Anonymous Google Employees Voted Arms Control Persons of the Year

https://www.armscontrol.org/pressroom/2018-acpoy-winner

by Nemant • 8 years ago

178 135 8 years ago

Perhaps for political purposes the businesses which bid over government contracts ought not also be consumer-facing ones.

ve55• 8 years ago

But yet all 4,000 of them still work for the largest surveillance corporation that has ever existed. At least now they think they have the moral high ground.

citilife• 8 years ago

They track us in real-time down to a meter, predict when and where we will travel, know who we interact with, know our DNA[1], know what food we like, when we are sick, what our political leanings are, can predict what our children will like / dislike and probably can predict when we'll die...

If any of that isn't completely true yet, it will be.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/23andme-is-terrif...

tehsauce• 8 years ago

That's true and it's terrible. But they are not building actual weapons that kill people. That's worth something.

archgoon• 8 years ago

It occurs to me that attacking people who are probably on your side, and are in a position to influence Google's policies, is probably not the most effective way of enacting change.

Unless your real argument is "Everyone's evil so don't bother trying".

DannyBee3• 8 years ago

Ah, the ole "sitting on the sidelines is helpful" argument. It's morally defensible for sure, and neutral, but pretending it is actually helpful is wrong. It doesn't help in any meaningful way to change things (in any direction) if you sit on the sidelines. Ironically, people who are the ones who always seem to think the have the moral high ground.

Of course that doesn't mean you have to join google to make a difference, but pretending that you have to not be working at Google to be helping change things is just silly nonsense.

lallysingh2• 8 years ago

No it's different. It's closer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement

It has an effect, you just need to have a large mass of people to make it work.

bogomipz• 8 years ago

"Ah, the ole "sitting on the sidelines is helpful" argument."

That's not even the OPs argument, nor is it some "ole" argument. You have both put words in their mouth and framed it as some classic well-known fallacy of which it is not.

The OP is making the distinction between "voting with your feet" which takes real commitment and has immediate effects versus "signing a letter"[1] which involves nothing more than a few seconds of your time without having to leave your desk.

If Google has trouble attracting talent due to matters of conscience it directly impacts its abilities to build new services as well as improve existing service in order to increase revenue.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-...

chrisco2552• 8 years ago

Isn't it inevitable that AI will be used to improve targeting technology for weaponry? Am I wrong in assuming that if U.S. doesn't develop this tech some other country will?

BurritoAlPastor• 8 years ago

It’s not inevitable if we aren’t willing to let it happen. It used to be “inevitable” that poison gas, napalm, cluster mines, etc. were inevitably the future of war, but as a species we decided we weren’t okay with the effects of those technologies, and we’ve subsequently been reasonably successful at not using them.

21• 8 years ago

The progression was always towards more targeted weapons, because they have less collateral damage.

drak0n1c4• 8 years ago

Imagine if all engineers had boycotted weapons development due to the heinous nature of napalm firebombing in WW2. US military competency stagnates at the stage of napalm. Would that actually change the behavior of the government's military, or would they continue to use napalm in Vietnam and beyond? As history has borne out, I think the latter is the case. The gov will assume it is the best tool so far to do the job, and preferable to the prior alternative of mass cannon bombardment and infantry deployment.

Development of smart munitions, better sensors/intel, and targeting precision has reduced the scale of military operations, entrenchment, and collateral damage. I think that was a form of technological disruption that was overall for the better.

There's a valid counter-argument that making war smaller and easier will lubricate the willingness for politicians (and the public) to enter into war, or maintain a state of pseudo-war. That is certainly a drawback.

cortesoft• 8 years ago

I mean, all of those things are still being used, though....

lallysingh2• 8 years ago

Face recognition is categorically inevitable for small targeting systems.

The danger with AI in particular is that eventually the technology gets trivially accessible. You don't need to hire specialists, just wait a bit and download the library and get the how-to book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

shaki-dora• 8 years ago

That’s a rather common argument. The glib answer is a reference to the Eichmann trial. To (slightly) elaborate, in such a scenario it would at least be only the second (or theirs, fourth...) best team working on the technology.

