>"Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,”
I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
> I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
Sure, it's valid to disagree with Google's involvement in this project, but I find it incredibly hard to justify the claim that private enterprises traditionally don't equip armed forces. Providing technology and hardware to armed forces is something that private companies have been doing for centuries. Heck non-state groups selling arms to armed forces likely predates the existence of states as we know them. Most armies prior to the modern era were militias that privately purchased their own equipment.
This project is "assisting in killing people" to at most the same degree that developing munitions guidance, military radar systems, and sonar are "assisting in killing people" (I'd argue less since this technology is purely about reviewing reconnaissance data, not about the actual deployment of weapons) and private companies have been developing those systems for over a century.
That's not a very apt analogy. Google is perceived as a benevolent or neutral service bordering on a public utility. They collect vast amounts of personal information / intelligence because people willingly give it to them.
Google assisting in drone strikes is like the military using the electrical grid to electrocute people in their homes or delivering lethal poisons via the Starbucks Rewards program.
What if your favorite cereal brand started participating in assassinations? It's not inconceivable to deliver poison that way. What if, due to a software error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned Cheerios.
There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime, "preventative" military campaign.
> This project is "assisting in killing people" to at most the same degree that developing munitions guidance, military radar systems, and sonar are "assisting in killing people"
Which incidentally, many developers find completely abhorrent.
Literally all of the equipment used to kill people, from the rifles, to the bullets, to the fighter jets, to the parts to repair the fighter jets, are manufactured by private companies in the United States. So I’m confused by your confusion in thinking that Google’s assistance in the drone program is somehow the first private company to participate in providing goods and services that are directly involved in killing people. Is Google somehow more culpable than the companies that make the bullets or bombs? How is providing software and computing power for that any different? You don’t think a private company writes the software that targets things for jets and missiles?
The majority of which will have been produced by armaments companies.
It would be strange to be outraged if, for example, Lockheed was doing something for the military, as they are primarily a defence company. Some might choose not to work for them for that same reason.
Google are a search and advertising company so it's not terribly surprising there's some negative reactions.
I think the abhorrent trend is the outsourcing of the people who should be assassinated, and that those people on the kill list will be selected by an ML model.
Google will just a be a processor in a long chain of steps, the actual killing will get passed to a drone team in Las Vegas.
> I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
States have contracted out to private individuals and firms for the development of tools for that purpose (and the actual killing) for as long as states as distinct from private individuals exercising power have existed.
To me that sounds like a misreading of the statement. It makes more sense to interpret it to the effect that tech companies are worried that "the military-industrial complex is using their stuff to kill people" and that this is incorrect. Google doesn't really specialize in optimizing lethality, but it does make a lot of noise about ethical application of its tech.
When people refer to the military industrial complex, they are referring to the businesses like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc. that are the private companies involved in designing and building weapons.
Exactly. Those companies are civilian as google is. Lockheed is next door even! Google is part of the intelligence wing of the MIC. The only controversy is that some of the more Berkeley / Burning Man googlers are surprised to learn that.
> I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
You missed the "using their stuff to" part of that quote, the opportunities for melodrama here are fewer than you might've hoped.
In some way every service you could offer anyone is part of the war machine. When you operate a daycare, you're taking care of somebody's kids, and that somebody either does something for, or is involved with the military. One of the actions typically carried out by an active military is killing people.
Somebody is always using the products of your labour, in some fashion or level of abstraction, to kill people in whatever way their outfit, organization, or mandate deems appropriate.
And if we're to be more honest about what's going on here, you could just as easily say that Google is helping the U.S. government not kill people they never intended to kill. Also, I think it's rather reasonable to assume that the U.S. government's interest in continuing the drone program, or the military operations it replaces, is largely independent of Google's willingness to help them with targeting, which to me indicates that Google has something of a moral obligation to help make that happen if they're called upon to do so.
