Thousands of Google employees asked CEO Sundar Pichai to stop providing AI tech for the US military』s drones

Thousands of Google employees have pleaded in a letter to CEOSundar Pichai to stop providing technology to the Pentagon thatcould be used to improve the accuracy of drone attacks.

「We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,」wrote the signers of the letter circulating within the company, acopy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

The signers, who represent a fraction of parent companyAlphabet』s 70,000 employees, ask that Google withdraw from ProjectMaven, a Pentagon pilot programme, and for the company to pledge tonever again 「build warfare technology.」

On Wednesday, in response to questions from Business Insider, aGoogle spokeswoman forwarded a statement. 「We know that there aremany open questions involved in the use of new technologies, sothese conversations - with employees and outside experts - arehugely important and beneficial,」 the statement read in part.

Last month, Google shocked many inside and outside the MountainView-based company when it confirmed that it was providing the USmilitary with artificial-intelligence technology that interpretsvideo imagery. According to experts, the technology could be usedto better pinpoint bombing targets. The revelation first appearedin a report by Gizmodo.

An internal schism

Responding to Gizmodo』s story, Google said the company』stechnology was 「non-offensive」 in nature and noted that the AImight assist military planners from hitting civilians. Google andthe Pentagon added that the work under Project Maven would not leadto any autonomous weapons systems, the kind of robotic killingmachines that critics fear will rise when AI is combined withweapon systems. Apparently, this came as small solace to someGoogle employees.

Google has long been associated with the corporate motto 「Don』tbe evil,」 and news the company had become a defence contractor hascreated something of internal schism, according to the Timesreport. Still, disagreements within the company are nothing new.Managers have long encouraged workers to voice opinions andconcerns about Google』s direction.

In the past, petitions have been circulated on a range of issuesincluding Google』s sponsorship of a right-leaning conference. Oneinternal debate led to the firing of James Damore, an engineer, whowas critical of the company』s diversity policies and claimed he wasdiscriminated because of his conservative views.

How much effect the letter to Pichai will have remains to beseen but the company』s ties to the Pentagon go beyond ProjectMaven. Eric Schmidt, Google』s former CEO and a current member ofthe executive board of Google』s parent company, Alphabet, is amember of a Pentagon advisory board.

Below is a copy of Google』s full statement to BusinessInsider.

「An important part of our culture is having employees who areactively engaged in the work that we do. We know that there aremany open questions involved in the use of new technologies, sothese conversations - with employees and outside experts - arehugely important and beneficial. Maven is a well publicised DoDproject and Google is working on one part of it - specificallyscoped to be for non-offensive purposes and using open-sourceobject recognition software available to any Google Cloud customer.The models are based on unclassified data only. The technology isused to flag images for human review and is intended to save livesand save people from having to do highly tedious work. Any militaryuse of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We』reactively engaged across the company in a comprehensive discussionof this important topic and also with outside experts, as wecontinue to develop our policies around the development and use ofour machine learning technologies.」