OK GOOGLE, IS THIS A TERRORIST? —
Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone kill footage to improve kill ratios— Google SJW employees “outraged”
"Project Maven" applies Google's image recognition tech to drone footage.
A report from Gizmodo says
that Google is partnering with the United States Department of
Defense and building drone software. The project will
reportedly apply Google's usual machine learning prowess
to identify objects in drone footage. Google's
involvement in the project wasn't public, but it was
apparently discussed internally at Google last week and
leaked.
The project is called
"Project Maven," also known as the "Algorithmic Warfare
Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT)."
The project started in April of last year with a mission to
“accelerate DoD’s integration of big data and machine
learning.”
A DoD press release on Project Maven says
the project aims to help deal with the "millions of hours of
video" the military collects. Drone footage is pouring into
the Pentagon at a rate faster than human analysts can keep up
with, so the hope is that machine learning could help do some
of the heavy lifting and identify interesting footage. As
the owner of YouTube, Google is probably the world's foremost
expert on having more video footage than you know what to do
with.
The press release said
Maven's initial focus was to detect "38 classes of objects
that represent the kinds of things the department needs to
detect, especially in the fight against the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria." Gizmodo claims it now provides the military
with "the ability to track individuals as they come and go
from different locations."
According to the Gizmodo
report, some Google employees are not taking the news well:
"Some Google employees were outraged that the company would
offer resources to the military for surveillance technology
involved in drone operations... while others argued that the
project raised important ethical questions about the
development and use of machine learning."
A Google spokesperson
responded to the report, saying, “We have long worked with
government agencies to provide technology solutions. This
specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to
provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object
recognition on unclassified data.”
The spokesperson added,
“The technology flags images for human review and is for
non-offensive uses only. Military use of machine learning
naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing
this important topic internally and with others as we continue
to develop policies and safeguards around the development and
use of our machine learning technologies.”