There are also instances of successfully preventing technology from becoming commonly used in warfare. Nuclear tech is one, but not a perfect fit because it requies huge investments. But chemical weapons are quite comparable to AI, in that any chemistry grad could create such weapons, yet they have been used far less often than mere feasibility would suggest.

sdinsn3• 8 years ago

Am I wrong in assuming that if U.S. doesn't develop this tech some other country will?

You are not wrong. Alibaba, Baidu, etc. work heavily with the Chinese government in this area.

izacus4• 8 years ago

Is that the old tired "if you won't help build tools to butcher people, evil chinese will?" argument?

This zero-sum, jingoisti, outlook on the world has caused most damaging and bloody wars in history. World policy is not a zero sum game and every human does not have to help kill other humans for the world to be at peace.

sodosopa3• 8 years ago

If AI can reduce friendly-fire or weapons striking the wrong target, isn't that saving lives where both of those examples currently kill an extraordinary number of innocent people?

drak0n1c4• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, the divide between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon will be bad for national security in the long run. Recent news cycles keep revealing yet another piece military equipment suffering from software weaknesses. Technology does not stand still, if Russia and China have more of their most talented engineers willing to work on national projects than us that will inevitably lead to a competence gap.

Here is an interesting article about the cultural divide and how it can be mediated:

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/12/divide-between-sili...

PhasmaFelis• 8 years ago

That's probably true, but the blame belongs squarely on the government.

Edit: Not clear why this is getting so many downvotes. If the government is not trustworthy, people won't want to cooperate with the government. Demanding that they put aside their ethics for the sake of patriotism/national security/etc., while ignoring their legitimate concerns, is pure propaganda.

mattnewton• 8 years ago

The article makes it feel like these changes happened because less people are enlisting or know people enlisting. I think that’s just another symptom of how some military programs lost a lot of legitimacy in the minds of some of my generation who were coming of age around the war on terror. It’s hard to feel like the good guys in a lot of these issues like drone warfare against non-combatants, and so the military was never a career I considered as a result, and I suspect I am not alone?

Edit: I’ll add, my generation clearly remembers 9/11 and the response to it. I think it’s not a lack of awareness of the current mission but _because_ of awareness to parts of it that many people write off the military.

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer, but with no work relationship to their AI efforts and my opinions are my own.

NotAnEconomist2• 8 years ago

I think the media has a lot to do with that.

They run stories about how the military bombs some civilians while fighting jihadists, but not about how those same jihadists routinely round up and torture children, kill scores of locals, etc.

Outside of Iraq, which fuck Bush, can you name something about the "War on Terror" you think we'd be better off not doing?

I think it's a really shallow view to say it's better to not bomb a few civilians... then leave them to be preyed on by violent locals instead.

I'm a millennial, and didn't enlist at 18 because I didn't want to go to Iraq (and still don't support starting that war), but I'd have gone to Afghanistan, and as I get older, I find myself much more willing to support the military.

I suspect I'm not alone in that, either.

JohnFen5• 8 years ago

I think that’s just another symptom of how some military programs lost a lot of legitimacy in the minds of some of my generation who were coming of age around the war on terror.

It's not just your generation. I'm in my 50s and this opinion isn't rare in my age group either.

daviross• 8 years ago

Recent news cycles keep revealing yet another piece military equipment suffering from software weaknesses

It's difficult to say this isn't a net moral good, as things currently stand. Competent tools put to immoral ends aren't somehow more moral than incompetent tools. The only fix is to change the ends.

tengbretson4• 8 years ago

That only holds true if you consider the military rivals of the United States to be greater forces for good in the world than the US.

I would consider that an indefensible position.

rifung3• 8 years ago

It's difficult to say this isn't a net moral good, as things currently stand.

I disagree but am open to being persuaded otherwise.

