"Gizmodo reports that Google employees are enraged at the company after discovering that the AI they built is presently being used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to analyze the massive troves of video footage captured by military drones.
It’s part of Project Maven, aka, Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT) (PDF), a Pentagon-driven project started last April to make use of big data and machine learning tech to advance the DoD’s capabilities in the field."
It was only a matter of time before their work would be used for military purposes. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
Tensorflow is open-source, so you wouldn’t think was problematic, but it turns out the DOD is actually using (and presumably paying for) Google resources to run the classifiers. So Google really is actively facilitating and complicit in it. I can see why they’re upset.
Anyone that knows of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidts close government ties could see this from a mile away.
These are just articles that approach what I remember and am looking for.
There’s one very interesting article(from about 2005/2008) out there about Eric Schmidt’s ties with Pentagon Officials.
But curiously I cant seem to find it right now.
Oh wait, more, but not quite it yet.
In essence several high level google people have been marketing Google’s capabilities and tech towards various government operations over the past decade.
I was about to post the Assange article too. Google has been working with the USA government very closely for a long time.
They even got some funding from intelligence agencies.
Since the dawn of civilization, primitive tribes have compared civilization to a flock of chickens. The lights might be on, but nobody is home, which is why chickens are the masters of acting indignant. Google is a kinder-gentler fascism but, these days, you can take your pick from a wide selection, including the most hardcore Three Stooges lowbrow slapstick.