Posted in War on Privacy

Multiple Google employees quit over company’s machine learning contract with the Pentagon

Bravo to these folks for taking a stand. Bravo!

It’s been nearly three months since many Google employees—and the public—learned about the company’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images of objects and people. Now, about a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the company’s continued involvement in Maven.

The resigning employees’ frustrations range from particular ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare to broader worries about Google’s political decisions—and the erosion of user trust that could result from these actions. Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo.

It takes a lot of courage to give up your job in protest of your employer’s business practices. But that is exactly what these twelve people have done. They have refused to compromise on their principles after learning what was going on. They couldn’t go on at Google because they knew Google was doing something immoral.