6 ms·

We work for Google. Our employer shouldn't be in the business of war

62 points by omnimus 9y ago

alslsls 9y ago
1. Companies are not democratic. 2. Being good at war is a good thing.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Being good at war is a bad thing if it means you're likely to do more of it.
  - alslsls 9y ago
    I don't understand the way people can neglect history, and pretend that the world will live peacefully ever after from now on. The world is relatively peaceful because the US is more powerful than all other nations combined. I'm sure if you asked the people who signed it, they would think this is a bad thing too.
    - fahadkhan 9y ago
      > The world is relatively peaceful because the US is more powerful than all other nations combined. This not true. The US and it's allies are constantly at war somewhere in the world. Chomsky has written extensively about this
      - lttlrck 9y ago
        That is relatively peaceful compared to a world war.
        fahadkhan 9y ago
        World Wars have not been the normal state in history.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >1. Companies are not democratic That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. >2.Being good at war is a good thing. Not for the casualties -- and often not for the general population either. Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Would a better at Vietnam US be?
  - kingkongjaffa 9y ago
    > That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over, i.e. not democratic > democratic in the business of surviving. Regardless of your ideals.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Only if "survived under current conditions" is the ultimate test of something's worth. Until 1850s slavery had also survived as a practice. But then it wasn't...
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over It might indicate that the current environment in the US, including the legal/regulatory environment and the social environment, is structured (in some cases deliberately) to favor anti-democratic corporations, yes. (Note that at least some sources I've seen indicate that European worker coops have higher survival rates than conventional firms in the same market.) Or it just might indicate that the democratic governance of firms in the US market is a less frequenrly tried thing, which has had less experience from which to optimize. Or it might be a mix of both.
  - alslsls 9y ago
    > companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. Actually, they are democratic, but its the owners who have the vote, not the employees. > Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Yes, from the German perspective, because they wanted world domination.
- fahadkhan 9y ago
  3. Being good at avoiding wars is a great thing. (Which I believe is the intent of the signatories)
tapatio 9y ago
You are not forced to work at Google. Go work somewhere else.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Corollary to that is that they're not forced to work at Google. Google should work on ethical things if they want to keep their employees.
  - alslsls 9y ago
    There are plenty of future employees ready to fill the empty spots.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      Yes, and there are plenty of future employers ready to take the ex-Googlers.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
  not sure why you're getting downvoted for this. Those working for Google (or any large Silicon Valley firm) are usually among the top in their league and should be able to decide where they want to go based on their ideals/values, not because they have no other choice. Compared to the gazillions of engineers out there who are part of a 2nd or even 3rd party outsourcing chain (on crap salary and without rights in the company), Google employees are there because they want to. If the general opinion (in light of what we learned) now shifts towards a believe these companies are evil (which IMO they are) then I hardly feel sorry for the individual engineers. Googlers, Facebookers, Palantir guys should adapt and adjust or read "Who moved my cheese". Time for making these changes are now IMHO.
  - iraphael 9y ago
    They are also smart enough to know that their opinions matter within the company, and they can affect positive change. This open letter is one mechanism for doing that.
Density 9y ago
No sympathy for censorship or building a police state.
- walshemj 9y ago
  yes and as google tracks more about the population does than any TLA and with zero oversight.
walshemj 9y ago
Ok so 3000 signed it I bet in a secret ballot the vast majority of google employees are not bothered or are in favor
some_account 9y ago
Advice to Googlers: stop working there. You are the smartest dumb people I know. Much like Oppenheimer you are running around, thinking you are doing something good. Wtf? AI, robotics and cloning are going to create a very, very bad world where people mean nothing. Google wants to run that world.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Google is an ad company. Let's not pretend it is anything more.
golemiprague 9y ago
Why? who is going to be in the business of war? You do want those drones to protect you but you don't want to make your hands dirty. You would rather someone else do it, or even not do it and just let other humans die rather than a drone. As long as you feel good with yourself.
docdeek 9y ago
Missing from this letter is any indication of action if Google does not agree to the demands. Are these 3000 people going to quit? Somehow I feel it is unlikely.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Yeah. Sort-of like all those people that continually threaten to leave Facebook...
