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Because they oppose the drone warfare program, which is killing noncombatants in nominally allied countries. https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028d

Because they oppose the drone warfare program, which is killing noncombatants in nominally allied countries. https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-obama-administrations-drone-strike-dissembling/473541/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-oba... It’s not the military that is evil, it’s this particular program in the eyes of many. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333 Disclaimer: I am also fortunate to work at Google and my opinions are my own.

slg 8y ago
>Because they oppose the drone warfare program, which is killing noncombatants in nominally allied countries. I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? The distinct advantage of drones is to safeguard the lives of military personnel by not putting them in harms way. You can make an argument that this fact makes using military force politically easier, but I think the blame for that is once again on the military/political leadership and not the drones themselves. If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  So the people who build the Death Star are innocent? The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to. I wouldn’t personally want to work in weapons development, but I certainly wouldn’t want to work in weapons development for a military that as a result of its offensive use of its weapons is making children in the third world afraid of blue skies. But I have a gmail and I use google maps, so I’m not really in a position to judge.
  - tlrobinson 8y ago
    Death Stars don't kill people. People kill people.
    - bonesss 8y ago
      ... ideally with Death Stars, millions at a time :D
  - slg 8y ago
    I know you are being a little facetious with the Death Star line, but I think that bares a distinction because it would be a WMD and part of its intended purpose is to kill civilians. Likewise in our world developing indiscriminate killing WMDs like bio-weapons deserves extra scrutiny. Drones are not indiscriminate killing machines any more than manned aircraft. If they are used indiscriminately, the problem should be with the leadership ordering their use in that manner. My overall point is that drones are not a unique class of weapon. You should either have a problem with Google working on a weapons program or not. Working on drones is no worse than working on manned aircraft.
    - marklgr 8y ago
      Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft, and with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone. So yes, it is potentially worse than aircraft, for the same reason a police/army of bots could potentially be much worse than a "conventional" one.
      - slg 8y ago
        >Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft Once again that is a political issue. If someone finds a way to suddenly reduce the cost of bullets by 50%, the response from the military shouldn’t be to buy twice the number of bullets. >with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone The article denies that is how the AI would be used.
- adamsea 8y ago
  > Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? No. > If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing. In the context of this discussion the problem would be with the weapons designers. That said, to imply drones are just like previous weapons is naive. The ethics of warfare change over time as the weapons used to wage it change. And death in war being even more abstracted away via drones (a process began with the first thrown rock and continued up through the carpet bombing of WWII and Vietnam) is certainly worth discussing. If nothin else drones raise the question of scale - they allow for a lot more targeted killings. Until the day war becomes an ugly memory we should all do as much as possible to examine and understand the forms of dehumanization it produces.
- arrownot 8y ago
  What if the one that ordered the killing is an AI system designed by Google? Who is to blame? Remember that clients don't know the full implications when they ask for a service.
- tzzuop 8y ago
  "We kill based on metadata" Phonenumbers are the target identifier.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    It is even looser than that, activity profiles and a graph of agents that fit some shakes marker. They literally don't know who they are killing, only people engaging in certain patterns of behavior. The whole thing is just a vaguely statistical murder game.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    I had completely forgotten about that quote. Thanks for the reminder.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? Not "fine", but I think "maybe a little bit less horrified" might be accurate, because a remote video feed apparently makes it even harder to tell what you're shooting [1]: What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle. Another former operator said similarly [2]: Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ “ Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog. Though in any case it seems like quite an awful argument that distancing yourself from whom your killing should be fine because killing-isn't-okay-anyway-so-whatever. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10403313/Confessions-of-a-US-drone-operator-I-watched-him-die.-It-took-a-long-time.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
- fsloth 8y ago
  "If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing." Drone strikes, as they are used, are a more evil way of taking out identified targets of other nationalities. I find the concept of a nation state summarily assassinating people a bit troubling, but drone strikes make it even worse by making it imprecise and cheap. Drone strikes without on the ground operators create huge collateral damage [0]. When operating in a civilian area, it's far less precise to handle the targeting based on a video stream and to send in a hellfire missile rather than have on the ground operators identify the target and pull the trigger. Effectively, they are using civilian casualties as credits to buy military lives and convenient and rapid force projection capabilities. Any calculus that considers innocent lives as accepted collateral - when you have other options that are just more expensive or difficult can be considered evil. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    Do you think that if part of Google's work were to make it more precise, would that be less evil?
    - fsloth 8y ago
