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So, I'm all for giving someone the benefit of the doubt if they have a change of heart upon reconsidering an issue, but this coming after the fact rings a bit h

So, I'm all for giving someone the benefit of the doubt if they have a change of heart upon reconsidering an issue, but this coming after the fact rings a bit hollow to me. I think the only principle at play here is that it became a PR issue. That's fine, but let's be honest about it. Early emails between Google execs framed this project only in terms of revenue and potential PR backlash. As far as we're aware, there was no discussion about the morality of the matter (I'm not taking any moral stance here just to be clear.) Once this became an internal and external PR issue, Google held a series of all hands meetings and claimed that this was a "small project" and that the AI would not be used to kill people. While technically true, those same internal emails show that Google expected this to become a much larger project over time, eventually bringing in about $250M / year[1]. So even then they were being a bit disingenuous by focusing only on the current scope of the deal. And here we are now with a release from the CEO talking about morality and "principles" well after the fact. I doubt many people do anyway, but I'm not buying the "these are our morals" bit. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/06/01/report-google-thought-military-drone-project-would.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/06/01/report-g...

throwaway2048 8y ago
There was a similar "comming to jesus moment" with Google in China. They saw how they had to do the right thing after years of censoring and manipulating data for the chinese government, but only after they got massively hacked, blocked, and essentially forced out of china... However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  > However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. Agreed, and I try not to be too hard on them. I don't think it's a black and white issue personally, the only issue I have is how this implies Google always wants to do the right thing from the get go, which very much seems to not be the case here.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    You should read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". It's not possible to make all the right policy decisions that are right in hindsight and before a sentinal event occurs. Hindsight bias is always 20/20. Anyone making real decisions of consequence will eventually curse hindsight.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Well Google is now framing this as a moral issue, so did morality change significantly between when they accepted this project and today?
      - killjoywashere 8y ago
        Do you think regret is morally valid?
    - the-pigeon 8y ago
      Sure. But Google has no intention of doing the right thing anymore than Microsoft or Disney does. These are corporations and their executives HAVE to do what they think will be best for the corporation. Not what they think is best for mankind. This is how for profit businesses currently work. And PR saying anything to the contrary is simply not true.
      - zaphar 8y ago
        This is a gross generalization that people trot out as if it were unassailable but never back it up with any support. Corporations are run by people with a complex set of motivations and constraints in which they make decisions. Some of them make decisions with intent to harm. Some make decisions with intent to help. No one person is automatically turned into a ruthless amoral person just be being employed at a corporation.
        the-pigeon 8y ago
        It gets complicated but it's more about the employees responsibility to shareholders. Not their personal morals. https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_true_that_corporations_are_legally/ https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_tr...
- baxtr 8y ago
  > However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. I'd say it is definitely better than not doing a good thing. For me, the real question is this though: considering there is a pattern here (doing the right thing after doing the wrong thing), do you trust they will do the right thing in the first place next time?
- ManFromUranus 8y ago
  Hmm not really. Google is bad and they should feel bad, you're just handwaving away how bad they are because you like them. Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all. Had everything gone to plan the guy would be dead and I would be blameless. Similarly if everything had gone to plan Google AI would now be powering various autonomous murder bots except they realized that they didn't want to be associated with this, not because they have any morals, but because WE DO. They are still bad.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Beleive me when I say that I do not like Google. But what is a person or a group of people supposed to do when they have done something wrong? All they can do is stop doing it, and try to prevent doing it in the future. You can speculate about their motives, I personally beleive it to be PR motivated aswell, but what matters in the end is that it stopped happening.
    - ionised 8y ago
      That's all fine, but that person or group shouldn't expect everybody to love them afterwards. If anything, they should expect distrust and dislike.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all. That's an odd analogy considering the the would-be conspirator didn't make a decision to not go through with it. Do you believe Google published this article by accident? And really; comparing Google's actions to murder... c'mon.
- ionised 8y ago
  > However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. Yes, but we should absolutely remember what the original intention was.
themacguffinman 8y ago
I doubt that Google spelling out their moral stance is intended to convince you right away that they're all good now. It's a public standard that they're setting for themselves. If you think their actions don't match their words, you now have concrete terms and principles to critique and compare with. It's a benchmark to which employees and the public can hold them accountable.
- ksk 8y ago
  Historically has anyone succeeded in holding such giant firms accountable to their own stated principles? At the moment, I like those principles more than I like Google.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    Look at it from the other side: with those principles written down, executives will at least have the option to adhere to them, something to point at when they do. Without, shareholders might give them a very hard time for every not strictly illegal profit opportunity they preferred to skip. Google might be in a position to not get bullied around much by investors though, so that line of thought might be slightly off topic here.
  - testvox 8y ago
    One example I can think of is private colleges. Many in the US have made public statements dedicating themselves to uphold principles like freedom of speech. Organizations like FIRE do a pretty good job holding them accountable to those principles and there are many instances in which they have documentated policy or enforcement changes made due to their activism.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    The funny thing about "holding people accountable" is that people rarely explain what it means, and I'm not even sure they know what it means? It's a stock phrase in politics that needs to be made more concrete to have any meaning.
    - 8y ago
killjoywashere 8y ago
The emails you're aware of framed it in those terms. Do you think a leaker might selectively leak with the intent to paint a particular picture? As someone who has helped write policy, it is literally impossible to write up all policy in advance. You always end up weathering some angry insights in the comment section (we used to call it the peanut gallery). If you can write out all policy a priori, every CEO, economist, scientist, and psychologist can just go home now.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >Do you think a leaker might selectively leak with the intent to paint a particular picture? Possibly. As I said "...that we're aware of." Anything beyond what we know is speculation. This is the information I have available. Let me ask you this; if there was real debate and concern beforehand, why is it only now that Google has decided to back out?