I don't consider national defense to be an immoral goal. I believe it's unrealistic for there to exist a world without weapons. That being the case, I believe it's important for us to constantly improve our military capability otherwise we will be left behind.

partiallypro• 8 years ago

That's well and good until China is invading Taiwan and Russia is invading Ukraine and there is no deterrence from the west to make them think twice.

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

The U.S. arms industry is huge, and so is defense spending. If the DoD wants better talent, then budget accordingly and pay high salaries and fix up their recruitment messages and surely some smart CS grads will go to them. Why should our military be dependent upon SV civilian companies that have workers who don’t want to work on military applications? Then just hire the ones who do, fund new military-oriented startups. This is a free market and the Pentagon needs to pay to play.

NewsAware• 8 years ago

They are paying to play -that's how outsourcing works. The high salary of Google devs is priced into the contracts the pentagon pays. So it's not an issue of salary level but of their inability to build up an internal structure (to which their public image among the SV crowd contributes) which causes them problems. Can this be solved? Maybe, but not simply by raising salaries.

adventured• 8 years ago

That's exactly the scenario we'll see over the next ~20 years, as parts of Silicon Valley refuse to go along with the Pentagon.

The military industrial complex will put tens of billions of dollars into backing new start-ups that will cooperate over that time. Those companies will receive favoritism from the state over time, to Google's detriment. That will include technology transfer and regulatory favoritism (AI will be a regulated industry 10-15 years from now, and will be regulated forever thereafter). For every worker in Silicon Valley that refuses to do military work, the Pentagon will find 100 outside of Silicon Valley that are more than happy to do so. Numerous large companies up and down the tech chain will cooperate as well, including Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, Cisco, TI, Micron, nVidia, and dozens of others. The contracts they receive over time will be a lucrative part of their business (it already is in many cases).

jopsen2• 8 years ago

IMO the big problem is that many of the big SV companies build end-user products. And to protect that they shouldn't want to get into arms contracts.

rifung3• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, the divide between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon will be bad for national security in the long run

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

I agree. However I think in the case of Google and most other companies, the issue is a little more.. awkward? Besides the fact we have offices in other countries, we also employ many people in the US from other countries. Obviously those people may have very different feelings about working on a project for US national security. I don't think I've been on a single team at Google which did not have people from abroad.

chris11• 8 years ago

I'm sure this isn't the case for every project Google does with the US government, but do foreigners usually get placed on defense projects? Security clearances are generally limited to Americans, and exceptions are only given out on a case-by-case basis.

tivert• 8 years ago

[at Google] we also employ many people in the US from other countries. Obviously those people may have very different feelings about working on a project for US national security. I don't think I've been on a single team at Google which did not have people from abroad.

I honestly think the US military would have more problems with having foreign nationals working on a military project than many of the foreign nationals themselves. I think it's difficult to get a security clearance if you're not a citizen, and it may even be hard if you're a dual citizen.

I would think that naturalized US citizens would have the same interest in US national security as native-born Americans. It's a little racist to suggest that they don't, and it would be a little disingenuous for them not to.

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

SV devs don't contribute significant volumes of code to military equipment. They're mostly being used to build the panopticon. The incumbent contractors have plenty of staff who will do the work others refuse.

heyjudy2• 8 years ago

You're making the classic fallacy based on your anecdotal experience. Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Palantir, Thales, SSL, Redhat (IBM) and more definitely make a good living off the MIC in the Bay Area. USARL, DARPA and the national labs also do a bit of work in the Valley. Heck, Stanford and SRI grew out of the MIC.

vl• 8 years ago

A lot of Google employees supported project Maven, but with liberally-controlled company and with witch-hunt mentality most of these people choose to keep quite.

tossaccount1232• 8 years ago

Google is actively helping the Chinese military by opening their AI center in China. Every bit of the IP they develop in China will be in the hands of the government and thus weaponized by the Chinese military. Yet I haven't heard a peep of protest from the same people who criticized project Maven

https://taskandpurpose.com/google-china-artificial-intellige...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/13/alphabets-google-opens-china...

hopler2• 8 years ago

That's a basic AI research center, and it's hiring people away from other projects they could be doing in China.

jka3• 8 years ago

Transparent de-escalation is the solution, not the age-old rhetoric of 'staying ahead in the arms-race'.

