget go to tech that will never deliver on its alleged performance, if it works at all, but which leaves a hole where the budget for arming and armoring troops actually in combat would be.
Either way, Freedom and Democracy are at best a tertiary concern. Senator Pork and CEO Barrel are doing fine, thank you.
Von Braun... Well, my question to him would be something like, "well, if the missiles target is not your department, then what about the thousands to tens of thousands of Jewish slaves which died in your factory"
My country has had a lot of moral triumphs and a lot of moral failures. But Operation Paperclip... Where we brought these Nazis over and turned a blind eye to any and all crimes so they could work in our great new defense-industrial complex... Is inexcusable.
@AC, quite true... Just wonder if there was a way we could have done proper rocketry without the Nazis. Unfortunately the US Army's projects were something other than fully successful.
Worn the green suit and definitely lost some scruples or two myself, but looking at the mess we left behind ... Every day I've got to ask if it was worth it.
The willful ignorance of these pompous preeners is preposterous. China is conducting a full-on arms races in every area of technology and a cold war from the South China Sea to buying control of the Panama Canal Zone to pushing pure propaganda through "cultural centers" in college campuses.
Military applications of AI is not a "mineshaft gap", it is an area of research that we know they are investing in heavily. Until China is being called out by these useful idiots to at least as great an extent as the US, I'm assuming that the entire thing is just another Chinese intelligence operation.
...what I'm a lot more concerned about is AI that has Google's total access to everyone's online life and will be trained to sniff out thoughtcrime. I can easily see myself and loved ones getting arrested not for what we write, but what some AI believes we are thinking. Guess I will see you in the place where there is no darkness...
... loved ones getting arrested not for what we write, but what some AI believes we are thinking ...
Arresting? That would be getting off easy!
"We" are right now droning hundreds of people annually based on some religious belief that AI's can find terrorists based on very, very few samples of actual terrorists. Totally as would be expected the failure rate measured in "terrorist vs. collateral damage" is about the same as was achieved with the bombing of Dresden!
This special brand of lunacy is only rarely questioned or criticised by any serious media or politician!
Ignoring the morals, it should be concerning enough that every "population management technique" that is now being tried out on the "coloured people" in "the colonies" will eventually come back here and be used on us for the same purposes!
Indefinite Detention, Secret Courts, Secret Laws, Mass Surveillance, Militarised Police shooting anyone that looks wrong to them with impunity -> Development is Done, and now Already here. Torture could be next. Because - Why Not?
On the other hand one could argue that the drones result in less immediate collateral damage that old-school air dropped gravity bombs or even laser-guided bombs, which tend to be pretty sizable in terms of mass.
BUT my word "immediate" is chosen deliberately. Id like to see a cost-benefit analysis on how many terrorists we create through drone strikes versus how many are sent to the grave. Putting myself in the others' shoes: if someone were to whack one of my family members from the air... sure, I would go retro. I value human life but I grade on a curve, and any of the foreign bastards invading my homeland becomes a valid target in such a scenario.
Outside the combat zone, how do you place a value on reputational loss to your nation or western civilization as a whole? For years now we've forgotten there are other measures of national power than the mailed fist. You cannot kill your way out of every problem.
I had thought that these were the best in the industry, so other companies would be interested. Also, if ALL the workers left, then the company would stop - this is collective action and what unions used to be able to do.
Perhaps the Googlers should think laterally and organise to take action, such as strikes or refusing to work on particular projects. There are many courses of action apart from resigning en masse.
If you aren't willing to organise to take action but continue to complain it makes you a whinger, and in the case here, a grandstanding whinger.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
