4 ms·

Ethically, I wonder if this would be any different if Google built a similar software for consumer applications and licensed it similarly to Android being used

Ethically, I wonder if this would be any different if Google built a similar software for consumer applications and licensed it similarly to Android being used for surveillance in both the US and far more paranoid governments. I would imagine that this allows both Google and the US government to have far more insight and control over the direction of this and possible applications. Not to dismiss the obvious ethical issues of Google having possibly harmful incentives and having their hands tied by the US government financially and legally, but all things considered, I think the main difference here is that Google is already doing this on a massively large scale for the sake of selling ads. It is possible this can help save lives.

pluma 9y ago
> It is possible this can help save lives. Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed. You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved any other way. Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the possibility of saving American lives.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  > You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. Drone strike have and will continue to take place, no matter what Google does. But as you very correctly mention, as it is right now, many innocent civilians accidentally get killed. Doesn't it then directly follow that if said drone strikes become more accurate, then less people (or innocent civilians) will be killed?
- natecavanaugh 9y ago
  This may get me some downvotes, but I imagine that the same ethical issue exists with any weapon. Guns and bullets exist to kill, and in both human society and the animal kingdom, elimination of a few people can increase the overall population and livelihood of the entire group. I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their use. However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is the elimination of death of people or animals. Sure, you could take a bullet to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their redemption. But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is better than widespread killing. My big worry isn't so much the killing part (not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance employed in the name of security. That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking collectively rather than individually there).
  - pluma 9y ago
    You're making a good point about handling criminals. The US still has the death penalty. The death penalty exists to "protect the public" but most civilised countries have agreed that it's inhumane compared to other alternatives. Its harm outweighs the good it does. We have also banned other inhumane practices like solitary confinement. Where you're wrong is that drone strikes are a necessary evil. There is no way to measure the efficacy of drone strikes. Sure, you can determine whether the drone strike destroyed the target and with Google's help you might even get a machine to tell you a confidence level of whether the target was correctly identified, but good luck proving that that drone strike even saved as much as a single life. What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define who can be considered a civilian. It's easy to have zero dead civilians when you're the one who gets to decide whether those unidentified adult males caught in the blast radius couldn't also maybe have been terrorists all along.
- edanm 9y ago
  "You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed." Errr, what? That's like saying that the US stopping the Nazis by waging war and killing some of them didn't for sure save lives. I mean who knows, those Nazis may have just decided to stop killing other people all on their own. I'm not saying drone strikes are necessarily ethical, but saying that any time you kill someone else, you are for sure killing someone but not for sure saving a life, therefore you can never kill anyone preemptively, goes against pretty much every moral or legal system ever devised.
  - pluma 9y ago
    > US stopping the Nazis First of all, the US didn't stop the Nazis. The Allies did. Saying the US stopped the Nazis belittles the sacrifices of all the other great nations that worked together and those that suffered the civilian cost of that wretched war -- and I say that as a German. Secondly that analogy is incredibly misleading. The Nazis wore uniforms. They were clearly identifiable. Nazi Germany was a formal nation state with a government and institutions. Unless you're going to argue for ethically questionable decisions like the firebombing and carpet bombing we're talking about mostly military engagements against military targets. But yes, even in a "just war", if you kill someone, you know for a fact you're killing someone and you don't know you're saving lives. It's how you justify the killing but it's not the act itself. You save a life by pushing someone away out of the way of a falling tree. You don't save a life by killing them. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. This doesn't mean you can never make a moral argument for killing someone or that you can't ever say with high confidence that a killing will likely result in lives being saved, but it's an extremely important distinction. If a bank robber points a loaded gun at a hostage and threatens to kill them and you have every reason to believe them, it's easily justifiable to kill them rather than wait for them to pull the trigger first. If a nation state declares war and invades another country, it's easily justifiable to kill their soldiers and lieutenants. But you're still killing people. Calling it "saving lives" is a moral judgment, not an objective description of what you're doing. It describes the motive, not the action. Using it as an objective description assumes the motive is honest and exclusive. I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but nobody ever started or joined a war simply to "save lives", even the US didn't join WW2 until they were directly attacked and decided to retaliate rather than remain isolationist.

