Google employees resigning to protest Pentagon drone contract.
- Frederik Herholdt
- May 16, 2018
- 1 min read
A number of Google employees have resigned to protest over Google.Inc's involvement in a US military pilot programme. The program is known as Project Maven.
Project Maven's main objective is to speed up the analysis of drone footage through automatically classifying images of objects and people.
It's said that the employees who resigned have raised a number of concerns regarding ethical questions about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in drones for warfare. The employees have reported that executives have become less transparent to their workforce. The executives are said to appear less interested to listening to their objections, leaving concerned employees no option but to resign in order to protest the matter.
According to Google employees, Google previously promoted a culture of employees challenging and debating product decisions – but it seems that this culture has been eroded.
Almost 4,000 Google employees have opposed the project in an internal petition. The petition was set in order to ask Google to cancel the contract and further to implement a policy against taking on future projects of similar nature for military work.
The protest didn't move the executives however...
Executives have not backed down, however, defending their work on Maven. Google is also believed to be a lead bidder on a cloud computing contract for the Pentagon.
Posted 16 May 2018 | Frederik Herholdt.
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