> I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
I agree with you, but I have to point out that nearly all of our wars are motivated to make the world safe for American business. The killing fields run red so that we can mine the green shoots. The last time we voted on military action was right after 9/11, where we gave permission for an unending world-wide war and toppled two countries outright and publicly.
Many defense contractors made a killing off these shenanigans.
Paradoxically, Google getting involved has the potential, if not the actual goal, of decreasing the amount of mistaken or misidentified targets.
I understand some "conscientious" Googlers feeling uneasy about Google getting involved in this sort of thing, but paradoxically, Google (or other AI resources) getting involved will very likely result in fewer incidents of hitting the wrong targets. In other words a measurable reduction in "collateral casualties/damage"
The problem isn't identifying targets. The problem is not killing civilians. Increasing the confidence of identifying targets may actually make things worse by allowing to justify drone strikes that would otherwise have to be called off.
The military likely won't be interested in identifying civilians. They have a list of people to kill and want to know whether one of them is in the target area. If they are and everybody else qualifies as a potential enemy combatant (i.e. they look somewhat male, adult and able-bodied) the drone goes kaboom.
Improving detection won't reduce casualties, it will increase confidence, which will result in more strikes and therefore more casualties. There's no incentive to improve the detection of civilians when everyone who is not obviously a civilian (e.g. children) can be considered a combatant.
This technology won't result in drone strikes being called off because there are civilians in the area. This will result in more drone strikes being made because they can ask a machine to greenlight them instead of having any personal accountability.
Our drones are already exceedingly good at hitting the targets they intend to. The problem is that most of the targets they are trying to hit are innocent.
From what I've gathered of the context I think the original presentation is correct. I read it as a joke criticizing an implied absurdity of tech groups being concerned specifically with what we use to kill people rather than whether we should be killing those people to begin with.
> I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
Are you from US? You might not be. Sounds like are not aware of the multi-billion dollar (maybe even trillion dollar) military industrial complex.
Also not sure what is meant by "democratic discussion". Who are the constituents here? Everyone, employees, tech people only, HN users?
> kill people 'incorrectly'.
Right. I think that tells us where Google stands. It is already helping kill people, it just helps kill them "correctly" of course. In some kind of a nice, non-evil way presumably
>I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
I'm not sure if you're criticizing that this happens at all or if you're criticizing it as a new development. Either way, it's generally been actual killing that's reserved for the state (or its mercenaries). Private organizations building and refining weapons for the state has been a thing in America since the old west.
I think both discussions are worth having. The involvement of private contractors in military affairs seems to have amplified over the last few decades especially as war has become more and more focused on technology.
Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?
There's something especially weird and shady about the fact that someone writes some tensorflow code for image recognition, goes and gets a smoothy from the office bar while the DoD just hooks itself into the API and bombs the hell out of people at the other end of the world.
That's a lot more opaque and blurs the line between civil and defense work in entirely new ways.
We faced this at work recently (at our decidely sub-Google scale) when sales guy refused to bid for an opportunity at a weapons manufacturer so we had some interesting discussions around the issue.
Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.
An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.
And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.
> Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad.
In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].
Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.
While I agree that the US has had some bad wars, that article seems a little ... absurd. First line in the tally:
> The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.
Sure, the US did stuff, but you're denying the agency of the Soviet Union (and Afghanistan, for that matter) in actually doing all the killing.
The US has killed enough people directly without blaming it for all armed conflicts since WWII.
> An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.
There is still debate about whether the use of nukes was at all justifiable, a lot of the motivation for researchers was to stop the Nazis from getting there first, not beating Japan into submission.
That said, this isn't WW2. The US has the largest military on Earth and the most advanced weapon systems. US drone strikes are killing targets in civilian areas without repercussions. The POTUS has the authorisation to wage war against whomever he chooses as long as he can somehow relate them to someone who was involved in 9/11. Heck, the invasion of Iraq even violated international law with no repercussions.
The US military (CIA included) can pretty much do what it pleases and kill people whenever and wherever it wants. Don't want to kill right now? Off to Guantanamo they go. If they happen to be a US citizen just say they're an enemy combatant and make sure they never see a domestic court of law. Even torture is permissible.
