Why Google said no to the Pentagon

Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared that artificial intelligence was going to have a more profound impact on the world than electricity or fire, said Tom Simonite in Wired. But last week, he promised that there would be one area in which Google would refrain from unleashing its vast potential: weaponry. Last year, the company appeared to go down this route by entering into its first major AI contract with the Pentagon. Project Maven, as it is known, uses machine learning to interpret video images from drones. But Google has now declared that it won’t renew the Maven contract when it expires next year, and will eschew any “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm”.

This about-turn is not the result of an epiphany on Pichai’s part, said Ben Tarnoff in Jacobin. It’s the result of pressure from his own staff, thousands of whom protested against Project Maven. They weren’t won over by claims that this was a one-off project, initially said to be worth $9m, with “strictly non-offensive purposes”. They rightly saw it as an “audition” for a much deeper collaboration with the Pentagon. It was part of Google’s push to win the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (Jedi) contract. Described by some as potentially the largest IT procurement project in history, Jedi is designed to set up a cloud computing system that can “network American forces all over the world and integrate them with AI”. Thankfully, tech workers have become “politicised” in the Trump era. They protested in 2016 against the idea of a “Muslim” database, and they’re equally horrified by the idea of autonomous weapons. As one Google employee declared in an internal Q&A session: “Hey, I left the defence department so I wouldn’t have to work on this kind of stuff.” The end of Project Maven is “a big win against US militarism”.

On the contrary, said Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post, “Google should be ashamed”. Do these people think the US military is “evil”? They fear Project Maven will make drone strikes more accurate, but if that means fewer innocent people are killed, it’s surely a good thing. Google has the Pentagon to thank for the peace and security America enjoys (and indeed, for much of the technological innovation that produced the internet). Yet now its staff want to deny the Pentagon the help that China’s military is receiving from Chinese tech companies – just so that they can sleep easily “in their Google ‘nap pods’, enjoy free massages and take free guitar lessons”.