sremani 9y ago
This is a tough one, Google is walking into a semantic quagmire - how do you differentiate "business of war" from "protecting our troops/homeland". You are going to piss of one half of the country at least by even engaging in this debate. The only Silicon Valley figure that would have veered out of this almost unscathed would have been Steve Jobs.
- tazjin 9y ago
  While Google is technically an American company, US citizens make up a minority of their user base. How do you define "homeland" here? What if Google's foreign subsidiaries participate in project "Maven" in some way? This doesn't seem "tough" to me at all.
- drivingmenuts 9y ago
  That's because Jobs built computers, not computers for the military, just computers. If they did wind up being used by the military, it was incidental, not because they were purpose-built for that. Like Tim Cook, he wouldn't have let himself be in that position.
sureaboutthis 9y ago
The problem with this thinking is that Google is not in the "business of war" but in the business of artificial intelligence. They have written an AI engine and a customer, the defense industry, wants to use it. This is almost like people in the steel industry wanting to get out of this business of war by not selling or working on steel. Another thing to note is, do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? Are these Googlers actively trying to persuade those countries not to work on this business of war at the same time?
- avoutthere 9y ago
  > do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? It's been my observation that vehement anti-war activists seem unwilling to admit that there are threats that need to be defended against.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Mine as well. More generally, I've often observed that when the status quo is imperfect, many people are willing to opt for a worse system so long as the imperfections are different (e.g., capitalism vs socialism).
- kuschku 9y ago
  Google also has employees in different countries. Would you be okay if your AI works as American ends up in the hands of the Russian military? Why should a German, or French, or Russian Google employee then accept that their work ends up in the hands of the US military? EDIT: Yes, they won’t directly work on the drone program – but the drone program will more likely than not be reusing ML technology built all across Google, and everyone that worked on that now knows they are personally helping the US military-industrial complex.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    Imagine if Russian Google workers are making something for US military? I'm pretty sure it would be considered treason under Russian laws.
coldcode 9y ago
And why would your leadership care what you say? I know how little the leadership in my company (almost as big) cares about causes when there is money to be made. CEOs are paid to make profits not care about doing good. They do good when they are retired and can spend all the money they made making money and not caring so much about good. Why do so many companies do business in China despite all the censorship and other pain they have to support? Money.
jedimastert 9y ago
I wonder if "Don't be evil" is still in their code of conduct...
- alslsls 9y ago
  Pacifism is evil.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Yeah, the untold victims of pacifism... oh, wait...
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      You could start with the victims of Nazi Germany. If Neville Chamberlain and his cronies had strangled the infant Nazi regime at its birth, rather than appeasing Hitler, many of those people would have lived. Instead, the appeasement just meant that the war, when it inevitably came, was vastly more horrible and cost vastly more lives than it otherwise would have.
      - portofcall 9y ago
        Are you seriously claiming that Neville Chamberlain and the UK were pacifists?
      - vixen99 9y ago
        And let's not forget people like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric. http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of_the_europ.htm http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of... And then there's IBM whose Hollerith card system so effectively allowed the Nazis to document Jews. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...
it_learnses 9y ago
If Google doesn't, then Amazon or Microsoft will. If America doesn't get there, China will. And if China takes over, then these employees will be forced to work for China.
merricksb 9y ago
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755530, which is still in the middle of the front page after 21 hours, and links to the text of this letter.
- omnimus 9y ago
  Sorry didnt see that one. But honestly it is not duplicate. But whatever.
  - merricksb 9y ago
    The HN policy seems to be that later posts on the same topic (even if they're different urls) will be considered duplicates, unless an article adds significant new information [1]. Otherwise you get discussion about the same topic split over multiple threads, leading to both repetition and incompleteness on each thread. If you think this article contains significant new information, or that it is a better source than the earlier post and should be the one linked from that thread, you should email the mods – hn@ycombinator.com. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20new%20information&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20new%20inf...