If you're worried the US might not be sufficiently equipped to become a dictatorial global authority, you haven't been paying attention.
Mad respect to sales guy. I'm doing the same and avoiding arms companies (my background is very useful for military research).
I acknowledge some warfare may be legitimate (having been bombed myself), but arms companies don't stop at selling to your personal favorite army which you consider morally right, they keep looking for more business abroad.
I don't want to be the one realizing I'm sitting in a cozy air-conditioned office and having made money from the messed up warfare in some distant far-away country, having a large financial incentive to cause more conflict there.
There's also an argument to be made that remaining on the cutting edge of military science is a form of national security. Being one of the first, or only, nations to develop and test a new kind of weapon means that you'll also be among the first nations to be able to fully assess its practical viability and evaluate its countermeasures.
Ethically, I wonder if this would be any different if Google built a similar software for consumer applications and licensed it similarly to Android being used for surveillance in both the US and far more paranoid governments.
I would imagine that this allows both Google and the US government to have far more insight and control over the direction of this and possible applications.
Not to dismiss the obvious ethical issues of Google having possibly harmful incentives and having their hands tied by the US government financially and legally, but all things considered, I think the main difference here is that Google is already doing this on a massively large scale for the sake of selling ads. It is possible this can help save lives.
Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed. You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved any other way.
Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the possibility of saving American lives.
This may get me some downvotes, but I imagine that the same ethical issue exists with any weapon.
Guns and bullets exist to kill, and in both human society and the animal kingdom, elimination of a few people can increase the overall population and livelihood of the entire group.
I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their use.
However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is the elimination of death of people or animals.
Sure, you could take a bullet to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their redemption.
But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is better than widespread killing.
My big worry isn't so much the killing part (not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance employed in the name of security.
That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking collectively rather than individually there).
"You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed."
Errr, what? That's like saying that the US stopping the Nazis by waging war and killing some of them didn't for sure save lives. I mean who knows, those Nazis may have just decided to stop killing other people all on their own.
I'm not saying drone strikes are necessarily ethical, but saying that any time you kill someone else, you are for sure killing someone but not for sure saving a life, therefore you can never kill anyone preemptively, goes against pretty much every moral or legal system ever devised.
> You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed.
Drone strike have and will continue to take place, no matter what Google does. But as you very correctly mention, as it is right now, many innocent civilians accidentally get killed. Doesn't it then directly follow that if said drone strikes become more accurate, then less people (or innocent civilians) will be killed?
The word used is “outraged” and not “surprised” though. I think that’s more than just a semantic point. In fact there is no mention of surprise in the article. I think that’s a reasonable reaction, whereas surprise is a straw man, largely implying a naïveté which is notably absent in the article.
indeed - i'm not clear on the basis for the outrage here.
from what the article here says (i don't know more about it than that), it's not clear to me that google is doing more than selling their cloud video analysis products to a customer for experimental use on unclassified data. and this kind of sale necessarily comes with offers of (paid) support and consulting services because customers need help. one might object to this customer, certainly - but if so, one might ask, to which customers is google's cloud business not supposed to sell services on this basis? google has never pretended that it didn't sell its products to the defense and intelligence agencies at all; keyhole (google earth) was for many years a major product in the GEOINT sector [0].
if one's objection is to folks working on anything relating to a military or intelligence problem, well, a very large fraction of US senior faculty have taken funding from defense agencies to work on unclassified versions of applications: tracking, image/video/text analysis challenges, etc. etc. etc.
Rough guess, it might be that we're less than 10 years removed from "Do no evil" being part of Google's motto. While completely unsurprising, it's still disappointing to see how money wins versus ethics. But hey, shareholder value!
Google officially doesn’t care about opportunities less than $1B in size. I very much doubt this is anywhere near a billion dollar opportunity. My educated guess: they’re trying to sell cloud to government and need a good use case. Cloud deal_could be_ a billion dollar opportunity.