_Most_ people regardless of country of residence or origin want a peaceful and fulfilled, free life. You can never please everyone but arguing from basis of 'fear of the other' is a bit disingenuous and leads to these literal arms races.

That's not to say defense spending isn't important, but it has to be stressed with the word 'defense' and with an inherent bias towards security and safety. (I don't believe technology products are inherently neutral; as a result of design they are better or worse suited towards particular usages, and that needs focus too)

jka3• 8 years ago

(also, fwiw - maybe we're not collectively ready for this yet, and sure, waiting until 'the other' is in fact ready to de-escalate themselves too is important in that kind of scenario)

slededit2• 8 years ago

The big fish is always going to have challengers from somewhere. You may be right about the average case but the world is quite large.

_ptgt• 8 years ago

_Most_ people regardless of country of residence or origin want a peaceful and fulfilled, free life. You can never please everyone but arguing from basis of 'fear of the other' is a bit disingenuous and leads to these literal arms races.

This is all fine and dandy, but some of the most powerful militaries in the world are run by authoritarians who optimize for their own interests rather than what's good for their population. Russia's people generally gain nothing from Putin's belligerence, yet the belligerence happens. The CCP rolled the tanks on its own people; do you really think they'll hesitate to roll them on foreigners if it suits their interests?

I don't worry about the aggregate opinion of Russians or Chinese; I worry about Putin and the CCP.

ddoolin• 8 years ago

I don't understand why that's necessarily such a bad thing. Should we be worried that other countries have more strength in this area than we do? Plenty of other countries are not the top in this category and they seem to get along just fine. I'm talking specifically about weaponry, not really defense infrastructure/innovation generally, which at least has some chance of outer application

_bfhp• 8 years ago

If I were an oligarch in a non-U.S.-allied industrial nation, would I not love having a comment like this at the top of where it is? I get to point to the American tech industry culture and say "they are trying to wipe us out!"

jopsen2• 8 years ago

You assume the military power has a significant role to play in the future.

Building secure civilian products, countering corporate espionage, and building products bæused world wide, all probably play a bigger part.

As do diplomacy. Disagreement between the bigs powers haven't been solved with military power for a long time.. why would that change?

Latteland4• 8 years ago

It could change if belligerent idiotic leaders get in charge. Remember back in WW 1, at every step of the way leaders of multiple countries thought "surely the other side won't go to that step, they'll stop if we just increase the pressure a bit". Tomorrow a chinese pilot could bomb or crash into a us ship, try to sink a carrier by Taiwan. That could start the war. Someone could take it upon themselves in Russian-occupied Ukraine to move on to the rest, or bomb Poland. Or the bomber flights the us and russia send to each other's borders could crash into the other countries fighters.

We have acting leaders at many levels of the military, and a president who talks the big talk but probably hasn't ever deal with a real crisis where the other side won't fold or de-escalated something ever. He's got no reasonable advisers left.

Whygul• 8 years ago

There is a lot of cynicism here in response to a strictly positive social effort. If we (nationally) are actually behind in some kind of "AI" drone-targeting arms race, I suspect a great many of these objectors would be willing to do work to, say, disable incoming drones, or develop systems to scramble/mislead automated targeting systems.

I feel that it is the responsibility of every moral and conscious agent to oppose dark patterns and negative trends within their place of work whenever possible, and while it is easy (and apropos) to accuse Google of perpetrating malicious patterns, I think we ought to laud and publicly encourage internal currants that oppose that trend, not smirk at them or deride them for not doing enough.

avar• 8 years ago

I'm cautiously optimistic that increased AI use in the military is going to be a good thing for everyone.