62 points by omnimus 9y ago

alslsls 9y ago

1. Companies are not democratic. 2. Being good at war is a good thing.

jstanley 9y ago
Being good at war is a bad thing if it means you're likely to do more of it.
- alslsls 9y ago
  I don't understand the way people can neglect history, and pretend that the world will live peacefully ever after from now on. The world is relatively peaceful because the US is more powerful than all other nations combined. I'm sure if you asked the people who signed it, they would think this is a bad thing too.
  - fahadkhan 9y ago
    > The world is relatively peaceful because the US is more powerful than all other nations combined. This not true. The US and it's allies are constantly at war somewhere in the world. Chomsky has written extensively about this
    - lttlrck 9y ago
      That is relatively peaceful compared to a world war.
      - fahadkhan 9y ago
        World Wars have not been the normal state in history.
coldtea 9y ago
>1. Companies are not democratic That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. >2.Being good at war is a good thing. Not for the casualties -- and often not for the general population either. Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Would a better at Vietnam US be?
- kingkongjaffa 9y ago
  > That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over, i.e. not democratic > democratic in the business of surviving. Regardless of your ideals.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Only if "survived under current conditions" is the ultimate test of something's worth. Until 1850s slavery had also survived as a practice. But then it wasn't...
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over It might indicate that the current environment in the US, including the legal/regulatory environment and the social environment, is structured (in some cases deliberately) to favor anti-democratic corporations, yes. (Note that at least some sources I've seen indicate that European worker coops have higher survival rates than conventional firms in the same market.) Or it just might indicate that the democratic governance of firms in the US market is a less frequenrly tried thing, which has had less experience from which to optimize. Or it might be a mix of both.
- alslsls 9y ago
  > companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so. Actually, they are democratic, but its the owners who have the vote, not the employees. > Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Yes, from the German perspective, because they wanted world domination.
fahadkhan 9y ago
3. Being good at avoiding wars is a great thing. (Which I believe is the intent of the signatories)

tapatio 9y ago

You are not forced to work at Google. Go work somewhere else.

jstanley 9y ago
Corollary to that is that they're not forced to work at Google. Google should work on ethical things if they want to keep their employees.
- alslsls 9y ago
  There are plenty of future employees ready to fill the empty spots.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    Yes, and there are plenty of future employers ready to take the ex-Googlers.
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
not sure why you're getting downvoted for this. Those working for Google (or any large Silicon Valley firm) are usually among the top in their league and should be able to decide where they want to go based on their ideals/values, not because they have no other choice. Compared to the gazillions of engineers out there who are part of a 2nd or even 3rd party outsourcing chain (on crap salary and without rights in the company), Google employees are there because they want to. If the general opinion (in light of what we learned) now shifts towards a believe these companies are evil (which IMO they are) then I hardly feel sorry for the individual engineers. Googlers, Facebookers, Palantir guys should adapt and adjust or read "Who moved my cheese". Time for making these changes are now IMHO.
- iraphael 9y ago
  They are also smart enough to know that their opinions matter within the company, and they can affect positive change. This open letter is one mechanism for doing that.

Density 9y ago

No sympathy for censorship or building a police state.

walshemj 9y ago
yes and as google tracks more about the population does than any TLA and with zero oversight.

walshemj 9y ago

Ok so 3000 signed it I bet in a secret ballot the vast majority of google employees are not bothered or are in favor

some_account 9y ago

Advice to Googlers: stop working there. You are the smartest dumb people I know. Much like Oppenheimer you are running around, thinking you are doing something good. Wtf? AI, robotics and cloning are going to create a very, very bad world where people mean nothing. Google wants to run that world.

paulie_a 9y ago
Google is an ad company. Let's not pretend it is anything more.

golemiprague 9y ago

Why? who is going to be in the business of war? You do want those drones to protect you but you don't want to make your hands dirty. You would rather someone else do it, or even not do it and just let other humans die rather than a drone. As long as you feel good with yourself.

docdeek 9y ago

Missing from this letter is any indication of action if Google does not agree to the demands. Are these 3000 people going to quit? Somehow I feel it is unlikely.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Yeah. Sort-of like all those people that continually threaten to leave Facebook...