Not sure what you consider the difference between a "company" and a "corporation", but I know a lot of people who work for small government contractors that definitely have "souls". Not everybody has the same ethical standpoint on military technology.
As a US citizen concerned with our bloated military budget but who also wants the US to remain the strongest military nation on Earth, I'd like to cut $100 billion from the $600 billion plus yearly US military budget, and allocate that money to infrastructure and social programs. We would still have by far the largest military budget in the world after this.
Whoever knows about the US military budget, how feasible would this be? What is the bulk of the military budget dedicated to?
The biggest fractions are personnel, operations, and health care (last I checked, the Defense Health Agency spends more than the Marine Corps ... and provides health care for 8.4 million Americans. The ones who are that strongest military). But the DoD budget actually pales in comparison to Medicare and Social Security. The US Government is a well-armed insurance company, not a weapons dealer selling health insurance.
You could cut a number of non-essential items, even if they're not the largest - the US Army is the largest employer of musicians in the country [0], and the entire military spent at least $437M in one year on musicians in 2015 [1].
That still leaves $99,563M. I'm not familiar enough with the details of the defense budget, but when looking at budgets, in general, the focus should be on line items that move the needle significantly.
How much of that could actually be cut? Even if you cut all the public relations type performances there's still some things you can't cut (even if you don't send buglers to funerals any more, you still need someone to show up and hit play on a boombox).
Members of the military bands also do regular military stuff- I talked to a member of one of the Marine Corps bands that split his time in Iraq about 50/50 between holding his trumpet and his rifle (escorting supply convoys).
They tried to sell it but nobody wanted it, AFAIK. Note that when they bought Boston Dynamics they made a big deal about not renewing military contracts because they didn't want to be in the business of autonomous weaponry.
Readit News
>"Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,”
I sure am surprised that the discussion has already reached the point where tech companies are debating whether they kill people 'incorrectly'. I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.
Sure, it's valid to disagree with Google's involvement in this project, but I find it incredibly hard to justify the claim that private enterprises traditionally don't equip armed forces. Providing technology and hardware to armed forces is something that private companies have been doing for centuries. Heck non-state groups selling arms to armed forces likely predates the existence of states as we know them. Most armies prior to the modern era were militias that privately purchased their own equipment.
This project is "assisting in killing people" to at most the same degree that developing munitions guidance, military radar systems, and sonar are "assisting in killing people" (I'd argue less since this technology is purely about reviewing reconnaissance data, not about the actual deployment of weapons) and private companies have been developing those systems for over a century.
Google assisting in drone strikes is like the military using the electrical grid to electrocute people in their homes or delivering lethal poisons via the Starbucks Rewards program.
What if your favorite cereal brand started participating in assassinations? It's not inconceivable to deliver poison that way. What if, due to a software error, instead of terrorist #41253 your daughter was delivered poisoned Cheerios.
There is a huge ethical gap between private arms manufacturing and a non-militarized company with this much reach participating in a non-wartime, "preventative" military campaign.
Which incidentally, many developers find completely abhorrent.
Deleted Comment
It would be strange to be outraged if, for example, Lockheed was doing something for the military, as they are primarily a defence company. Some might choose not to work for them for that same reason.
Google are a search and advertising company so it's not terribly surprising there's some negative reactions.
Google will just a be a processor in a long chain of steps, the actual killing will get passed to a drone team in Las Vegas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creech_Air_Force_Base
States have contracted out to private individuals and firms for the development of tools for that purpose (and the actual killing) for as long as states as distinct from private individuals exercising power have existed.
You missed the "using their stuff to" part of that quote, the opportunities for melodrama here are fewer than you might've hoped.
In some way every service you could offer anyone is part of the war machine. When you operate a daycare, you're taking care of somebody's kids, and that somebody either does something for, or is involved with the military. One of the actions typically carried out by an active military is killing people.
Somebody is always using the products of your labour, in some fashion or level of abstraction, to kill people in whatever way their outfit, organization, or mandate deems appropriate.