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    Because one very good policy is to not make policy in the heat of the moment. Write things down. Discuss with confidantes, counsel, etc. Sleep it on it. Change it. Sleep on it again. The bigger the issue, the more you think about before going public.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  If they really believed this stuff, I don’t see why they would have had so many resignations over the issue. Had somebody brought up the ethical aspects when the project was being discussed, they wouldn’t be scrambling to limit the damage now.
  - Aunche 8y ago
    A few people resigned and they're trying to limit the damage because people like being outraged at things that don't matter. It's the same thing that got James Damore fired.
evilmushroom 8y ago
And now someone else will easily pick up the contract, and Google loses any ability at all to influence it. Perhaps they could have reduced civilian casualities more so than whoever picks it up.
- chillydawg 8y ago
  My crack selling business is the safest, too!
- ionised 8y ago
  That's the biggest integrity-lacking cop-out imaginable. "If I don't do it somebody else will!"
knuththetruth 8y ago
Google’s disregard for the ethics of the arrangement is further supported by this interview with one of the Googlers who organized the resistance to this project: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military-tech-workers https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...
- carapace 8y ago
  Jeez, that's just brutal. I try to avoid content-free comments like this one but... damn. Just brutal. If things actually went down like this person describes I would have been out the door too. (Due to the betrayal. I actually think Project JEDI is pretty cool.)
debt 8y ago
I noticed there was one particularly phrase missing from Apple's WWDC this year: artificial intelligence. It wasn't mentioned one time. Never in the presentations, none of the talk titles had it included either. Machine Learning was mentioned and Apple also released many updates related to it, but never did they call it artificially intelligent, or use the phrase artificial intelligence. Not a single time. Go ahead and watch it if you haven't already. They'll never say those words. Pretty remarkable considering it was a developer conference, I wonder why?
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Impending AI Winter poised to make a lot of people look like fools?
- hk__2 8y ago
  Probably because "machine learning" is a more accurate naming while "artificial intelligence" is the buzzword for non-tech people. There’s nothing "intelligent" in machine learning.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  I credit their sense of discipline in using the more accurate term. They know they can only stand to lose down the road if they over-hype notions if "artificial intelligence" now when it really is a misnomer. And they're probably betting that's what will happen to their competition who more enthusiastically use the phrase for marketing.
  - s2g 8y ago
    Probably more that they aren't as heavily invested in selling the idea that we are close to smart general AI. Compare it to Musk who constantly talks up the idea while the actual AI systems his company has deployed are killing people.
    - debt 8y ago
      Musk's systems are more A than I.
31reasons 8y ago
Give them a break. Based on how much it cost to buy a house in the Bay Area, I don't blame them. /s
jrs95 8y ago
The context of those leaked emails pretty much ensures that it would be framed in terms of revenue and potential PR backlash. Even if those individuals have a moral problem with it, they're likely going to frame their argument in that way because that's probably the most effective argument to make in that context.
moultano 8y ago
Organizations do not always communicate well, and sometimes things only reach the CEO via the press. Do not assume that the whole organization, or even just its executive, agrees with or knows about everything the organization does.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  In addition to this, individual executives and teams of them often have to compartmentalize discussions of different aspects of a complex issue. This makes taking specific communications, chosen by a third party, as indicative of the whole conversation iffy.
ma2rten 8y ago
The article you linked says the email was written by an exec, but the source article in the intercept said it was written by "a member of the sales team". It also says Fei-Fei Li, arguably the only exec on the email chain, was actually against it: “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.” If you take this literally you might say her concern is "just PR", but this is exactly the kind of argument I would use if I was against something on moral grounds but I am trying to convince who does not share the same values.
- gowld 8y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project... That article adds some pre-context to the quote above. > "Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI,” she wrote [...] . “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google.”
benkarst 8y ago
I agree. I'm encouraged that there are people who can see through the propaganda.
wpdev_63 8y ago
You hit the nail on the head.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thisrod 8y ago
I'd put this another way. Here is the CEO of Google laying down the law. And the first question to ask, before you bother reading or discussing any law, is what redress you have when someone breaks it. If Google does start building weapons, you can always turn up with a sledgehammer. How do these principles reduce the need for you to do that?
- fixermark 8y ago
  If Google starts building weapons, wouldn't one want to turn up with something a bit more effective than a sledgehammer?
outworlder 8y ago
Is that all? 250M/year is still peanuts for a company like Google.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  It’s 250M a year for now. Considering the size of the global arms trade, it’s very unlikely to stay 250M a year for long.
svat 8y ago
• At first there was no explicit policy. • A decision was taken (contract entered into). • As part of the backlash to that decision, one of the demands was that an explicit policy be created. • That demand was accepted, and what you see here is the outcome. (Sorry for the passive voice….) That's all there is to it; I don't see a claim anywhere that the article reflects anyone's principles or morals in the past, only that this is a (only now thought-out) policy on how to decide about similar things in the future (“So today, we’re announcing seven principles to guide our work going forward”).
dredmorbius 8y ago
There's a lot to be said for this view, and I've reshared and highlighted your comments elsewhere. At the same time, Google and Alphabet Inc., far-from perfect entities which I have and do criticise strongly and often, at least present a public face of learning from mistakess rather than doubling down or issueing repeated and increasingly trite and vacant apologies (say: Facebook). This is a line Google have drawn for themselves in the sand, and our various future selves may judge them against.
VanillaCafe 8y ago
These principles seem to have already been wholesomely applied to Google then Waymo's approach to self-driving cars. This is in stark contrast to the approaches used by competitors such as Uber and Tesla who appear to favor capturing market first and foremost. It seems a narrow view to take to assume Google's only AI project with mortal human consequence is Maven, then using that narrow view to confirm your own negative bias about profit, perception, disingenuity.