      If they could make sure they are killing only the guy they wanted, and act on that using pinpoint precision? Uh, actually, now that you mentioned it, that would be even more scary. That would be totally consequence free assassination device. At least the civilian casualties put some lid on the tendency to wantonly fly around in glorified RC planes murdering people. The way I see it, if you are intending to assassinate a person (i.e. kill them not part of a military engagement) you could at least have the decency to have operators on the ground, with visual range to the target to pull the trigger. That's skin in the game. That's proper balancing of the calculus. When you remove the chance of your own guys getting hurt, you are lowering the threshold to apply deadly force. The whole point of due process and so on is to guarantee human rights for all and more importantly, put checks and balances on the actions of the political leaders. When it suddenly becomes "ok" to kill people in automated fashion around the globe, that's a serious threat to all civil liberties regardless if one is a US citizen or not. I think a free and open society is the only reason US has any credibility in claiming a moral high ground and things like eliminating targets on the disposition matrix [0] without due process erodes that high ground quite effectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
- spupy 8y ago
  > They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. Oh, so we don't need these weaponized AI developements then? But I suspect that with the AI you could more easily escape responsibility by blaming the software. Who faces the consequences when an autonomous drone bombs a school? "Oops, sorry, it was a bug."
  - Marysville 8y ago
    More than the blame, it will dehumanise those deaths. Like a tree falling in a forest....
- gldalmaso 8y ago
  > There is a human pilot behind every death. Google's work will now ensure that there won't be. Even with a 100% sure target identifier, it will now correctly hit the right target just as much as it correctly demonetizes youtube videos.
- detaro 8y ago
  And if you disagree with the people ordering the killing, you might not want to fulfill their wishes for new weapons improvements, knowing that they'll use them for killings you disagree with. Or if it makes killings politically easier for them, then it's in your interest to not do that. Why is that unlogical? Let's say your neighbor starts poisoning all the pets in your neighborhood, would you make poison for them because it's not the poison doing the killing?
- Lennie 8y ago
  "there is a human pilot behind every death." That statement won't last long term.
  - randcraw 8y ago
    No, it'll become "there's a Google programmer behind every death".
- barrkel 8y ago
  Drones are a worse weapon than a man on the ground with a gun, because they have asymmetric risks. The country with the drones doesn't risk civilian backlash from casualties. They get to start wars without much political pushback. And that means they can start wars for less justifiable reasons.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    Mostly curious but do you feel the same way about body armor? Body armor reduces casualties as well and makes war seem less risky?
- Semirhage 8y ago
  In the immortal words of Rob Delaney, “Guns don’t kill people. People who say “Guns don’t kill people” kill people. With guns.” /s/guns/drones
- hamandcheese 8y ago
  Weapons are not all equal. Chemicals can be used as weapons. Most of society generally agrees not to participate in chemical warfare. Some weapons are more evil than others.
  - chii 8y ago
    > Most of society generally agrees not to participate in chemical warfare. because of uncontrollable collateral damage. Same with mines that can't be deactivated. Drones, on the other hand, promises precise strike, with little to no collateral damage. If killing of "enemy combatants" can't be stopped, why not make it as precise and accurate as possible, and prevent collateral damage?
    - sireat 8y ago
      You do realize that drones are not precise at all? Plenty of collateral damage from them. That is they are precise in targeting a specific location but they blow up everyone at that location? Let's not even talk about double tap drone attacks. The second drone kills everyone attempting to help the wounded. Talk about do no evil...
- mattnewton 8y ago
  >”Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs?” No, that wouldn’t matter obviously. Drones are only relevant because that’s what they are using: if it were helecopters and google were being asked to make computer-vision enhanced helecopter dashboards to make the program more efficient and more lethal people would have similar concerns. This program in particular is troublesome because they have decided since it is out of self defense[0] it can be done outside of a congressionally declared war without public oversight[1] and to even target American citizens if the executive branch alone secretly determines they are linked to Al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization[2]. It has also been documented hitting first responders to ensure a target is not rescued [3] which would be called a war crime if anyone else did it. Project Maven expands this new (in my view, extralegal) kind of warfare by making it more lethal and more automated. It scales this program up in a way that, say, making bullet proof vests for soilders or even tanks does not, because those are used in old fashioned congresssionally declared wars. [0] https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Egan-ASIL-speech.pdf https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Egan... [1] https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/08/15/opinion/oconnell-targeted-killing/index.html https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/08/15/opinion/oconnell-targeted-k... [2] http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-dro...
- drspacemonkey 8y ago
  The problem is that Google wants to give the military better weapons to kill people, knowing full well that they're intended to be better at killing people, and they're using the data we voluntarily gave them under the illusion that they wouldn't do evil things with it. Evil things like making better weapons for people who kill innocent civilians.
jimmaswell 8y ago
I've often heard that civilian casualties would be higher without drones. First result on google seems to support it: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/04/u_s_drone_strikes_civilian_casualties_would_be_much_higher_without_them.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
- hedora 8y ago
  Drones enable perpetual war. For instance, the US has been continuously launching drone strikes against its ally pakistan since 2004. I don’t think that’s even the current longest running drone conflict, but I can’t remember which one is. Yemen is probably biggest humanitarian military disaster at the moment, but that war is only in year eight. Here is a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mi...