pluma 9y ago

> It is possible this can help save lives. Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed. You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved any other way. Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the possibility of saving American lives.

ehsankia 9y ago
> You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. Drone strike have and will continue to take place, no matter what Google does. But as you very correctly mention, as it is right now, many innocent civilians accidentally get killed. Doesn't it then directly follow that if said drone strikes become more accurate, then less people (or innocent civilians) will be killed?
natecavanaugh 9y ago
This may get me some downvotes, but I imagine that the same ethical issue exists with any weapon. Guns and bullets exist to kill, and in both human society and the animal kingdom, elimination of a few people can increase the overall population and livelihood of the entire group. I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their use. However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is the elimination of death of people or animals. Sure, you could take a bullet to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their redemption. But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is better than widespread killing. My big worry isn't so much the killing part (not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance employed in the name of security. That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking collectively rather than individually there).
- pluma 9y ago
  You're making a good point about handling criminals. The US still has the death penalty. The death penalty exists to "protect the public" but most civilised countries have agreed that it's inhumane compared to other alternatives. Its harm outweighs the good it does. We have also banned other inhumane practices like solitary confinement. Where you're wrong is that drone strikes are a necessary evil. There is no way to measure the efficacy of drone strikes. Sure, you can determine whether the drone strike destroyed the target and with Google's help you might even get a machine to tell you a confidence level of whether the target was correctly identified, but good luck proving that that drone strike even saved as much as a single life. What we can measure, however, is the civilian cost. Except of course it's nearly zero because those in charge of the drone strikes also get to define who can be considered a civilian. It's easy to have zero dead civilians when you're the one who gets to decide whether those unidentified adult males caught in the blast radius couldn't also maybe have been terrorists all along.
edanm 9y ago
"You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed." Errr, what? That's like saying that the US stopping the Nazis by waging war and killing some of them didn't for sure save lives. I mean who knows, those Nazis may have just decided to stop killing other people all on their own. I'm not saying drone strikes are necessarily ethical, but saying that any time you kill someone else, you are for sure killing someone but not for sure saving a life, therefore you can never kill anyone preemptively, goes against pretty much every moral or legal system ever devised.
- pluma 9y ago
  > US stopping the Nazis First of all, the US didn't stop the Nazis. The Allies did. Saying the US stopped the Nazis belittles the sacrifices of all the other great nations that worked together and those that suffered the civilian cost of that wretched war -- and I say that as a German. Secondly that analogy is incredibly misleading. The Nazis wore uniforms. They were clearly identifiable. Nazi Germany was a formal nation state with a government and institutions. Unless you're going to argue for ethically questionable decisions like the firebombing and carpet bombing we're talking about mostly military engagements against military targets. But yes, even in a "just war", if you kill someone, you know for a fact you're killing someone and you don't know you're saving lives. It's how you justify the killing but it's not the act itself. You save a life by pushing someone away out of the way of a falling tree. You don't save a life by killing them. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. This doesn't mean you can never make a moral argument for killing someone or that you can't ever say with high confidence that a killing will likely result in lives being saved, but it's an extremely important distinction. If a bank robber points a loaded gun at a hostage and threatens to kill them and you have every reason to believe them, it's easily justifiable to kill them rather than wait for them to pull the trigger first. If a nation state declares war and invades another country, it's easily justifiable to kill their soldiers and lieutenants. But you're still killing people. Calling it "saving lives" is a moral judgment, not an objective description of what you're doing. It describes the motive, not the action. Using it as an objective description assumes the motive is honest and exclusive. I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but nobody ever started or joined a war simply to "save lives", even the US didn't join WW2 until they were directly attacked and decided to retaliate rather than remain isolationist.