throwaway2048 8y ago

There was a similar "comming to jesus moment" with Google in China. They saw how they had to do the right thing after years of censoring and manipulating data for the chinese government, but only after they got massively hacked, blocked, and essentially forced out of china... However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing.

EpicEng 8y ago
> However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. Agreed, and I try not to be too hard on them. I don't think it's a black and white issue personally, the only issue I have is how this implies Google always wants to do the right thing from the get go, which very much seems to not be the case here.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  You should read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". It's not possible to make all the right policy decisions that are right in hindsight and before a sentinal event occurs. Hindsight bias is always 20/20. Anyone making real decisions of consequence will eventually curse hindsight.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Well Google is now framing this as a moral issue, so did morality change significantly between when they accepted this project and today?
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      Do you think regret is morally valid?
  - the-pigeon 8y ago
    Sure. But Google has no intention of doing the right thing anymore than Microsoft or Disney does. These are corporations and their executives HAVE to do what they think will be best for the corporation. Not what they think is best for mankind. This is how for profit businesses currently work. And PR saying anything to the contrary is simply not true.
    - zaphar 8y ago
      This is a gross generalization that people trot out as if it were unassailable but never back it up with any support. Corporations are run by people with a complex set of motivations and constraints in which they make decisions. Some of them make decisions with intent to harm. Some make decisions with intent to help. No one person is automatically turned into a ruthless amoral person just be being employed at a corporation.
      - the-pigeon 8y ago
        It gets complicated but it's more about the employees responsibility to shareholders. Not their personal morals. https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_true_that_corporations_are_legally/ https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_tr...
baxtr 8y ago
> However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. I'd say it is definitely better than not doing a good thing. For me, the real question is this though: considering there is a pattern here (doing the right thing after doing the wrong thing), do you trust they will do the right thing in the first place next time?
ManFromUranus 8y ago
Hmm not really. Google is bad and they should feel bad, you're just handwaving away how bad they are because you like them. Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all. Had everything gone to plan the guy would be dead and I would be blameless. Similarly if everything had gone to plan Google AI would now be powering various autonomous murder bots except they realized that they didn't want to be associated with this, not because they have any morals, but because WE DO. They are still bad.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Beleive me when I say that I do not like Google. But what is a person or a group of people supposed to do when they have done something wrong? All they can do is stop doing it, and try to prevent doing it in the future. You can speculate about their motives, I personally beleive it to be PR motivated aswell, but what matters in the end is that it stopped happening.
  - ionised 8y ago
    That's all fine, but that person or group shouldn't expect everybody to love them afterwards. If anything, they should expect distrust and dislike.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all. That's an odd analogy considering the the would-be conspirator didn't make a decision to not go through with it. Do you believe Google published this article by accident? And really; comparing Google's actions to murder... c'mon.
ionised 8y ago
> However a good thing done for the wrong reasons is still a good thing. Yes, but we should absolutely remember what the original intention was.