slg 8y ago

>Because they oppose the drone warfare program, which is killing noncombatants in nominally allied countries. I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? The distinct advantage of drones is to safeguard the lives of military personnel by not putting them in harms way. You can make an argument that this fact makes using military force politically easier, but I think the blame for that is once again on the military/political leadership and not the drones themselves. If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing.

eksemplar 8y ago
So the people who build the Death Star are innocent? The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to. I wouldn’t personally want to work in weapons development, but I certainly wouldn’t want to work in weapons development for a military that as a result of its offensive use of its weapons is making children in the third world afraid of blue skies. But I have a gmail and I use google maps, so I’m not really in a position to judge.
- tlrobinson 8y ago
  Death Stars don't kill people. People kill people.
  - bonesss 8y ago
    ... ideally with Death Stars, millions at a time :D
- slg 8y ago
  I know you are being a little facetious with the Death Star line, but I think that bares a distinction because it would be a WMD and part of its intended purpose is to kill civilians. Likewise in our world developing indiscriminate killing WMDs like bio-weapons deserves extra scrutiny. Drones are not indiscriminate killing machines any more than manned aircraft. If they are used indiscriminately, the problem should be with the leadership ordering their use in that manner. My overall point is that drones are not a unique class of weapon. You should either have a problem with Google working on a weapons program or not. Working on drones is no worse than working on manned aircraft.
  - marklgr 8y ago
    Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft, and with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone. So yes, it is potentially worse than aircraft, for the same reason a police/army of bots could potentially be much worse than a "conventional" one.
    - slg 8y ago
      >Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft Once again that is a political issue. If someone finds a way to suddenly reduce the cost of bullets by 50%, the response from the military shouldn’t be to buy twice the number of bullets. >with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone The article denies that is how the AI would be used.
adamsea 8y ago
> Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? No. > If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing. In the context of this discussion the problem would be with the weapons designers. That said, to imply drones are just like previous weapons is naive. The ethics of warfare change over time as the weapons used to wage it change. And death in war being even more abstracted away via drones (a process began with the first thrown rock and continued up through the carpet bombing of WWII and Vietnam) is certainly worth discussing. If nothin else drones raise the question of scale - they allow for a lot more targeted killings. Until the day war becomes an ugly memory we should all do as much as possible to examine and understand the forms of dehumanization it produces.
arrownot 8y ago
What if the one that ordered the killing is an AI system designed by Google? Who is to blame? Remember that clients don't know the full implications when they ask for a service.
tzzuop 8y ago
"We kill based on metadata" Phonenumbers are the target identifier.
- sitkack 8y ago
  It is even looser than that, activity profiles and a graph of agents that fit some shakes marker. They literally don't know who they are killing, only people engaging in certain patterns of behavior. The whole thing is just a vaguely statistical murder game.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  I had completely forgotten about that quote. Thanks for the reminder.
mehrdadn 8y ago
> I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs? Not "fine", but I think "maybe a little bit less horrified" might be accurate, because a remote video feed apparently makes it even harder to tell what you're shooting [1]: What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle. Another former operator said similarly [2]: Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ “ Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog. Though in any case it seems like quite an awful argument that distancing yourself from whom your killing should be fine because killing-isn't-okay-anyway-so-whatever. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10403313/Confessions-of-a-US-drone-operator-I-watched-him-die.-It-took-a-long-time.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
fsloth 8y ago
"If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing." Drone strikes, as they are used, are a more evil way of taking out identified targets of other nationalities. I find the concept of a nation state summarily assassinating people a bit troubling, but drone strikes make it even worse by making it imprecise and cheap. Drone strikes without on the ground operators create huge collateral damage [0]. When operating in a civilian area, it's far less precise to handle the targeting based on a video stream and to send in a hellfire missile rather than have on the ground operators identify the target and pull the trigger. Effectively, they are using civilian casualties as credits to buy military lives and convenient and rapid force projection capabilities. Any calculus that considers innocent lives as accepted collateral - when you have other options that are just more expensive or difficult can be considered evil. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
- bpicolo 8y ago
  Do you think that if part of Google's work were to make it more precise, would that be less evil?
  - fsloth 8y ago