sremani 9y ago

This is a tough one, Google is walking into a semantic quagmire - how do you differentiate "business of war" from "protecting our troops/homeland". You are going to piss of one half of the country at least by even engaging in this debate. The only Silicon Valley figure that would have veered out of this almost unscathed would have been Steve Jobs.

tazjin 9y ago
While Google is technically an American company, US citizens make up a minority of their user base. How do you define "homeland" here? What if Google's foreign subsidiaries participate in project "Maven" in some way? This doesn't seem "tough" to me at all.
drivingmenuts 9y ago
That's because Jobs built computers, not computers for the military, just computers. If they did wind up being used by the military, it was incidental, not because they were purpose-built for that. Like Tim Cook, he wouldn't have let himself be in that position.

sureaboutthis 9y ago

The problem with this thinking is that Google is not in the "business of war" but in the business of artificial intelligence. They have written an AI engine and a customer, the defense industry, wants to use it. This is almost like people in the steel industry wanting to get out of this business of war by not selling or working on steel. Another thing to note is, do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? Are these Googlers actively trying to persuade those countries not to work on this business of war at the same time?

avoutthere 9y ago
> do these Googlers honestly think Russia and China and others aren't working on the same thing to be used by their military? It's been my observation that vehement anti-war activists seem unwilling to admit that there are threats that need to be defended against.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Mine as well. More generally, I've often observed that when the status quo is imperfect, many people are willing to opt for a worse system so long as the imperfections are different (e.g., capitalism vs socialism).
kuschku 9y ago
Google also has employees in different countries. Would you be okay if your AI works as American ends up in the hands of the Russian military? Why should a German, or French, or Russian Google employee then accept that their work ends up in the hands of the US military? EDIT: Yes, they won’t directly work on the drone program – but the drone program will more likely than not be reusing ML technology built all across Google, and everyone that worked on that now knows they are personally helping the US military-industrial complex.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  Imagine if Russian Google workers are making something for US military? I'm pretty sure it would be considered treason under Russian laws.

coldcode 9y ago

And why would your leadership care what you say? I know how little the leadership in my company (almost as big) cares about causes when there is money to be made. CEOs are paid to make profits not care about doing good. They do good when they are retired and can spend all the money they made making money and not caring so much about good. Why do so many companies do business in China despite all the censorship and other pain they have to support? Money.

jedimastert 9y ago

I wonder if "Don't be evil" is still in their code of conduct...

alslsls 9y ago
Pacifism is evil.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Yeah, the untold victims of pacifism... oh, wait...
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    You could start with the victims of Nazi Germany. If Neville Chamberlain and his cronies had strangled the infant Nazi regime at its birth, rather than appeasing Hitler, many of those people would have lived. Instead, the appeasement just meant that the war, when it inevitably came, was vastly more horrible and cost vastly more lives than it otherwise would have.
    - portofcall 9y ago
      Are you seriously claiming that Neville Chamberlain and the UK were pacifists?
    - vixen99 9y ago
      And let's not forget people like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric. http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of_the_europ.htm http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of... And then there's IBM whose Hollerith card system so effectively allowed the Nazis to document Jews. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...

it_learnses 9y ago

If Google doesn't, then Amazon or Microsoft will. If America doesn't get there, China will. And if China takes over, then these employees will be forced to work for China.

merricksb 9y ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755530, which is still in the middle of the front page after 21 hours, and links to the text of this letter.

omnimus 9y ago
Sorry didnt see that one. But honestly it is not duplicate. But whatever.
- merricksb 9y ago
  The HN policy seems to be that later posts on the same topic (even if they're different urls) will be considered duplicates, unless an article adds significant new information [1]. Otherwise you get discussion about the same topic split over multiple threads, leading to both repetition and incompleteness on each thread. If you think this article contains significant new information, or that it is a better source than the earlier post and should be the one linked from that thread, you should email the mods – hn@ycombinator.com. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20new%20information&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20new%20inf...