It’s a shame. I was enjoying the rebooted Joy-Ann so much.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/msnbc-joy-reid-apologized-old-blog-posts-hacking?utm_term=.frlGppea7#.lv43DD80R

I guess having their plans to bury this military contract published in the New York Times was the kind of PR disaster than Google was trying to prevent.

Don’t expect this to change the fundamentals however. Google is a military contractor just like Amazon and other silicon valley giants. They are actively seeking ways exploit machine learning, mass surveillance, cloud and computing muscle to sell to the world’s militaries.

There is no positive way to spin this. You are either for or against the imperial war machine. Google is a typical American corporation so naturally it is in favour.

Originally shared by mathew murphy

https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/daveyalba/google-says-it-will-not-follow-through-on-pentagon-drone-ai?__twitter_impression=true

…any chance that Google could move quietly into defense work with no public attention is gone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html

The deal is worth hundreds of millions to Google.

“I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.”

The Google team noted that it has no press plan for the rollout of the contract and agreed that the company should work to set the “narrative” as quickly as possible. The “buzz” generated by the contract could be a positive, Black suggested.

The government sales team noted that Project Maven had been concealed through a contract awarded to ECS Federal, an arrangement first reported by The Intercept.

“The contract is not direct with Google but through a partner (ECS) and we have terms that prevent press releases from happening without our mutual consent,” wrote Black. The Defense Department “will not say anything about Google without our approval.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-drone-ai-pentagon-lucrative/