8 ms·

A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project

141 points by dismal2 8y ago

ForHackernews 8y ago
http://neveragain.tech/ http://neveragain.tech/ a bunch of names on here. Have any of them taken a stand?
- thisacctforreal 8y ago
  Looks like they are taking a stand by signing that pledge. There is one section on resigning: > If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations: > ... > If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply. From what I have seen, Google's help with the Pentagon seems limited to software consulting. If Google had shared any data with the Pentagon for military purposes then it would have crossed a line for the pledge. The pledge says to try to fix it through: working with colleagues/leaders; then whistleblowing; then legal defenses if they have the authority; then resignation.
otempomores 8y ago
Making the world a better place
whataretensors 8y ago
Good on these employees. Now go work somewhere or start something that gives you ownership and control of what you work on. This is likely a result of massive corporate/government entanglement. Google can't say no. Their stock could crash, their negotiating ability could go down significantly, all the work they've done on lobbying could be in danger. Who knows what other back room deals are happening.
debt 8y ago
I'm staunchly opposed to war, but understand it's unfortunate necessity under certain extreme circumstances. If these types of projects make war machines more precise overall, they may actually decrease overall collateral damage and reduce the total time war is waged which could cause less lives to be lost during war. Until us humans can collectively overcome the various problems that cause war, might be worth it for the best minds to help make war machines as precise as possible.
- DINKDINK 8y ago
  Your argument is: "By making war more efficient/effective, we will reduce its use." Say a government only has nuclear bombs in its arsenal and they really want an enemy of the state dead. Do you think they're willing to nuke an entire city to kill one person? Now imagine a government has electronic kill switches. Imagine it being almost like The Matrix, they can just flip your life off at the flick of a button. Do you think they willing to just flick off the lives of anyone who they don't like? You're effectively arguing that the latter is better than the former. Societies use more of a technology the far down the learning curve development goes and the cheaper the technology is. If there is no cost to violence, violence will be endless.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved. We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. And the adversaries we have faced, from Hitler to Daesh, would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction as we would. The reason asymmetric warfare works is that the terrorist is willing to stoop to levels that we are not. The only counter to that is precision warfare.
    - posix_me_less 8y ago
      > "Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved." Nonsense. Violence is still limited, in time and extent, by economic and political forces, and by the fact that soldiers still have some respect for life of other people, because they are in the field, risking their own life and seeing the injustices of war. But put them in control of a violent video game, and that may change. > We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. You've tried intervention, and places like Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Syria also have paid and are paying the price. Perhaps it is not about the intervention/non-intervention, but about how you engage in the world. > The only counter to that is precision warfare. Only if you already decided on the warfare part. An alternative is to stop killing unknown people abroad and in so helping create new terrorists, and instead doing something about cooperation between the governments to stop the violence.
option2 8y ago
Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
- baseethrowaway 8y ago
  Google does not hire AI people exclusively.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  IANAAIExpert, but it seems that many such jobs might have questionable ethical implications?
- cjcole 8y ago
  Are there many AI opportunities out there without potential military use? Warfare is a broad-spectrum human activity. I'm having trouble imagining many things that can't be leveraged.
detaro 8y ago
this is primarily reporting what a news article on a different site says, please submit the original article in such cases. That article also already has a discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776 (98 comments)
metalrain 8y ago
Would there be article if company in question would not be as large/influential?
- eurticket 8y ago
  Well if they had very intelligent engineers that leveraged their positions and knowledge for work that is directly opposing their personal views, yes.
manfredo 8y ago
> "If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed," the letter reads, "we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,” My understanding from the reading I've done is that this project is to analyze drone video after it's collected, to automate tasks like picking out when people enter and exit buildings and to read the license plates off cars. If that understanding is correct then this quote seems disingenuous. Google's project is no more designed to "Target and kill at a distance" than the designers of the drone's camera, or it's engine. Arguably even less than those, since those components are in use when drone actually launches strikes. Google's project only comes into play after drones have returned and they have time to crunch the data.
- mratzloff 8y ago
  Once Google engineers have trained an algorithm to interpret a video feed to determine when people enter and exit buildings, what do you think the very next step is? It will be applied to live video for use in determining where a target is located in order to kill him.
  - travmatt 8y ago
    Sometimes I’m convinced that hn’ers are just trying to argue the contrarian point of view, irregardless of facts. Thats certainly easier for me to believe than someone who sincerely thinks that military spending millions of dollars on targeting systems doesn’t mean the military is planning on using targeting systems it spent millions of dollars to develop.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  Just because Google or the military say the tech won't be used to target and kill people doesn't mean it's true. The letter that I read[1] states: "Recently, Googlers voiced concerns about Maven internally. Diane Greene responded, assuring them that the technology will not “operate or fly drones” and “will not be used to launch weapons.” While this eliminates a narrow set of direct applications, the technology is being built for the military, and once it’s delivered it could easily be used to assist in these tasks." and: "Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable." So the concern seems to be that the military can easily repurpose Google's technology to lethal ends. [1] - https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter....
