[repolfx]

For what it's worth I also worked for Google for many years. And I'm hardly a shrinking liberal violet. I think it was stupid to fire Damore.

But the mental gymnastics on display in this thread are depressing.

Is helping the U.S. military consistent with doing good things for the world?

Google has always been a global company with most of its users and employees outside of the USA. You can't even stop yourself talking about "good things for the world" here, even though you then immediately go on to talk about Americans only.

But even if a slim majority of Americans support the Pentagon's drone strike program, the VAST majority of the world hates it:

http://time.com/2986118/drone-strike-poll-pew/

Anyway, we don't need opinion polls in this case. A definition of "evil" that doesn't include assassinating defenceless people is utterly useless and might as well be abandoned. The US isn't at war with Pakistan and Afghanistan is hardly a country to begin with, neither country has ever posed a military threat to the USA. So the drone program has simply become a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine that eats lives on the flimsiest of pretexts and based on the most damningly absurd 'evidence' (like mobile phone signals), with the obvious consequence of mass deaths of innocent people. For instance at red weddings:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/middleeast/drone-st...

... not just once, but multiple times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...

I find myself so saddened by what Google has become.

[fixermark]

> and Afghanistan is hardly a country to begin with, neither country has ever posed a military threat to the USA.

I hate to call out the elephant in the room, but there are about 9,000 people who might disagree with you---3,000 we'd have to assume, because they are dead.

Nation-states don't have the excuse of "We're barely a country" when their territory can be used to launch an asymmetric attack by private terrorists on another nation. At best, that's an abrogation of responsibility. Since the Taliban was in charge at the time, I'd call 'abrogation of responsibility' way, way too charitable an interpretation.

[repolfx]

9/11 was not a military attack, it was a terrorist attack, and terrorism is a law enforcement problem. As evidenced by the fact that the USA has been killing 'terrorists' in Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly 20 years now and yet there are still regular Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe.

[fixermark]

The policing and prevention of terrorist attacks on a nation's home soil is a law enforcement problem.

Law enforcement can't handle international issues when the originating nation doesn't have cooperative domestic law enforcement. At that point, the issue where attacks on a nation's home soil are being coordinated in the territory of an unresponsive or hostile foreign government becomes a military calculation.

The military is a ham-fisted tool to replace the job of domestic law enforcement, but in circumstances where the alternative is "nothing," it's depressingly better than nothing.

[meritt]

> with the obvious consequence of mass deaths of innocent people

So the drone program has a very ineffective targeting algorithm, one so bad it has absolutely catastrophic results, and we should be upset they've tried to hire the one company who spent the past two decades refining their world-class targeting algorithms? Nobody targets better than Google.

If we want to shut down the drone program, by all means I support that notion, call your legislators though I have a feeling with the current abomination of an administration in place, it's going to fall on deaf ears for a while. But in the meantime, while we are faced with the reality of a drone program, I'm elated to hear they might be getting some much needed help to stop killing innocents.

[repolfx]

If you think a lack of quality neural networks is the reason the USA keeps killing innocent people and covering it up, I don't really know what to say to you.

The reason it keeps happening is because there are entire divisions of the military that are paid to drone strike people and nobody, at any level of the government, has the backbone or strength to say "enough is enough". They already had multi-billion dollar targeting efforts through the NSA, the world's largest and most sophisticated SIGINT operation. It didn't do anything, it just gave them the confidence they needed to pull the trigger more often.

The drone operators kill people because that is their job. Their kill rate will not go down because of a 20% DNN driven boost to image analysis algorithms. It will go up, because strikes on things that looked like terrorists but were actually empty houses, funny shaped rocks etc will go down, freeing up missiles to use more on actual people (their goal).

Calling legislators won't help. Obama claimed he would cancel the program, but was a phenomenally weak leader who was immediately manipulated into a consensus-quo "middle ground" position of, OK, we'll keep drone striking people, but I will personally approve each one: as if his decisions couldn't be completely determined by the people controlling his access to information!

(I'm not even American, by the way).

[meritt]

You didn't really provide an answer to why the USA keeps killing innocent people other than asserting the US military is designed to kill people (which is absolutely true) but I'm not seeing the reasoning why innocents are killed. Nearly everyone in the world agrees that innocents should not be killed, and I think it's fairly safe to assume the US military does not pride itself on the deaths of innocent civilians.

Obama's administration misrepresented the drone program for its "surgical precision" and "ability with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist, while limiting damage to the tissue around it" [1]. Seems to me like a targeting issue.

So I guess my question to you is: If the drone program was somehow 100% precise and it only affected people the US government deemed as "bad people", would you still be against it? If so there's no real point in our sub-discussion, as you're wanting Google to somehow shut down the drone program and I want Google to help reduce their false positive rate to zero.

As you've said, neither of us (nor Google) has the power to shut down the program, so I'd rather at least try and support doing good by reducing the deaths of the innocent until some sort of miraculous shift in US politics can result in a more permanent shuttering of the program. And I don't see that happening as even Bernie Sanders supports the drone program [2]. It's here to stay whether people like it or not, so why not focus on making it more accurate.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/05/01/151778804/john-brennan-delive...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/11/bernie-sande...

[repolfx]

If the drone program was somehow 100% precise and it only affected people the US government deemed as "bad people", would you still be against it?

Yes! Obviously! Goodness.

Look, civilised societies have many, many checks and balances to prevent government officials arbitrarily killing people they happen to dislike. This extends to forbidding the death penalty in all the countries where I've lived. This is very important, critical in fact.

The USA routinely classifies people as "bad" without any idea of who they are, what exactly they've done (if anything) and certainly without ever thinking about why those people might have gone "bad". And it never can whilst there are people whose salary is linked to killing people.

The basic disconnect here appears to be your belief that there is a finite supply of terrorists/bad people/whatever, generated via some natural process, and the USA needs to be able to take them out with lethal force and no trials, in foreign countries. If it spends enough time, money and skill on this problem it will eventually be done, and thus the goal is to avoid killing "not bad" people whilst ensuring the "bad" people are taken out.

Whereas my view, and the view of most people in the world according to opinion polls, is that the USA arbitrarily reclassifies people as "bad" in order to keep the drone strike programme filled with targets. The more budget the various drone controlling agencies have, the more targets there will be. The supply of "bad" people is therefore infinite and drone strikes will never end, until the day the budgets for them are zeroed out.

[AlexandrB]

> So I guess my question to you is: If the drone program was somehow 100% precise and it only affected people the US government deemed as "bad people", would you still be against it?

This question is nonsense. We already have a system for determining who is "bad people" and doling out punishment in a fair way. It's called the criminal justice system. The drone program can't ever be "100% precise" because it's acting as the "executioner" of the "judge, jury, and executioner" that is US foreign policy. Even if it killed only the intended target, the targets are chosen through extrajudicial means.

If you want to counter that the US is "at war" with al-Qaida, I would ask: when does this "war" end? What are the victory conditions? Many (most?) of the people who were in al-Qaida in 2001 are already dead - yet the drone strikes continue.