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Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoWeirdly, I don't see any sources here even though the article suggests some of them wrote online. It seems none of them are named in this article. I'd really be curious if any names I recognize are on the list, but I doubt it.
- uhnuhnuhn 9y ago> the article suggests some of them wrote online I think you read that wrong. Quote from the article: "Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo."
- sqdbps 9y ago“about a dozen employees”. The 'maven' story was published in early march, it’s an 80k employee company, that is not even a blip within their natural turnover rate.
- have_faith 9y ago> several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions It's a significant amount of people if all of these people are close to or part of the project being discussed. I wouldn't expect Mike from the Angular team to resign over a project he knows little about so I don't think the employee count is relevant.
- resonanttoe 9y agoBut that's not what the article says and it does that on purpose. The phrase "Google Employees resign in protest" is significant from a writers PoV. If they had sources and evidence to suggest it was close to the project, they would have said "Google's Project Maven Employees resign in protest" as it gives it more weight. The art/lie is omission and letting the reader jump to the conclusion. Currently there is nothing in the article to suggest that these aren't just call-centre workers but they (Gizmodo, pronouns pal) will let you believe that its Maven people and senior engineers. It puts the article in to random-arse speculation mode of a pretty bad kind.
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- sqdbps 9y agoI agree that the nature of their employment isn't being made clear and I'd argue that this was done to mislead, if the author had knowledge that people close to the project resigned they would have published it in the headline.
- blottsie 9y agoThe reason they don't include the roles of the people who resigned is likely because those people are anonymous sources, and revealing their position risks revealing their identities.
- frockington 9y agoAnd all employees who are being "let go" shortly will claim they left because of this
- shanghaiaway 9y ago>the company has defended its work on Maven and is thought to be one of the lead contenders for another major Pentagon cloud computing contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, better known as JEDI, that is currently up for bids. I'd say Google has closer ties to the military industrial complex than for example Huawei does to the PLA. I not only think that Google should be banned outside of the US, but that it must be.
- sqdbps 9y agoIt's a cloud contract the other major cloud providers are bidding on it as well.
- amaccuish 9y agoExactly. These companies are far from transparent, the best move is to not put all our eggs in one basket/country. We too easily allow ourselves to leave it all up to Google and US companies with shady backgrounds and connections. It's why we must support the development of services like WeChat etc, so we are not fully reliant on the US. It also has the added benefit of allowing much greater focus on non-US people and languages, we're often forgotten about.
- dominotw 9y agoNice!. More openings for people like me.
- vaadu 9y agoI'm glad this attitude didn't exist in the 1940s. Otherwise we all might be speaking German.
- CamTin 9y agoWhat's the existential, Germany&Japan-level threat we're facing right now?
- kawfey 9y agoChina and Russia, and the general lack of democracy in certain oil-laden countries.
- unpopular42 9y agoChina is not a threat. Russia, North Korea, and certain Middle East countries are.
- dx034 9y agoIf the Middle East is a threat the easiest solution is switching to renewable energies. Many of the wars in the Middle East can only be fought because of money coming from oil. Any increase in renewable energy lessens that. That is, to a certain degree, also true for Russia. Revenues for NAtural Gas and Oil are crucial for the state, they'd have to cut expenses significantly if oil prices were back at $30/bbl for more than just a few years.
- mantas 9y agoWhy do you think so? China is pretty much the only one that may be a threat. North Korea is a blip on the radar at worst. Russia is fading away and fast.
- posix_me_less 9y ago> Russia is fading away and fast. How can you say that? They have more active nuclear warheads than U. S., plenty to overwhelm any current AB system. Do you count on the AB system getting better so as to eliminate MAD?
- assblaster 9y agoIf alphabet is the one with the machine learning contract with the government, at least they can run it conscientiously. Other companies and employees might not care about ethics as much; would these Google employees regret not having some control over this process?
- emodendroket 9y agoPresumably they believe this should not be done at all.
- assblaster 9y agoGetting back to my original post, it doesn't matter if they believe it shouldn't be done at all. Machine learning will be utilized for defense/war/security, it's only a matter of when/by whom. Would these Alphabet employees prefer the machine learning contracts to go to Lockheed Martin/Amazon where ethics are not a priority, or would they have rather kept the development in house?
- emodendroket 9y agoThere are limits to the idea of trying to get inside and change the organization from within. To take the idea to a ridiculous extreme, you wouldn't tell someone that they should join ISIS and change it from within because Islamic terrorism is going to happen with or without them. I'd also question your bedrock assumption, that Google has much higher ethical standards than Raytheon. Why should we think this beyond "don't be evil" branding?
