The Google revolt hasn’t yet spread across Silicon Valley, despite efforts by some engineers to organize such a boycott. The engineer replied that these safeguards meant little to him because he wasn’t a U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights would prevent excesses by the United States. A Pentagon official recalls trying to explain to one of these AI gurus that the U.S. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai’s withdrawal from Maven was driven, above all, by opposition from some of the top engineers on whom Google’s future rests. (Pentagon anger deepened when Google announced last year that it would launch a “Dragonfly” search-engine project in China the company has since retreated, again after employee protest.) Google employees felt misled, and Pentagon officials were enraged that the tech engineers had scuttled a project aimed at detecting terrorist threats. A tight-lipped Pentagon worsened the public-relations disaster. But they were secretive with employees about the project. Senior Google executives had wanted a larger piece of the government’s national security business, which has been dominated by Amazon and Microsoft. Neither the company nor the Pentagon foresaw the controversy that erupted when thousands of Google employees signed a protest petition the company had to retreat and declined to renew the contract.īehind the Maven flap lie some fascinating crosscurrents. It was a relatively small, $9 million contract to write algorithms for nonlethal monitoring of surveillance videos to detect threatening movement. This bridge-building to the tech community follows a potentially disastrous rupture last year, when Google employees rebelled at a Pentagon AI effort called Project Maven. “It wasn’t going to be enough to say, ‘Hey, we’re the good guys, we’re Americans.’ We needed to be more introspective.” “If we’re going to be the arsenal of democracy in the 21st century, we have to show that we have ideals and are ready to stand up for them,” said a Pentagon official involved in the program.
As the innovation board’s statement announcing the ethics dialogue put it, “We are taking care to include not only experts who often work with the, but also AI skeptics, department critics and leading AI engineers who have never worked with DoD before.” The Pentagon outreach was deliberately aimed at engineers who don’t like the idea of working with the U.S. Similar expert gatherings are planned at Carnegie Mellon University in March and Stanford University in April, and then the board will release draft principles for public comment. The group debated privacy concerns, the trade-off between an algorithm’s power and its ability to explain its results, methods for establishing human accountability for AI actions, and other legal and moral issues. The Harvard roundtable discussion was lively, and occasionally sharp, a participant said. The first major public meeting took place on Tuesday at Harvard, where Pentagon officials met with about a dozen AI experts, some of them strong critics of U.S. This AI Principles Project was launched in October by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. The basic idea is to do AI “the American way,” as people used to say, by framing a set of clear, ethical rules through public debate.
ABRIDGE AI SOFTWARE
security - and fortunately, the Pentagon, after some false starts, is launching a creative effort to win the trust of suspicious software engineers who grew up in the shadow of Edward Snowden’s revelations. But tapping this talent base is essential for U.S.
The challenge is huge, given that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and other tech giants see themselves as global companies with workers drawn from many nations. As the age of artificial intelligence transforms warfare, the Pentagon faces a delicate problem: How does it convince employees of high-tech companies based in the United States that Americans are still the “good guys,” so that they’ll lend their talents to U.S.
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