And if we're to be more honest about what's going on here, you could just as easily say that Google is helping the U.S. government not kill people they never intended to kill. Also, I think it's rather reasonable to assume that the U.S. government's interest in continuing the drone program, or the military operations it replaces, is largely independent of Google's willingness to help them with targeting, which to me indicates that Google has something of a moral obligation to help make that happen if they're called upon to do so.
I agree with you, but I have to point out that nearly all of our wars are motivated to make the world safe for American business. The killing fields run red so that we can mine the green shoots. The last time we voted on military action was right after 9/11, where we gave permission for an unending world-wide war and toppled two countries outright and publicly.
Many defense contractors made a killing off these shenanigans.
EDIT: Connecting this history to now, recall https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
I understand some "conscientious" Googlers feeling uneasy about Google getting involved in this sort of thing, but paradoxically, Google (or other AI resources) getting involved will very likely result in fewer incidents of hitting the wrong targets. In other words a measurable reduction in "collateral casualties/damage"
The military likely won't be interested in identifying civilians. They have a list of people to kill and want to know whether one of them is in the target area. If they are and everybody else qualifies as a potential enemy combatant (i.e. they look somewhat male, adult and able-bodied) the drone goes kaboom.
Improving detection won't reduce casualties, it will increase confidence, which will result in more strikes and therefore more casualties. There's no incentive to improve the detection of civilians when everyone who is not obviously a civilian (e.g. children) can be considered a combatant.
This technology won't result in drone strikes being called off because there are civilians in the area. This will result in more drone strikes being made because they can ask a machine to greenlight them instead of having any personal accountability.
Deleted Comment
"Patches welcome!"
...what? This is America. Private industry makes all killing machines. Last I checked, Colt, Boeing, Lockheed Martin - all private companies.
Are you from US? You might not be. Sounds like are not aware of the multi-billion dollar (maybe even trillion dollar) military industrial complex.
Also not sure what is meant by "democratic discussion". Who are the constituents here? Everyone, employees, tech people only, HN users?
> kill people 'incorrectly'.
Right. I think that tells us where Google stands. It is already helping kill people, it just helps kill them "correctly" of course. In some kind of a nice, non-evil way presumably
I'm not sure if you're criticizing that this happens at all or if you're criticizing it as a new development. Either way, it's generally been actual killing that's reserved for the state (or its mercenaries). Private organizations building and refining weapons for the state has been a thing in America since the old west.
Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?
There's something especially weird and shady about the fact that someone writes some tensorflow code for image recognition, goes and gets a smoothy from the office bar while the DoD just hooks itself into the API and bombs the hell out of people at the other end of the world.
That's a lot more opaque and blurs the line between civil and defense work in entirely new ways.
Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.
An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.
And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.
In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].
Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.
1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...
> The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.
Sure, the US did stuff, but you're denying the agency of the Soviet Union (and Afghanistan, for that matter) in actually doing all the killing.
The US has killed enough people directly without blaming it for all armed conflicts since WWII.
Dead Comment
There is still debate about whether the use of nukes was at all justifiable, a lot of the motivation for researchers was to stop the Nazis from getting there first, not beating Japan into submission.
That said, this isn't WW2. The US has the largest military on Earth and the most advanced weapon systems. US drone strikes are killing targets in civilian areas without repercussions. The POTUS has the authorisation to wage war against whomever he chooses as long as he can somehow relate them to someone who was involved in 9/11. Heck, the invasion of Iraq even violated international law with no repercussions.
The US military (CIA included) can pretty much do what it pleases and kill people whenever and wherever it wants. Don't want to kill right now? Off to Guantanamo they go. If they happen to be a US citizen just say they're an enemy combatant and make sure they never see a domestic court of law. Even torture is permissible.
If you're worried the US might not be sufficiently equipped to become a dictatorial global authority, you haven't been paying attention.