- assblaster 9y agoYour ridiculous extreme is non-nonsensical as it is a straw man to intimate any equivalency between ISIS and Alphabet's machine learning division. As well, the Department of Defense often has open bidding for contracts for defense technologies. If Alphabet is competing for a contract, you can almost certainly be guaranteed that another corporation is bidding for the same contract. Individual employees have a say in how products are developed, it is not like employees must adhere to a rigid medieval orthodoxy or otherwise suffer death/decapitation/torture/rape.
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- jahaja 9y agoVery respectable decision in my book. Walking the walk, not just talking the talk. You just can't abstract yourself away from ethical decisions ad infinitum. The level of self-deception needed to convince oneself that this, or whatever US military tech for that matter, would only be used for defensive purposes is mind-boggling to me.
- sjg007 9y agoWell... yes and no.. AI research is funded and has developed out of darpa contracts. If you rule out the abstraction then we’d have no research. But it’s fine if they say they don’t wa t to do this particular work.
- jahaja 9y agoHence the 'ad infinitum'. There's always a spectrum.
- sjg007 9y agoI’m suggesting it’s turtles all the way down. The AI class you take in college is based on results from DARPA funded grants on say threat assessment or battlefield awareness or even automated defense technologies. It’s exactly the same except where you are on the R&D product timeline.
- retSava 9y agoThe thing is that you can't simply lump all military-related activities into one heap. There's a scale from passively only reacting in self-defense when acted upon, to actively seeking engagement on foreign ground. This thing Google helps with, parsing and scanning through drone visual feeds, typically ends up on the latter end of the scale. Sure, it could be used for parsing feeds from drones monitoring the US borders to Canada/Mexico, or cattle or whatever, but that's not the case here.
- mc32 9y agoOne could argue if a military will keep on using drones, is it “better” for them and us to better discern an enemy more accurately to minimize non enemy casualties, or continue with present incidental collateral death rates? It’s not as simple as I’m against droning—that’s going to continue so long as the electorate demands minimized losses on our side (a very good argument, one leftists leveraged to try to get the US to disengage from previous wars), droning and it’s capabilities will continue.
- TravelTechGuy 9y agoI couldn’t help but think that if Palanteer employees ever decide to quit based on their company’s questionable decisions, there’d be no one left to work there.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThere are plenty of people with either little or distorted morals willing to work for... Pretty much anyone for the right price. Which is why Google will have no problem finding replacements for these employees who have less pesky ethical standards.
- detaro 9y agoI'd guess in the vast majority of cases, that kind of person wouldn't even start working for Palantir.
- creo 9y agoOff-topic: 2008 ... everyone was using G product (in my env at least). Imagine saying back then "10 years from now Google will provide military with artificial intelligence".
- astura 9y agoOnly surprising to people who are ignorant of history, the entirety of Silicon Valley was built on the back of military funding. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsible-for-almost-all-the-technology-in-your-iphone-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsibl... https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_valley/2013/12/the_origins_of_silicon_valley_could_they_ever_be_replicated.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_va...
- dekhn 9y agoThis was an obvious outcome to me. I'm a Googler, previously worked for a national lab (non confidential, but the military was free to use our free software products), and I always expected that one of the end games of a US company with advanced ML would be selling it to the US government.
- acct1771 9y agoThey've been assisting with govt/.MIL intelligence tech forever. The artificial part is just the nature progression of such.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoEric Schmidt acted directly on the behalf of the US government and the State Department, and has been cultivating close ties with the DoD for years now. Published in 2013-2014 time frame: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- acct1771 9y agoThis deserves so much more attention.
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- greesil 9y agoI see comments about how Google should be protecting the country, thus failing some sort of patriotism test. I don't understand how people don't see that Google is a global company, and really should be providing lethal cloud services to all nations to harm all of its users instead of just some of them. Some of you are way too US centric in your viewpoints.
- sqdbps 9y agoGoogle is a US company thus eligible to bid on US government contracts, if other countries were to open their defence logistics to outside bidders they should consider bidding for those.
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- Pigo 9y agoI left a good job with an insurance company, not in protest really, but just because I hated the idea of being a part of an industry I despise so much. Unfortunately my departure didn't shake the foundation of their business, but I'm no longer embarrassed to talk about who I work for.
- Matt3o12_ 9y agoWhy would you not want to take about that? Did the insurance company have a very bad reputation? Because I certainly would not be embarrassed to work for some insurance companies because they can be fair and quite reasonable (while others are not).