davidf18 8y ago
I wonder how many of those Googler's who objected to the development of weapon systems have served in combat positions fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan? I'm guessing not many which is a reason why it is important for firms such as Google to prioritize the hiring of combat vets (besides the fact that they risked their lives to serve our country). For those who have not served in combat or lost a friend or relative that served in combat, saving lives with drone technology is too abstract. The drones are very effective at killing terrorists and technology which improves the effectiveness of killing terrorists and enemy combatants (and thus saving American lives) is a good thing. In Israel, both men and women alike are drafted and the women can serve in combat positions if they desire. Men serve on one month reserve duty until they are 40. Some of these men have been educated as engineers and they understand first-hand the importance of developing technology to save the lives of combat soldiers. This is something firms like Google are missing: there seems to be little empathy for US military soldiers who are risking their lives defending our nation and developing of technologies to save their lives.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Unfortunately they’re also very effective at killing foreign nationals with nothing to do with any conflict. And if you reply with the weasel words “collateral damage” then, with all due respect, fuck you. (Sorry dang, I’ll take any downvotes as deserved, but this comment is unacceptable in my eyes).
  - neolefty 8y ago
    How much of your objection has to do with the technology, and how much with the conflict itself? In other words, which question is more appealing: * Given that we're in this conflict, what should we do? * How can we prevent these kinds of conflicts in the future? Those are very different conversations. Personally I'm more focused on the second one. But we have to take care of the first one too. And it's messy.
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      The answer for the second arises from the first, to whit “promiscuous killing of citizens radicalises survivors”. The invisible but entirely audible presence of the drone is a reminder that a foreign power has the ability to kill you at the touch of the button for no reason that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that’s meant to protect people?
laurent123456 8y ago
Lately, a lot of Recaptcha challenges are things like - identify the trucks, the cars, the shops, etc. I really hate these challenges knowing what Google will (at least in part) do with the data.
- romaniv 8y ago
  IIRC, original Recaptcha was about OCR of books that weren't readable. I'm not sure why anyone uses it right now. Like you said, it's obvious where it's going. Not to mention that it's increasingly annoying for users.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    And completely accessible. RECAPTCHA is basically impossible to use if you need a screen reader or have any sort of visual impairment. Hell, I’ve have problems as a EU resident due to differences between street signs between here and the US.
    - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
      Yep. “Click on the images containing a crosswalk.” I’m British. That’s not a word we use.
      - liveoneggs 8y ago
        "find the zebra" might be more confusing :)
      - raverbashing 8y ago
        I don't see what's so hard about it. Captcha descriptions are also localized but I understand why they wouldn't do US<>UK.
        Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
        What's hard is that 90% of UK residents won't understand what they're being asked to do.
sillyquiet 8y ago
Good on them. That's taking a stand, and it's admirable they are standing by their beliefs. Maybe they can go work on making a product that could never be used by the U.S. military they despise so much as they live their sheltered and comfortable parochial lives. I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to think of any such product, but maybe I lack imagination.
candiodari 8y ago
I don't get this. This is about tracking humans. If you're worried about AIs tracking humans through areal cameras ... let me put your mind at ease : this is "tutorial" level stuff. Granted. There's getting it to demoable state, and there's getting it to work under all conditions, getting it stable, getting it tested, and so on and so forth. But still, this is not exactly state of the art anymore. This ship has sailed. Over and done. Genie cannot be put into the bottle. The US army has this option now, and very soon essentially any professional military will have it. A quick course on AI will enable you to do this, and I assume that the US military has enough such people available. Same with tracking specific people in (high-res) cams. There's a computational cost, but this has been done and described so many times. If anybody wants to build a network of cameras that can track specific people by their faces, there's nothing stopping them at this point. So why get all worked up about this ? What's the big deal ?
- jononor 8y ago
  If the US army had or was easily able to build this they would probably not pay large sums of money to Google. There are still many challenges in creating scalable robust solutions using machine learning in computer vision, especially when high degrees of response time and robustness is needed.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    Most, if not all types of machine learning networks are O(1). Keeping the response time constant is not needed. Robustness is harder, but for this problem, not very hard.
trumped 8y ago
Were they directly involved? Did they know what they were working on?
CNJ7654 8y ago
Good on those employees. While I am personally in favor of the US military making whatever advancements they possibly can, these employees are staying true to their core beliefs, and that should never be faulted
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ralusek 8y ago
Free market isn't just about buying and selling. Doesn't matter if you agree with the politics, choosing to not to work somewhere on principle is a beautiful thing, especially when the position being given up is a highly coveted one.

