Google will stop collaborating with the Pentagon on the development of war software

During these last weeks a lot has been talking about Google and its alleged collaboration with the Pentagon in the field of software development for military purposes. We are specifically talking about a project, apparently known by the name of Project Maven that, after numerous protests by thousands of employees, would have been finally discarded.

Although this project has been discarded, the truth is that the contract cannot be revoked unilaterally, this is something that happens with many companies and contracts of this type, so what will really happen is that Google will continue to work with the United States Department of Defense until March 2019, date on which the contract must be renewed, something that, apparently, Google has decided to reject.

Google has been developing an artificial intelligence system that will be used by the United States Army

Going into a little more detail, the truth and knowing that we are talking about a project developed jointly by the Pentagon and Google is to understand that there is very little information about it, if it has been revealed that much less was working on the development of some type of military artificial intelligence for drones, handling robots or guiding missiles, something that has been commented on by many web pages, but its mission was to analyze all that huge amount of videos and images captured by drones of the United States Army.

This project would only take a few months and it is now that Google has informed its employees. It was precisely this moment, when the American company has officially informed its employees, when they have begun to sign petitions for the company to stop collaborating in the development of this type of artificial intelligence platforms for military purposes, protests inside and outside the company and it even got to the point that at least a dozen workers decided to quit their job.

Faced with the protests, Google has finally decided not to renew its contract with the Pentagon

With this in mind, it is not surprising that several of the company leaders wanted to give their point of view. At this point, for example highlight the email to which the New York Times has had access in which the chief scientist of Google Cloud, Fei Fei Li he asked his colleagues for caution when mentioning the implication of Google's artificial intelligence in the agreement signed with the Pentagon. In this sense, the email can read something like:

Armed artificial intelligence is probably one of the most contentious topics in artificial intelligence, if not the most. This is bait for the media, as they will want to harm Google at all costs.

On the other hand and publicly, Diane greene, CEO of Google Cloud commented during the weekly meeting where the active businesses that this division has within the company are announced to employees:

We have always said this was an 18 month contract, so this will end in March 2019. And after this, there will be no follow-up to Project Maven.

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As it has been revealed, it seems Maven would have been developed to support US Army analysts. The idea is that thanks to its impressive capacity to process data, it can analyze images and videos, a task that precisely due to the magnitude and amount of data of this type that all security cameras and army drones collect is almost a task. impossible to perform by human beings.

In order to do this, Maven relies on a deep learning system in order to learn patterns and objectives so that it can be very effective when it comes to locating people who are moving from one point to another. As a detail, tell you that today Maven has already done some missionNot surprisingly, in December of last year, some media already warned that the United States Government was using some type of artificial intelligence to combat ISIS.