- tzakrajs 9y agoAt least in the United States, it's a trope that insurance salespeople and civil litigation lawyers are scumbags. I think it's completely bullshit, we need these industries.
- jakear 9y agoI once agreed. But three months ago I broke my leg in a skiing accident and my insurance (fuck you, Cigna) has refused to cover it because I didn't get "prior approval" for my emergency room visit. Thats right, I was supposed to call my fucking insurance company while lying in agony with a broken leg on top of a mountain waiting to be med-evac'd. On top of that, they've refused to cover my physical therapy, sending me a letter saying that it is their belief that I have full mobility and will not need further therapy sessions covered... while I was on crutches, in a boot. Probably a week or two after I got out of a wheelchair. Fuck you Cigna. Fuck Cigna.
- tzakrajs 9y agoOh wow! Fuck Cigna is right.
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- ahbs66 9y agoI wish they would release their names to see if there are any coincidences.
- pjc50 9y agoWhat do you hope to infer from their names? Please be clear.
- tzakrajs 9y agoResigning from Google in this way is the most Googley thing you can do. Disclaimer: I am a Xoogler
- mc32 9y agoMy guess is that this is mostly political in that if Hillary were in the WH, this would not have been news despite a likely increase in “droning”, given her expression around droning. If they really had ethical concerns they’d have quit long ago given all the data collected from their users —I get it advertising is their bread and butter. We’ll see how GDPR affects their behavior at home and if it means anything.
- icebraining 9y agoIf they really had ethical concerns they’d have quit long ago given all the data collected from their users Because everyone who doesn't share your ethics must have none? I like and support the GDPR, but that's the most intolerant statement I've read in a while on HN.
- nunya213 9y agoIronic, considering the rain of downvotes on posts that disagree with the resignations.
- thrwwy75337 9y agoMy personal conspiracy theory is this is Google’s way to get its notorious horde of SJWs to resign en masse. I left years ago, and even back then the internal Google+ was a festering, aggressively intolerant SJW cesspool. There are dozens of people who seem to spend all day there posting the most ludicrous SJW bullshit and virtue signaling, and seemingly do nothing else (according to eg Critique, the internal code review tool). The management is unwilling/unable to do anything about the problem. From what I heard things have gotten much worse since I left.
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- needToSay 9y agoStop projecting, back to your cave nigger monkey
- walshemj 9y agoLol id bet that 90% of googles in the US are in European /UK terms centre right or wet/one nation tory's
- jahaja 9y agoYou certainly seem to be the mirror image of tolerance. Sigh. Have you ever considered that you're projecting?
- emodendroket 9y agoYeah they're undertaking a big government contact to that end. Great theory.
- tootie 9y agoNo adults use the term SJW.
- purple-again 9y agoTo me this quote right here seem to sum it up perfectly: The company’s recent political fumbles, like its sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action Conference and its struggle to address internal diversity concerns, have also played a role. The company does not want to be a left leaning liberal company. It wants to be a neutral company that doesn't get punished by the winds of our two party political system. I'm sure after Trump won in 2016 a lot of higher ups at Google let out a collective sigh of relief about their 2012 decision to support the CPAC. Calling that support a 'political fumble' is all that you need to see how biased this article is.
- dep_b 9y agoShowing results for "Don't be evil" No results found for "Don't be evil" Did you mean: "Do be evil"
- sunstone 9y agoClearly Google/Alphabet should have subsidiary for it if they want/have to do military work.
- wpdev_63 9y agoGood on them. Weaponizing mass surveillance will the most evil any company has ever done. Soon enough we are going to have drone flying done the street and stopping us to scan our face. No one will bat an eye as it's for "our protection" and nothing _more_. Make no mistake we are competing with China.
- marco_salvatori 9y agoOn a more general note, where ones work violates ones values either because one feels ones work can enable unwarrented agression, transgressions against human liberties, or violaations of human rights. The most influential thing one can do is walk away. A core set of experineced, capable engineers is required for the success of many projects beyond standard levels of complexity. Engineers now, but more in the future, will influence aysmetrically the type of systems that get built, just by refusing to work on projects that can server intrests that they are at odds with. As a second point, engineers somewhere, perhaps readers of hackernews, have built systems that enabled illegality and overreach -- and they maintain them. I understand that people want to provide for their families and futures, but at some level introspection, unfortuntely, seems to have fallen short. Taking the idea a step further, what expections should we have of our peers? People really can help create the future through what they choose to work on.