    If they could make sure they are killing only the guy they wanted, and act on that using pinpoint precision? Uh, actually, now that you mentioned it, that would be even more scary. That would be totally consequence free assassination device. At least the civilian casualties put some lid on the tendency to wantonly fly around in glorified RC planes murdering people. The way I see it, if you are intending to assassinate a person (i.e. kill them not part of a military engagement) you could at least have the decency to have operators on the ground, with visual range to the target to pull the trigger. That's skin in the game. That's proper balancing of the calculus. When you remove the chance of your own guys getting hurt, you are lowering the threshold to apply deadly force. The whole point of due process and so on is to guarantee human rights for all and more importantly, put checks and balances on the actions of the political leaders. When it suddenly becomes "ok" to kill people in automated fashion around the globe, that's a serious threat to all civil liberties regardless if one is a US citizen or not. I think a free and open society is the only reason US has any credibility in claiming a moral high ground and things like eliminating targets on the disposition matrix [0] without due process erodes that high ground quite effectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
spupy 8y ago
> They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. Oh, so we don't need these weaponized AI developements then? But I suspect that with the AI you could more easily escape responsibility by blaming the software. Who faces the consequences when an autonomous drone bombs a school? "Oops, sorry, it was a bug."
- Marysville 8y ago
  More than the blame, it will dehumanise those deaths. Like a tree falling in a forest....
gldalmaso 8y ago
> There is a human pilot behind every death. Google's work will now ensure that there won't be. Even with a 100% sure target identifier, it will now correctly hit the right target just as much as it correctly demonetizes youtube videos.
detaro 8y ago
And if you disagree with the people ordering the killing, you might not want to fulfill their wishes for new weapons improvements, knowing that they'll use them for killings you disagree with. Or if it makes killings politically easier for them, then it's in your interest to not do that. Why is that unlogical? Let's say your neighbor starts poisoning all the pets in your neighborhood, would you make poison for them because it's not the poison doing the killing?
Lennie 8y ago
"there is a human pilot behind every death." That statement won't last long term.
- randcraw 8y ago
  No, it'll become "there's a Google programmer behind every death".
barrkel 8y ago
Drones are a worse weapon than a man on the ground with a gun, because they have asymmetric risks. The country with the drones doesn't risk civilian backlash from casualties. They get to start wars without much political pushback. And that means they can start wars for less justifiable reasons.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  Mostly curious but do you feel the same way about body armor? Body armor reduces casualties as well and makes war seem less risky?
Semirhage 8y ago
In the immortal words of Rob Delaney, “Guns don’t kill people. People who say “Guns don’t kill people” kill people. With guns.” /s/guns/drones
hamandcheese 8y ago
Weapons are not all equal. Chemicals can be used as weapons. Most of society generally agrees not to participate in chemical warfare. Some weapons are more evil than others.
- chii 8y ago
  > Most of society generally agrees not to participate in chemical warfare. because of uncontrollable collateral damage. Same with mines that can't be deactivated. Drones, on the other hand, promises precise strike, with little to no collateral damage. If killing of "enemy combatants" can't be stopped, why not make it as precise and accurate as possible, and prevent collateral damage?
  - sireat 8y ago
    You do realize that drones are not precise at all? Plenty of collateral damage from them. That is they are precise in targeting a specific location but they blow up everyone at that location? Let's not even talk about double tap drone attacks. The second drone kills everyone attempting to help the wounded. Talk about do no evil...
mattnewton 8y ago
>”Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs?” No, that wouldn’t matter obviously. Drones are only relevant because that’s what they are using: if it were helecopters and google were being asked to make computer-vision enhanced helecopter dashboards to make the program more efficient and more lethal people would have similar concerns. This program in particular is troublesome because they have decided since it is out of self defense[0] it can be done outside of a congressionally declared war without public oversight[1] and to even target American citizens if the executive branch alone secretly determines they are linked to Al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization[2]. It has also been documented hitting first responders to ensure a target is not rescued [3] which would be called a war crime if anyone else did it. Project Maven expands this new (in my view, extralegal) kind of warfare by making it more lethal and more automated. It scales this program up in a way that, say, making bullet proof vests for soilders or even tanks does not, because those are used in old fashioned congresssionally declared wars. [0] https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Egan-ASIL-speech.pdf https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Egan... [1] https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/08/15/opinion/oconnell-targeted-killing/index.html https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/08/15/opinion/oconnell-targeted-k... [2] http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-dro...
drspacemonkey 8y ago
The problem is that Google wants to give the military better weapons to kill people, knowing full well that they're intended to be better at killing people, and they're using the data we voluntarily gave them under the illusion that they wouldn't do evil things with it. Evil things like making better weapons for people who kill innocent civilians.

jimmaswell 8y ago

I've often heard that civilian casualties would be higher without drones. First result on google seems to support it: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/04/u_s_drone_strikes_civilian_casualties_would_be_much_higher_without_them.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

hedora 8y ago
Drones enable perpetual war. For instance, the US has been continuously launching drone strikes against its ally pakistan since 2004. I don’t think that’s even the current longest running drone conflict, but I can’t remember which one is. Yemen is probably biggest humanitarian military disaster at the moment, but that war is only in year eight. Here is a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mi...