Artificial intelligence, drones, warfare, and Google.It's a mixture that caused an uproar inside the tech giant where the early motto was don't be evil.So what's behind Google's contract with the Department of Defense for a project called Maven?Joining me now from Oakland is Gizmodo reporter Kate Conger who has been covering the story.Kate, so what was the extent of what google was planning to do and work with on this project Maven?So Google's role in this project has been to create artificial intelligence to do image classification on the footage collected by drones,and so they were trying to help the Department of Defense mark objects in this footage to say this car is a car,this building is a building, this is a person.Okay. And the employees at google had a problem with this for the past several weeks, but how did they protest it?What was their concern? So there is a couple of different concerns within the employees.Some employees at google feel like the company shouldn't be involved with the military at all.There are other employees that feel that using artificial intelligence in this context is particularly risky.They foresee a future where eventually you have a computer making the decision of whether or not to carry out a drone strike,and they feel like a human should be the one who is making that decision, not a computer.And so there's been a few things that they have done to push back and protest.There was an open letter they sent around the company asking google to cancel the contractand obviously they have been speaking to the press about some of their objections as well.