themacguffinman 8y ago

I doubt that Google spelling out their moral stance is intended to convince you right away that they're all good now. It's a public standard that they're setting for themselves. If you think their actions don't match their words, you now have concrete terms and principles to critique and compare with. It's a benchmark to which employees and the public can hold them accountable.

ksk 8y ago
Historically has anyone succeeded in holding such giant firms accountable to their own stated principles? At the moment, I like those principles more than I like Google.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Look at it from the other side: with those principles written down, executives will at least have the option to adhere to them, something to point at when they do. Without, shareholders might give them a very hard time for every not strictly illegal profit opportunity they preferred to skip. Google might be in a position to not get bullied around much by investors though, so that line of thought might be slightly off topic here.
- testvox 8y ago
  One example I can think of is private colleges. Many in the US have made public statements dedicating themselves to uphold principles like freedom of speech. Organizations like FIRE do a pretty good job holding them accountable to those principles and there are many instances in which they have documentated policy or enforcement changes made due to their activism.
- skybrian 8y ago
  The funny thing about "holding people accountable" is that people rarely explain what it means, and I'm not even sure they know what it means? It's a stock phrase in politics that needs to be made more concrete to have any meaning.
  - 8y ago

killjoywashere 8y ago

The emails you're aware of framed it in those terms. Do you think a leaker might selectively leak with the intent to paint a particular picture? As someone who has helped write policy, it is literally impossible to write up all policy in advance. You always end up weathering some angry insights in the comment section (we used to call it the peanut gallery). If you can write out all policy a priori, every CEO, economist, scientist, and psychologist can just go home now.

EpicEng 8y ago
>Do you think a leaker might selectively leak with the intent to paint a particular picture? Possibly. As I said "...that we're aware of." Anything beyond what we know is speculation. This is the information I have available. Let me ask you this; if there was real debate and concern beforehand, why is it only now that Google has decided to back out?
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Because one very good policy is to not make policy in the heat of the moment. Write things down. Discuss with confidantes, counsel, etc. Sleep it on it. Change it. Sleep on it again. The bigger the issue, the more you think about before going public.
iainmerrick 8y ago
If they really believed this stuff, I don’t see why they would have had so many resignations over the issue. Had somebody brought up the ethical aspects when the project was being discussed, they wouldn’t be scrambling to limit the damage now.
- Aunche 8y ago
  A few people resigned and they're trying to limit the damage because people like being outraged at things that don't matter. It's the same thing that got James Damore fired.

evilmushroom 8y ago

And now someone else will easily pick up the contract, and Google loses any ability at all to influence it. Perhaps they could have reduced civilian casualities more so than whoever picks it up.

chillydawg 8y ago
My crack selling business is the safest, too!
ionised 8y ago
That's the biggest integrity-lacking cop-out imaginable. "If I don't do it somebody else will!"

knuththetruth 8y ago

Google’s disregard for the ethics of the arrangement is further supported by this interview with one of the Googlers who organized the resistance to this project: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military-tech-workers https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...

carapace 8y ago
Jeez, that's just brutal. I try to avoid content-free comments like this one but... damn. Just brutal. If things actually went down like this person describes I would have been out the door too. (Due to the betrayal. I actually think Project JEDI is pretty cool.)

