Andrew NG, the founder and former Google Brain leader, supports Google’s latest decision to remove his commitment not to build a weapon systems.
“I am very happy that Google has changed its stance,” NG said during an interview on stage Thursday evening with Techcrunch at the starting conference of military veterans in San Francisco.
Earlier this week, Google deleted a 7-year-old promise from its website the principles of the one, which promised that the company would not design it for weapons or supervision. In addition to the deletion, Google posted a blog post written by the CEO of Deepmind Demis Hassabis, who noted that companies and governments should work together to build AI that “support national security”.
Google made its weapons promise in 2018 after the Maven Protests project, in which thousands of employees protested the company’s contracts with the US military. The protesters were specifically dealing with Google supplying him for a military program that helped interpret video images and can be used to improve the accuracy of drone attacks.
NG, however, was upset by protesters of the Maven project, he told an audience consisting mainly of veterans.
“Honestly, when the project was deducted … Many of you are going out, ready to shed blood for our country to protect us all,” Ng said. “So how hell can a US company refuse to help our service people there, fighting for us?”
NG did not work on Google when the Maven project protest took place, but he played a key role in shaping Google’s efforts around him and nerve networks. Today, Ng runs a studio of entrepreneurship focused on him and the fund, and often speaks of politics.
He later said he was grateful that two regulatory efforts of he – the veto and the California SB 1047 and the Biden’s inverted executive order – were no longer in the game. He had repeatedly argued that both measures would slow down the development of open sources in America.
The true Keyel for him, he argued, is to ensure that America can compete with China technologically. He pointed out that the drones and he would “completely revolutionize the battlefield”.
He is not the only google’s former executive that has spread that message. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now spends its days lobbying Washington, DC, to buy the drones to compete with China; His company, White Stork, can eventually supply those drones.
While NG and Schmidt seem to support the use of that of the army, the theme has divided the ranks within Google for years.
Mredith Whittaker, now the president of Signal, led Maven Protests in 2018 while working on Google as a researcher. When Google made the promise not to renew her project contracts, Whittaker said she was happy about the decision, noting that the company “should not be in the war business”.
It is not the only googler who has been opposed. Former Google Study AI and Laureate Nobel Geoffrey Hinton previously demanded global governments to stop and regulate the use of him in weapons. Another long and respected Google executive, Jeff Dean – now Deepmind’s leading scientist – previously signed a letter opposing the use of machinery teaching in autonomous weapons.
In recent years, Google and Amazon fell under a renewable control over their military work, including their project Nimbus contracts with the Israeli government. Employees of both Cloud providers organized landing last year to protest the Nimbus project, under which Google and Amazon reportedly provided Cloud Computing services to Israeli Defense Forces.
The Pentagon and the military across the globe have a renewable appetite to use him, the chief of the Defense Department he told Techcrunch earlier. While Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other technology giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in it, many are seeking to recover that investment through military partnerships.
