Google at War
Over 3000 of Google’s employees have signed a letter asking Google to stop working on a project with the US military.
Labelled ‘Project Maven’, Google has been working with the military to improve the accuracy of military drone strikes. The head of Google’s cloud business has assured employees that the technology would not be used to operate or fly drones, nor would it be used to launch weapons.
Employees have raised concerns that the project could damage Googles morally responsible brand by allowing the Pentagon to use some of its image recognition technologies.
There could however be benefits from the work Google are undertaking alongside the military. The image recognition technology their using is similar to that available to any Google cloud customer and it could apparently be used to save lives and save people from highly tedious work by flagging certain images for human review.