Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

Dollar short and a day late. The future of the US tech industry belongs to those who weren't interested in performative woke nonsense like this during the last decade.

Who is that?

Palantir, for one?

How is it woke nonsense to not want to create a weapon that probabilistically determines if a civilian looks close enough like a bad guy to missle strike them?

By what measure? Google has a market cap that's 10x Palantir, and the gap in revenue/profit is even more massive. They aren't in the same league at all.

Protesting weapons manufacturing has been going on long before reactionaries started fearing the "woke" boogeyman. People protested Dupont for making napalm during the Vietnam war.

Or better yet, misinterpret who the target is even supposed to be because of a hallucination.

The future of the tech industry belongs to China

> Or better yet, misinterpret who the target is even supposed to be because of a hallucination.

Who, in that business, cares?

AI will provide a fig leaf for the indiscriminate large scale killing that is regularly done since the start of industrialised warfare.

Using robots spare drone pilots from PTSD

From the perspective of the murderous thugs that run our nations (way way before the current bunch of plainly bonkers ones in the USA), what is not to like?

Whilst there are all sorts of quibbles about weapons generally being evil, this is evil.

This sentiment ignores the reality on the ground in favor of performative ideological purity - civilians are already getting blown up all the time by systems that do not even attempt to make any distinction between civilians and soldiers: artillery shells, mortars, landmines, rockets, etc.

And indiscriminate has a cost that can slow people from using them.

Imagine you have a weapon that can find and kill all the 'bad guys'. Would you not be in a morally compromised position if you didn't use it? You're letting innocents die every moment you don't.

* warning definitions of bad guys may differ leading to further conflict.

The reality on the ground is that one of the very first uses of AI weapons was to target civilians in Gaza:

> Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

The logic of this argument implies we should develop weapons with maximal collateral damage to deter their usage.

Which begs the question of if we can escape the Red Queen hypothesis.

Personally I don't think we can as a species.

Future? The present day tech industry belongs to China unless you narrowly define it as software or pharmaceuticals.

https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

For example the most advanced batteries in the world are designed and manufactured in China.

The measure is stock returns in the last 5 years. The whole point of public companies is to generate wealth for shareholders and Google just simply isn't really delivering on the same level as Palantir.

In fact, when you look at the last decade of Google saying they're an "AI first" company and literally inventing transformers, and look at what their stock price has done and how they've performed in relation to other major companies involved in this current AI spring, there is simply no way not to be disappointed.

Lavender is not an autonomous weapon but if you want to seriously consider if Lavender is a good thing (I am undecided) you need to compare the effect of this operation with Lavender and the effect of doing the same operation without the Lavender system. Otherwise you run the risk of making arguments that in the end just boil down to 'weapons bad'.

AI driven drones in particular seem like ideal tools for carrying out a genocide: identify an ethnicity based off some physical characteristics, kill. No paperwork, no transport, no human conscience. Just manufacture, deploy and instruct at scale. Sure, it might get it wrong sometimes but you've got to break a few eggs...

Because "not wanting" to do something that would make the company money due to moral considerations that aren't shared by your competitors is idiotic.

There's a big difference between outsider activists protesting the actions of a company, and the actual leadership of a company choosing a less profitable path in order to seem more morally pure.

Plenty of companies produce good returns, but that doesn't make them any kind of leader. FAANG still controls the market, pays the highest salaries, and produces the most research. Other rising stars like OpenAI and ByteDance are not uniquely evil either. Not saying FAANG won't fade away like IBM or Oracle, but I don't think it would be due to their unwillingness to be like Palantir.

> civilians are already getting blown up all the time by systems that do not even attempt to make any distinction between civilians and soldiers: artillery shells, mortars, landmines, rockets, etc.

Right, and everytime that happens because of miscalculations by our government they lose the very real and important public license to continue. Ultimately modern wars led by democracies are won by public desire to continue them. The American public can become very hesitant to wage war very fast, if we unleash Minority Report on the world for revenge

Ah, the Nuremberg Defense

Lol, is that all you people can ever come up with? "I disagree, therefore you're a Nazi?" Hasn't the events of the past 6 months shown you that this dumb "gotcha" style debating doesn't work?

They're not "outsider activists", they're customers affecting the bottom line.

I couldn't do anything because of "moral considerations" my peers don't share. That's literally the Nuremberg Defense. Maybe pointing this out doesn't "work" but it is true. Do what you will with that, I'm not here to "work" on you or anything like that. You're a free person, as am I