[EggsOnToast]

>I must have missed the democratic discussion about private businesses assisting in killing people at all, a duty traditionally exercised by states.

I'm not sure if you're criticizing that this happens at all or if you're criticizing it as a new development. Either way, it's generally been actual killing that's reserved for the state (or its mercenaries). Private organizations building and refining weapons for the state has been a thing in America since the old west.

[Barrin92]

I think both discussions are worth having. The involvement of private contractors in military affairs seems to have amplified over the last few decades especially as war has become more and more focused on technology.

Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?

There's something especially weird and shady about the fact that someone writes some tensorflow code for image recognition, goes and gets a smoothy from the office bar while the DoD just hooks itself into the API and bombs the hell out of people at the other end of the world.

That's a lot more opaque and blurs the line between civil and defense work in entirely new ways.

[aoki]

i'm not sure i agree.

google's cloud couldn't host this customer's production application because (afaik) google can't host classified data.

so then you're talking about the fact that your tech is inherently "dual-use." but that's almost anything in computing, absent a license that prevents it. in the early days of postgres, we were a little weirded out by some of the support requests we got [0], given the university prototype nature of the system.

[0] https://www.paulaoki.com/.admin/pgapps.html

[EggsOnToast]

I agree that there's definately a need for more dialogue.

>Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?

When I was reading the article this part jumped out at me too. It's interesting because it's a debate that ultimately focuses on workers rights vs. the rights of the employer. A callous argument could be made that the political views of the employees shouldn't matter because they're not being paid to be policy experts they're paid to make a product. The counter argument of course would be that, even if the first argument is true, an employee who isn't informed about the nature of their work lacks adequate understanding to decide if they feel strongly enough to quit or if they want to take the job in the first place.