Could you please explain this in detail?
The idea of ‘AI species’ appears to have emerged by Larry Page’s defense of ‘superior AI species’ in contrast with ‘the human species’ when Elon Musk argued that measures were needed to control AI to prevent it from eliminating the human race.
Google has made the conscious decision to do business with the Israeli military, to provide AI, amid accusations of “genocide”.
After Google massively fired employees over their protest against “profit from genocide”, 200 Google DeepMind employees are currently protesting Google’s “embrace of Military AI” with a ‘sneaky’ reference to Israel:
The letter of the 200 DeepMind employees states that employee concerns aren’t “about the geopolitics of any particular conflict,” but it does specifically link out to Time’s reporting on Google’s AI defense contract with the Israeli military.
Besides this, Google amassed more than 100,000 employees in just a few years time shortly before the release of AI and has since been cutting that same amount of employees or more. Employees have been complaining of “fake jobs”.
Google 2018: 89,000 full-time employees
Google 2022: 190,234 full-time employees
Employee: “They were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
The situation is questionable, in my opinion.
Google didn’t just do business with any military, but with a country that was actively being accused of genocide. At the time of the decision there were mass protests at Universities around the world.
In the United States, over 130 universities across 45 states protested the Israel’s military actions in Gaza with among others Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, who faced significant political backlash for her participation in the protests.
So this accusation situation wasn’t just something at the time that Google made their decision.
I was recently listening to a Harvard Business Review podcast about the corporate decision to get involved with a country that faces severe accusations, and it reveals in my opinion, from a generic business ethics perspective, that Google must have made a conscious decision to provide AI to Isreal’s military amid accusations of genocide. And this decision might reveal something about Google’s vision for the future, when it concerns ‘humanity’.
What does it mean for Google to ‘win’?