- Let's just say Doomsday arrived.
The worst of the worst came knocking on the door.
How would we think about the tech company's role
in partnering with the military?
Is it immoral for a tech company
to partner up with the military
to create war tech?
But in the same breath,
we can ask ourselves a very connected question:
Is it immoral not to?
The United States has and will continue to be
in an AI arms race.
It truly is a race to a undetermined finish
of who can provide the best technologies at the right time,
to achieve the best objectives.
The United States has to consider
whether its own narratives
about the technologies,
how we use them, how we promote them,
are putting ourselves at a disadvantage
against an enemy that's asking similar questions.
- 'Hoorah!'
- My name is Anna Butrico.
I recently co-authored a book
with General Stanley McChrystal,
entitled "Risk: A User's Guide."
And I work at McChrystal Group.
Google's "Don't Be Evil" value came from a discussion,
really at the beginning, in the inception of the company,
about what Google's values were.
Paul Buchheit, who was the 23rd employee of Google,
recommended, in kind of a joking manner,
that "Don't Be Evil" should be one of the company's values.
Other companies were trying to take advantage of their users
in putting advertisements in their searches.
When doing so,
they'd often make money off of those searches
and the advertisements connected to them.
Google didn't wanna do that.
They did not want to be sneaky with their users
and take advantage of them
in order to profit.
Google employees believed that they wanted to do good,
that in their life-saving and enabling technologies,
that they were intentionally not doing harm,
and rather helping the world.
The word evil in the "Don't Be Evil" phrase
is a bit problematic
because what is 'evil?'
In terms of Google, initially,
being evil was sneaking in advertisements.
But later, evil became a question of
how Google was using its technologies
in the world and in national security.
Project Maven was a project from
the Department of Defense that aimed
to use Google's technology for their own purposes.
Specifically, they wanted to use Google's deep learning
and artificial intelligence
to be able to track vehicles and track people.
Google employees originally did not really know
about Project Maven.
Parts of the business definitely did,
but it wasn't made hugely public.
So initially, when people heard about Project Maven,
they investigated,
they put their own feelers out
to read code and see what was going on.
Google employees felt
that they had a culture of 'sanctioned activism.'
So it was Google-y to speak up and protest
and speak your mind if you felt something was inappropriate,
or that it contradicted Google's "Don't Be Evil" value.
When they did eventually find out what was happening,
there was great unrest within the employees of Google.
There were petitions, there were protests.
They wrote a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai,
asking him to reconsider Project Maven.
And when he didn't initially,
many were upset and resigned from Google as a result.
They were very frustrated
that the narrative that they so believed in at Google,
was not being honored in this project.
TV REPORTER: A giant, army B-24 bomber arrives
for inspection by 78-year-old Henry Ford.
ANNA BUTRICO: The relationship between private industry
and the military was pretty straightforward in World War II.
Ford, for example,
would provide vehicles, machinery, etc.,
to the military in a very easy,
expected, straightforward way.
These days, it gets a bit more complicated,
particularly with tech companies like Google.
They provide a wide array of services
that expand from simple messaging
to more complex gathering,
to passing of data and information at great scale.
But with that increased capability,
in an organization as big and complex as Google,
comes increased risks
when we're lending those services to the military.
RONALD REAGAN: To ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.
ANNA BUTRICO: Evil is in the eye of the beholder.
GEORGE W. BUSH: To defeat this evil.
ANNA BUTRICO: How do you define your terms?
NAJI SABRI: Those who are fond of exporting evil.
ANNA BUTRICO: It's hard for me to say
whether or not Google's partnership
with the Department of Defense was, in itself, evil.
It's up for your own interpretation or debate.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to narrative.
When the huge narrative shifts in a time of great crisis,
then the terms of what is evil, what is not,
what is accepted and what we can't tolerate, will change.
Think about the September 11th attacks:
That was a horrendous day for the United States,
and it immediately changed the narrative
of how we perceive ourselves,
how we perceive our efforts,
and what we would do for the sake of protecting our country.