I acknowledge some warfare may be legitimate (having been bombed myself), but arms companies don't stop at selling to your personal favorite army which you consider morally right, they keep looking for more business abroad.
I don't want to be the one realizing I'm sitting in a cozy air-conditioned office and having made money from the messed up warfare in some distant far-away country, having a large financial incentive to cause more conflict there.
Not to dismiss the obvious ethical issues of Google having possibly harmful incentives and having their hands tied by the US government financially and legally, but all things considered, I think the main difference here is that Google is already doing this on a massively large scale for the sake of selling ads. It is possible this can help save lives.
Please don't fall for this rhetoric. The technology helps killing people, not save lives. Saving lives means preventing people from being killed. You can't prove any of the drone strikes ever helped preventing people from being killed. You can prove a lot of people (including people most normal human beings would consider civilians) did get killed. And even if killing the target helped save lives you can't prove those lives couldn't have been saved any other way.
Drone strikes don't save lives. Drone strikes take lives. The reason we use to justify taking those lives is that they might help save other lives. But mostly drone strikes are trading the guaranteed death of foreigners for the possibility of saving American lives.
I think what you're arguing is about effectiveness of those weapons, not their use.
However, I truly believe that the right direction for life on this planet is the elimination of death of people or animals. Sure, you could take a bullet to every jaywalker or tax cheat, but I think we've learned more productive ways to handle those situations, and I hope/pray that we'll learn new ways in how to handle terrorists and other violent criminals that could lead to their redemption.
But in the meantime, we may have to accept a lesser of two evils while searching for a good, and I think more intelligent and selective killing is better than widespread killing. My big worry isn't so much the killing part (not because it's foreigners, but because they are hopefully only attacking murderers), but the erasure of civil rights via intelligent surveillance employed in the name of security.
That to me seems far more insidious and dangerous (which of course is easy to say when it's not my life or my family's that's being ended, but I'm speaking collectively rather than individually there).
Errr, what? That's like saying that the US stopping the Nazis by waging war and killing some of them didn't for sure save lives. I mean who knows, those Nazis may have just decided to stop killing other people all on their own.
I'm not saying drone strikes are necessarily ethical, but saying that any time you kill someone else, you are for sure killing someone but not for sure saving a life, therefore you can never kill anyone preemptively, goes against pretty much every moral or legal system ever devised.
Drone strike have and will continue to take place, no matter what Google does. But as you very correctly mention, as it is right now, many innocent civilians accidentally get killed. Doesn't it then directly follow that if said drone strikes become more accurate, then less people (or innocent civilians) will be killed?
Why are they surprised? Google is the Bell Labs of our time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...
from what the article here says (i don't know more about it than that), it's not clear to me that google is doing more than selling their cloud video analysis products to a customer for experimental use on unclassified data. and this kind of sale necessarily comes with offers of (paid) support and consulting services because customers need help. one might object to this customer, certainly - but if so, one might ask, to which customers is google's cloud business not supposed to sell services on this basis? google has never pretended that it didn't sell its products to the defense and intelligence agencies at all; keyhole (google earth) was for many years a major product in the GEOINT sector [0].
if one's objection is to folks working on anything relating to a military or intelligence problem, well, a very large fraction of US senior faculty have taken funding from defense agencies to work on unclassified versions of applications: tracking, image/video/text analysis challenges, etc. etc. etc.
[0] http://trajectorymagazine.com/genesis-google-earth/
Rough guess, it might be that we're less than 10 years removed from "Do no evil" being part of Google's motto. While completely unsurprising, it's still disappointing to see how money wins versus ethics. But hey, shareholder value!
Whoever knows about the US military budget, how feasible would this be? What is the bulk of the military budget dedicated to?
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2010/09/29/130212353/...
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/pentagons-bands-battl...
Members of the military bands also do regular military stuff- I talked to a member of one of the Marine Corps bands that split his time in Iraq about 50/50 between holding his trumpet and his rifle (escorting supply convoys).
Look how a mere couple years has changed things.
Same apply to my Google Photos ?