141 points by dismal2 8y ago

ForHackernews 8y ago

http://neveragain.tech/ http://neveragain.tech/ a bunch of names on here. Have any of them taken a stand?

thisacctforreal 8y ago
Looks like they are taking a stand by signing that pledge. There is one section on resigning: > If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations: > ... > If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply. From what I have seen, Google's help with the Pentagon seems limited to software consulting. If Google had shared any data with the Pentagon for military purposes then it would have crossed a line for the pledge. The pledge says to try to fix it through: working with colleagues/leaders; then whistleblowing; then legal defenses if they have the authority; then resignation.

otempomores 8y ago

Making the world a better place

whataretensors 8y ago

Good on these employees. Now go work somewhere or start something that gives you ownership and control of what you work on. This is likely a result of massive corporate/government entanglement. Google can't say no. Their stock could crash, their negotiating ability could go down significantly, all the work they've done on lobbying could be in danger. Who knows what other back room deals are happening.

debt 8y ago

I'm staunchly opposed to war, but understand it's unfortunate necessity under certain extreme circumstances. If these types of projects make war machines more precise overall, they may actually decrease overall collateral damage and reduce the total time war is waged which could cause less lives to be lost during war. Until us humans can collectively overcome the various problems that cause war, might be worth it for the best minds to help make war machines as precise as possible.

DINKDINK 8y ago
Your argument is: "By making war more efficient/effective, we will reduce its use." Say a government only has nuclear bombs in its arsenal and they really want an enemy of the state dead. Do you think they're willing to nuke an entire city to kill one person? Now imagine a government has electronic kill switches. Imagine it being almost like The Matrix, they can just flip your life off at the flick of a button. Do you think they willing to just flick off the lives of anyone who they don't like? You're effectively arguing that the latter is better than the former. Societies use more of a technology the far down the learning curve development goes and the cheaper the technology is. If there is no cost to violence, violence will be endless.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved. We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. And the adversaries we have faced, from Hitler to Daesh, would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction as we would. The reason asymmetric warfare works is that the terrorist is willing to stoop to levels that we are not. The only counter to that is precision warfare.
  - posix_me_less 8y ago
    > "Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved." Nonsense. Violence is still limited, in time and extent, by economic and political forces, and by the fact that soldiers still have some respect for life of other people, because they are in the field, risking their own life and seeing the injustices of war. But put them in control of a violent video game, and that may change. > We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. You've tried intervention, and places like Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Syria also have paid and are paying the price. Perhaps it is not about the intervention/non-intervention, but about how you engage in the world. > The only counter to that is precision warfare. Only if you already decided on the warfare part. An alternative is to stop killing unknown people abroad and in so helping create new terrorists, and instead doing something about cooperation between the governments to stop the violence.

option2 8y ago

Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles. If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward

baseethrowaway 8y ago
Google does not hire AI people exclusively.
jessaustin 8y ago
IANAAIExpert, but it seems that many such jobs might have questionable ethical implications?
cjcole 8y ago
Are there many AI opportunities out there without potential military use? Warfare is a broad-spectrum human activity. I'm having trouble imagining many things that can't be leveraged.

detaro 8y ago

this is primarily reporting what a news article on a different site says, please submit the original article in such cases. That article also already has a discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776 (98 comments)

metalrain 8y ago

Would there be article if company in question would not be as large/influential?

eurticket 8y ago
Well if they had very intelligent engineers that leveraged their positions and knowledge for work that is directly opposing their personal views, yes.

manfredo 8y ago

> "If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed," the letter reads, "we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,” My understanding from the reading I've done is that this project is to analyze drone video after it's collected, to automate tasks like picking out when people enter and exit buildings and to read the license plates off cars. If that understanding is correct then this quote seems disingenuous. Google's project is no more designed to "Target and kill at a distance" than the designers of the drone's camera, or it's engine. Arguably even less than those, since those components are in use when drone actually launches strikes. Google's project only comes into play after drones have returned and they have time to crunch the data.

mratzloff 8y ago
Once Google engineers have trained an algorithm to interpret a video feed to determine when people enter and exit buildings, what do you think the very next step is? It will be applied to live video for use in determining where a target is located in order to kill him.
- travmatt 8y ago
  Sometimes I’m convinced that hn’ers are just trying to argue the contrarian point of view, irregardless of facts. Thats certainly easier for me to believe than someone who sincerely thinks that military spending millions of dollars on targeting systems doesn’t mean the military is planning on using targeting systems it spent millions of dollars to develop.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Just because Google or the military say the tech won't be used to target and kill people doesn't mean it's true. The letter that I read[1] states: "Recently, Googlers voiced concerns about Maven internally. Diane Greene responded, assuring them that the technology will not “operate or fly drones” and “will not be used to launch weapons.” While this eliminates a narrow set of direct applications, the technology is being built for the military, and once it’s delivered it could easily be used to assist in these tasks." and: "Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable." So the concern seems to be that the military can easily repurpose Google's technology to lethal ends. [1] - https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter....