Realistically we're not going to solve the problem of nation states wanting to protect their interests halfway across the world, which'll among other things mean killing some "combatants" from a drone.

But we can hope to do things like improve targeting, and a reduction in civilian casualties or collateral casualties. Right now the "AI" is some group of 20-somethings sitting behind a computer in Nevada, what if we trained an AI instead, and could e.g. hold legislative audits on what that software was configured to target?

brokenmachine2• 8 years ago

I'm cautiously optimistic that increased AI use in the military is going to be a good thing for everyone.
what if we trained an AI instead, and could e.g. hold legislative audits on what that software was configured to target?

You are much more optimistic than me.

If those audits ever happened, they would be held in secret, and have very different goals than most people would consider moral.

throwaway010919• 8 years ago

The runners-up in the vote for the 2018 Arms Control Persons of the Year were the founders and co-chairs of the International Gender Champions Disarmament Impact Group... The impact group developed specific aims for expanding knowledge about the importance of gender issues and practical actions for bringing gendered perspectives into disarmament discussions.

I find it just a little bit hard to take them seriously if they feel this is the second most significant group in arms control last year.

tengbretson4• 8 years ago

The world must be a wonderfully prosperous place if these are the remaining sorts of problems we have chosen to organize around.

standardUser• 8 years ago

No one is intended to take a "Arms Control Persons of the Year" seriously as an objective ranking. It's about raising awareness and driving the discussion.

mbo• 8 years ago

I don't understand why you don't think gendered perspectives regarding disarmament discussions are useful. Feminism has a long and entrenched history within peace and conflict studies and international relations, and its insights are often useful, particularly with respect to things like disarmament and post-conflict peacekeeping.

justtopost2• 8 years ago

I'll bite. Got any concrete examples of this in actual application? To say it sounds like a parody of the current mess of 'gender studies' would be an understatement.

crb002• 8 years ago

Meanwhile Amazon makes $$$ and increases their overwhelming user base from D.C.

neaanopri• 8 years ago

I think younger engineers' morality towards the military distinguishes between technology for great-power warfare, and technology for bombing weddings in Yemen. Aside from some real outliers, nobody of any age wants to lose a war with China. However, it's the "wars of choice" that are problematic.

izacus4• 8 years ago

Why are you talking about a war with China? Is USA preparing to attack China in the near future? There has been a very concerning rise of targeted anti-Chinese articles on this site, is that a preparation for war?

bliblah• 8 years ago

The second runner-up was South Korean president Moon Jae-in. He was nominated for promoting improved Inter-Korean relations and a renewed dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang on denuclearization and peace that has led to a number of significant steps to decrease tensions, including a North Korean moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear testing, a halt to U.S.-South Korean military exercises, and steps to avoid military incidents along the demilitarized zone that divides North Korea and South Korea.

IMO this is the only one that matters in the list. The Pentagon will get another US Based Tech company to aid them in the pursuit of new weapons because there is just too much money to ignore it. Meanwhile peace talks between South and North Korea actually reduces the chance of a thermonuclear war between two nations. We can only hope that other nations follow suit.

PHGamer• 8 years ago

I wonder how many of these employees are actual us citizens or not.

buboard• 8 years ago

Title Confused Me To No End

sodosopa3• 8 years ago

They're perfectly ok with scanning emails and providing that data to hostile countries and getting someone shot in the face, but if the person is shot in the face with an AI-powered weapon, they're not?

Wow the faux ethical reach-around they've giving each other over this is comical.

heyjudy2• 8 years ago

Beware of the hubris of those surrounding Peter Thiel, whom are war hawks and pro military startups of all sorts... including Palantir which is used to target and eliminate dissidents. And even more troubling are a few of the Ukrainian and Russian "entrepreneurs" whom come to the Valley as being flag-waving capitalists, but it's difficult to ascertain their actual allegiances because the Valley lets people pop up out of nowhere without references, and hands them money and influence.

Anonymous Google Employees Voted Arms Control Persons of the Year

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