debt 8y ago

I noticed there was one particularly phrase missing from Apple's WWDC this year: artificial intelligence. It wasn't mentioned one time. Never in the presentations, none of the talk titles had it included either. Machine Learning was mentioned and Apple also released many updates related to it, but never did they call it artificially intelligent, or use the phrase artificial intelligence. Not a single time. Go ahead and watch it if you haven't already. They'll never say those words. Pretty remarkable considering it was a developer conference, I wonder why?

thanatropism 8y ago
Impending AI Winter poised to make a lot of people look like fools?
hk__2 8y ago
Probably because "machine learning" is a more accurate naming while "artificial intelligence" is the buzzword for non-tech people. There’s nothing "intelligent" in machine learning.
rdiddly 8y ago
I credit their sense of discipline in using the more accurate term. They know they can only stand to lose down the road if they over-hype notions if "artificial intelligence" now when it really is a misnomer. And they're probably betting that's what will happen to their competition who more enthusiastically use the phrase for marketing.
- s2g 8y ago
  Probably more that they aren't as heavily invested in selling the idea that we are close to smart general AI. Compare it to Musk who constantly talks up the idea while the actual AI systems his company has deployed are killing people.
  - debt 8y ago
    Musk's systems are more A than I.

31reasons 8y ago

Give them a break. Based on how much it cost to buy a house in the Bay Area, I don't blame them. /s

jrs95 8y ago

The context of those leaked emails pretty much ensures that it would be framed in terms of revenue and potential PR backlash. Even if those individuals have a moral problem with it, they're likely going to frame their argument in that way because that's probably the most effective argument to make in that context.

moultano 8y ago

Organizations do not always communicate well, and sometimes things only reach the CEO via the press. Do not assume that the whole organization, or even just its executive, agrees with or knows about everything the organization does.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
In addition to this, individual executives and teams of them often have to compartmentalize discussions of different aspects of a complex issue. This makes taking specific communications, chosen by a third party, as indicative of the whole conversation iffy.

ma2rten 8y ago

The article you linked says the email was written by an exec, but the source article in the intercept said it was written by "a member of the sales team". It also says Fei-Fei Li, arguably the only exec on the email chain, was actually against it: “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.” If you take this literally you might say her concern is "just PR", but this is exactly the kind of argument I would use if I was against something on moral grounds but I am trying to convince who does not share the same values.

gowld 8y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project... That article adds some pre-context to the quote above. > "Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI,” she wrote [...] . “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google.”

benkarst 8y ago

I agree. I'm encouraged that there are people who can see through the propaganda.

wpdev_63 8y ago

You hit the nail on the head.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thisrod 8y ago

I'd put this another way. Here is the CEO of Google laying down the law. And the first question to ask, before you bother reading or discussing any law, is what redress you have when someone breaks it. If Google does start building weapons, you can always turn up with a sledgehammer. How do these principles reduce the need for you to do that?

fixermark 8y ago
If Google starts building weapons, wouldn't one want to turn up with something a bit more effective than a sledgehammer?

outworlder 8y ago

Is that all? 250M/year is still peanuts for a company like Google.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
It’s 250M a year for now. Considering the size of the global arms trade, it’s very unlikely to stay 250M a year for long.

svat 8y ago

• At first there was no explicit policy. • A decision was taken (contract entered into). • As part of the backlash to that decision, one of the demands was that an explicit policy be created. • That demand was accepted, and what you see here is the outcome. (Sorry for the passive voice….) That's all there is to it; I don't see a claim anywhere that the article reflects anyone's principles or morals in the past, only that this is a (only now thought-out) policy on how to decide about similar things in the future (“So today, we’re announcing seven principles to guide our work going forward”).

dredmorbius 8y ago

There's a lot to be said for this view, and I've reshared and highlighted your comments elsewhere. At the same time, Google and Alphabet Inc., far-from perfect entities which I have and do criticise strongly and often, at least present a public face of learning from mistakess rather than doubling down or issueing repeated and increasingly trite and vacant apologies (say: Facebook). This is a line Google have drawn for themselves in the sand, and our various future selves may judge them against.

VanillaCafe 8y ago

These principles seem to have already been wholesomely applied to Google then Waymo's approach to self-driving cars. This is in stark contrast to the approaches used by competitors such as Uber and Tesla who appear to favor capturing market first and foremost. It seems a narrow view to take to assume Google's only AI project with mortal human consequence is Maven, then using that narrow view to confirm your own negative bias about profit, perception, disingenuity.