Engineering students join Google and Microsoft workers in protesting the tech-industry’s enabling of U.S. militarism
[dropcap]R[/dropcap]esistance to U.S. militarism is growing in an unlikely place, the tech industry. The New York Times reported last week that at “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.”
This trend made news last spring when Google employees protested its involvement in a military program called Maven, which harnesses artificial intelligence for identifying targets. The employees released a petition stating: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Therefore we ask that Project Maven be cancelled, and that Google draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
In May, Google announced that it would not seek a renewal of its Maven contract. A more recent focus of protest is a $10 billion program called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, which calls for collecting military data in a cloud system. JEDI is thought to play a key role in the Pentagon’s ambitions to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations.
Last week Bloomberg reported that Google decided not to pursue the JEDI contract, for two reasons. First, Google does not have the required classification clearances, a spokesperson explained, and second, the company “couldn’t be assured that [JEDI] would align with our AI Principles.” According to The New York Times, Google’s principles prohibit use of its AI software “in weapons as well as services that violate international norms for surveillance and human rights.”
Employees of Microsoft, which is bidding on JEDI, have urged the company to withdraw from the project. In an open letter the protesters quote a Pentagon official acknowledging that JEDI “is truly about increasing the lethality of our department.” The protesters state:
Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position.
Meanwhile more than 100 engineering students at Stanford and other schools released a letter pledging that they will:
First, do no harm.
Refuse to participate in developing technologies of war: our labor, our expertise, and our lives will not be in the service of destruction…
Abstain from working for technology companies that fail to reject the weaponizing of their technology for military purposes. Instead, push our companies to pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to instead support efforts to ban autonomous weapons globally.
I applaud the moral clarity and courage of these protesters. As I have stated before, the U.S. is by far the most warlike nation on earth, and its military ambitions seem to be growing. The U.S. spends more on arms and armies than the next seven biggest spenders combined, and it has been at war non-stop since 2001. The U.S. is involved in counter-terror operations in 76 nations.
U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have resulted in the direct (bombs and bullets) or indirect (displacement, disease, malnutrition) deaths of more than 1.1 million people, most of them civilians, according to the Costs of War project. Last year alone, U.S. and allied airstrikes in Syria and Iraq killed 6,000 civilians, according to The Washington Post.
Last June, blogging on Google’s decision not to participate in Maven, I expressed the hope that Google’s “act of moral leadership could catalyze a conversation about U.S. militarism–and about how humanity can move past militarism once and for all.” If recent reports are any indication, that long overdue conversation may be beginning. Now if only we can get our politicians to listen.
COMMENTS WORTH LISTENING TO:
Further Reading:
War Is Our Most Urgent Problem–Let’s Solve It
Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money
Shouldn’t Americans Care That Their Country Is Killing as Well as Imprisoning Kids
Would Global Violence Decline Faster If U.S. Was Less Militaristic
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Please Speak Out about Militarization of Science
Silicon Valley and “Disruptive” War Research
Will Neuroweapons, Micro-Drones and Other Killer Apps Really Make Us Safer
We Need a New Just-War Theory, Which Aims to End War Forever
Meta-Post: Horgan Posts on War and Peace
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science and The End of War.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
1. superkuh16 hours ago
This article goes in with the premise that antiwar movements are new within tech workers. This is very far far the truth. You only have to look back to the 2nd Gulf War under George W. Bush. The silicon valley types were massively up in arms.
No, what we’re seeing is the unfortunately the on and off switching of partisan democrat and republican fighting. When a Democratic administration is in there is little anti-war effort by the silicon valley left. When a Republican president gets in it starts up again.
If only both sides could be anti-war and anti-militarism instead of just anti-*political party they aren’t it”.
2. HTAaron19 hours ago
By all accounts, the JEDI contract is wired for Amazon, anyway.
3. GreydomOctober 18, 2018
I applaud resistance to war and we must think in terms of peace as a means of defense. We cannot enter into this next escalation that appears to be building between the US and China/Russia who are de facto representatives of the middle east and much of Asia. However, Google and Microsoft are well known for employing foreign workers at home and elsewhere. Therefore are those two organizations a true representation of American tech workers?
4. Anonymous123October 17, 2018
Sadly a drop in the bucket. The day of single purpose electronic components and software are long gone. Every modern defense system uses Intel/AMD/ARM/IBM/ Motorola microprocessors, Linux/MS/QNX operating systems. Facebook has pages and pages of stuff sponsored by the numerous military’s, twitter has military accounts, Google takes money from the US military to prioritize their links, and on and on and on.