Google Employees Says it is 'Business of War', Protest Against Project Maven Which Helps the Pentagon

Thousands of employees including senior officials and engineers have decided to protest against a new project by the internet giant. The Project Maven by Google looks into using artificial intelligence for video imagery to improve the precision of drone strikes for the Pentagon. The employees fear that involvement in the business of war could tarnish the reputation of the brand.

A letter addressed to Sundar Pichai, CEO Google says, "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.Therefore we ask that Project Maven be cancelled, and that Google draft, publicise and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology." This letter has received about 3100 signatures and the staff has raised the concern among the senior officials. Google which has 88,000 employees worldwide has a motto of not being evil and they will not be involved in anything that facilitates war or weapons used for war. By taking up Project Maven, the company would compromise on their moral ethics is an issue of the employees.

As a response to the letter, the head of Google's cloud business, Diane Greene, has given an assurance that the technology will not help in launching any weapons or flying of drones. Though the employers still feel the company is compromising on the consumer's trust. Google themselves had confirmed to Gizmodo about allowing Pentagon to use some of its image recognition technologies as part of a military project. But a Google spokesperson was quoted to BBC as "Maven is a well-publicised Department of Defense project and Google is working on one part of it - specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes and using open-source object recognition software available to any Google Cloud customer. The models are based on unclassified data only. The technology is used to flag images for human review and is intended to save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work."

Google has always encouraged its employees to speak about their problems and concerns. There have been internal message boards to get problems across all the levels. The employees even have earlier addressed various problems like petitions on a range of issues, including Google Plus, the company’s lagging competitor to Facebook, and Google’s sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The company is now working on developing specific policies for using the artificial intelligence technologies.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 07, 2018 03:37 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).