As we reported in March, Google worked with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) on "Project Maven", a secret military project involving AI.
Specifically, Google is working on a technology capable of automatically analyzing drone sequences using automatic learning, although the AI never specified what the IA was looking for.
As you might expect, Project Maven has turned out to be very controversial, especially among Google employees. Many of the company's employees were worried about the ethical implications of working alongside a government military organization.
Google has tried to allay these concerns by claiming that their technology strictly "signals images for human control purposes" and would only be used for "non-offensive" purposes. A month later, we reported that over 3,100 employees had signed a letter of opposition to the DoD partnership.
This number would now have reached 4,000, according to Gizmodo. In addition, a dozen employees have officially left Google due to the ongoing work of the company on Project Maven.
"In recent months, I've been less and less impressed by the response and the way people are treated and listened to ..."
"In recent months, I've been less and less impressed by the response and the way people are treated and listened to," said one of the resigning employees.
It's hard to say if these resignations and letter signatures will convince Google to break their partnership with the DoD, but the company is certainly aware of the complaints of their employees.
A Google spokesman issued the following statement in April:
An important part of our culture is having employees who are actively involved in the work we do. We know that there are many open questions related to the use of new technologies, so these conversations - with employees and external experts - are extremely important and beneficial.
Maven is a highly publicized DoD project, and Google is working on a part of it, specifically for non-offensive purposes and using open-source object recognition software available to any Google Cloud client . Models are based on unclassified data only. The technology is used to post images for human review purposes and aims to save lives and to prevent people from having to do a very tedious job.
Any military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We actively participate in the entire company as part of an in-depth discussion of this important topic and also with external experts as we continue to develop our development policies. and the use of our machine learning technologies.
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