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> This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott Yet, big companies have had

> This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-controversial-pentagon-contract.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect. Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it. Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-wins-new-pentagon-deal-with-111-million-from-the-army https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-... In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.
- singron 6y ago
  From my reading of available publications by the airforce on maven, the calculus was actually that they had a fixed threshold for risk, and being able to analyze more data would allow them to act in more cases with that same risk level. To probably oversimplify, if they were ok with 25% innocent causalities, increasing efficiency 100x would just let them kill 100x more often at the same ratio. Disclosure: ex-google

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it. Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-wins-new-pentagon-deal-with-111-million-from-the-army https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-... In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.

singron 6y ago
From my reading of available publications by the airforce on maven, the calculus was actually that they had a fixed threshold for risk, and being able to analyze more data would allow them to act in more cases with that same risk level. To probably oversimplify, if they were ok with 25% innocent causalities, increasing efficiency 100x would just let them kill 100x more often at the same ratio. Disclosure: ex-google