Andrew Ng is ‘very glad’ Google dropped its AI weapons pledge
Andrew NG, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to drop his promise not to build AI systems for weapons.
“I am very happy that Google has changed its attitude,” NG said during an interview on stage on Thursday evening with WAN at the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco.
Earlier this week, Google deleted a 7-year promise from its AI Principles web page, which promised that the company would not design AI for weapons or supervision. In addition to the removal, Google published a Blog post Written by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who noticed that companies and governments should work together to build AI that ‘supports national security’.
Google did its AI Weapons Pledge in 2018 after the Maven Protests project, in which thousands of employees protested against the contracts of the company with the US Army. The demonstrators had specific problems with Google that deliver AI for a military program that helped to interpret video images and could be used to improve the accuracy of drone attacks.
NG, however, was stunned by the Maven demonstrators project, he told an audience that largely consisted of veterans.
“To be honest, when the Maven -Ding project went down … Many of you go out, willing to throw blood for our country to protect us all,” Ng said. “So how can an American company refuse to help our own service people who are there, fighting for us?”
NG did not work at Google when the project Maven protests took place, but he did play a key role in shaping the efforts of Google around AI and neural networks. Nowadays, NG leads an AI-oriented Venture Studio and AI fund and he often expresses the AI policy.
NG later said that he was grateful that two AI -regulatory efforts – the Vetoed California SB 1047 Bill and Biden’s destroyed AI Executive Order – were no longer in stake. He had repeatedly argued that both measures would delay the Open Source AI development in America.
The real key to American AI safety, argued NG, is to ensure that America can compete technologically with China. He noted that AI drones ‘would completely revolutionize the battlefield’.
He is not the only former Google director who has spread that message. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now spending his days Lobby at Washington, DC, to buy AI drones To compete with China; His company, White Stork, can ultimately deliver those drones.
While NG and Schmidt seem to support the use of AI by the army, the subject has distributed the ranks in Google for years.
Meredith Whittaker, now the President of Signal, led the Maven protests in 2018 while he worked as an AI researcher at Google. When Google did the promise not to renew his project Maven contracts, Whittaker said she was happy with the decision and noticed the company “should not be in the war. “
She is not the only Googler who does not agree. Former Google AI researcher and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton earlier called for global governments to ban and regulate the use of AI in weapons. Another old and respected Google director, Jeff Dean – now the main scientist of DeepMind – earlier signed a letter against the use of machine learning in autonomous weapons.
In recent years, Google and Amazon fell under renewed control for their military work, including their project Nimbus contracts with the Israeli government. Employees of both cloud providers organized SIT-ins last year to protest against Project Nimbus, where Google and Amazon reportedly granted Cloud Computing Services to the Israel Defense Forces.
The Pentagon and the soldiers around the world have a renewed hunger to use AI, the Chief AI officer of the Ministry of Defense told WAN earlier. While Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other technical giants are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, many want to earn back investment through military partnerships.