davidf18 8y ago

I wonder how many of those Googler's who objected to the development of weapon systems have served in combat positions fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan? I'm guessing not many which is a reason why it is important for firms such as Google to prioritize the hiring of combat vets (besides the fact that they risked their lives to serve our country). For those who have not served in combat or lost a friend or relative that served in combat, saving lives with drone technology is too abstract. The drones are very effective at killing terrorists and technology which improves the effectiveness of killing terrorists and enemy combatants (and thus saving American lives) is a good thing. In Israel, both men and women alike are drafted and the women can serve in combat positions if they desire. Men serve on one month reserve duty until they are 40. Some of these men have been educated as engineers and they understand first-hand the importance of developing technology to save the lives of combat soldiers. This is something firms like Google are missing: there seems to be little empathy for US military soldiers who are risking their lives defending our nation and developing of technologies to save their lives.

robin_reala 8y ago
Unfortunately they’re also very effective at killing foreign nationals with nothing to do with any conflict. And if you reply with the weasel words “collateral damage” then, with all due respect, fuck you. (Sorry dang, I’ll take any downvotes as deserved, but this comment is unacceptable in my eyes).
- neolefty 8y ago
  How much of your objection has to do with the technology, and how much with the conflict itself? In other words, which question is more appealing: * Given that we're in this conflict, what should we do? * How can we prevent these kinds of conflicts in the future? Those are very different conversations. Personally I'm more focused on the second one. But we have to take care of the first one too. And it's messy.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    The answer for the second arises from the first, to whit “promiscuous killing of citizens radicalises survivors”. The invisible but entirely audible presence of the drone is a reminder that a foreign power has the ability to kill you at the touch of the button for no reason that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that’s meant to protect people?

laurent123456 8y ago

Lately, a lot of Recaptcha challenges are things like - identify the trucks, the cars, the shops, etc. I really hate these challenges knowing what Google will (at least in part) do with the data.

romaniv 8y ago
IIRC, original Recaptcha was about OCR of books that weren't readable. I'm not sure why anyone uses it right now. Like you said, it's obvious where it's going. Not to mention that it's increasingly annoying for users.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  And completely accessible. RECAPTCHA is basically impossible to use if you need a screen reader or have any sort of visual impairment. Hell, I’ve have problems as a EU resident due to differences between street signs between here and the US.
  - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
    Yep. “Click on the images containing a crosswalk.” I’m British. That’s not a word we use.
    - liveoneggs 8y ago
      "find the zebra" might be more confusing :)
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      I don't see what's so hard about it. Captcha descriptions are also localized but I understand why they wouldn't do US<>UK.
      - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
        What's hard is that 90% of UK residents won't understand what they're being asked to do.

sillyquiet 8y ago

Good on them. That's taking a stand, and it's admirable they are standing by their beliefs. Maybe they can go work on making a product that could never be used by the U.S. military they despise so much as they live their sheltered and comfortable parochial lives. I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to think of any such product, but maybe I lack imagination.

candiodari 8y ago

I don't get this. This is about tracking humans. If you're worried about AIs tracking humans through areal cameras ... let me put your mind at ease : this is "tutorial" level stuff. Granted. There's getting it to demoable state, and there's getting it to work under all conditions, getting it stable, getting it tested, and so on and so forth. But still, this is not exactly state of the art anymore. This ship has sailed. Over and done. Genie cannot be put into the bottle. The US army has this option now, and very soon essentially any professional military will have it. A quick course on AI will enable you to do this, and I assume that the US military has enough such people available. Same with tracking specific people in (high-res) cams. There's a computational cost, but this has been done and described so many times. If anybody wants to build a network of cameras that can track specific people by their faces, there's nothing stopping them at this point. So why get all worked up about this ? What's the big deal ?

jononor 8y ago
If the US army had or was easily able to build this they would probably not pay large sums of money to Google. There are still many challenges in creating scalable robust solutions using machine learning in computer vision, especially when high degrees of response time and robustness is needed.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Most, if not all types of machine learning networks are O(1). Keeping the response time constant is not needed. Robustness is harder, but for this problem, not very hard.

trumped 8y ago

Were they directly involved? Did they know what they were working on?

CNJ7654 8y ago

Good on those employees. While I am personally in favor of the US military making whatever advancements they possibly can, these employees are staying true to their core beliefs, and that should never be faulted

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ralusek 8y ago

Free market isn't just about buying and selling. Doesn't matter if you agree with the politics, choosing to not to work somewhere on principle is a beautiful thing, especially when the position being given up is a highly coveted one.