Does "don't be evil" mean "don't build robots that the government will use to kill or harm people"?
It would be nice to see some clarification on this from Google management. There's only so far you can go in high end robotics research before the pentagon comes a-knocking with wheelbarrows of freshly printed money.
You and I know this, but I imagine there are many Googlers who take it to heart, and the cognitive dissonance involved in their building war machines may be useful to our ends of reducing American-perpetrated violence.
But what is more evil - that your coworker works on encryption technology that is used to pilot drones, or that your coworker didn't work on that technology, and thus in order to foil a terrorist plot, ground missions were required that ended up costing the lives of a strict superset of people? Don't get me wrong - I don't condone the lengths to which our government uses war technology, but as an engineer, the probability distribution over {my technology will be evil by some metric, my technology will promote good in this world by that metric} is by no means certain.
"Dr. Raibert has said in the past that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor — it is merely trying to advance robotics technology. Google executives said the company would honor existing military contracts, but that it did not plan to move toward becoming a military contractor on its own."
There are two sides to this story. The one I consider almost insignificant is that by honouring existing contracts, they have become a defence contractor in the literal sense.
The more important one is that by not doing new work for the military, they have just remove one of the hottest companies from the defence market.
I wonder whether the US government has ways of withholding regulatory approval of this deal because of this.
If they didn't buy the company, they would have to honor the contracts anyways. If they break the contract presumably they will have to face consequences, possibly paying money to DARPA so some other company can do it.
If the robots are used for military logistics (moving stuff around, but not directly engaging in combat) would you consider them to be "robots that the government will use to kill or harm people"?
It would be better, but it's still enabling the US military. Even from the perspective of US allies and beneficiaries it can be distasteful to deal with companies that directly enable the DoD.
My own politics aside, there's a pragmatic concern: the NSA is part of the DoD. If Google is fulfilling military contracts, then it's going to be hard to do that and to push back hard against NSA.
Unless they're only doing it so as not to be sued for breach of contract. If they're not chasing future grants from DARPA then there's no incentive at all to play nice on other fronts.
Then we will reclassify everyone we want to kill as 'evil', just like the administration reclassified any adult male in a combat zone as an 'enemy combatant'.
It would be nice to see some clarification on this from Google management. There's only so far you can go in high end robotics research before the pentagon comes a-knocking with wheelbarrows of freshly printed money.
in b4 "skynet"