As Silicon Vally Big Tech in the USA faces increased opposition from its own employees over Pentagon contracts, the head of Microsoft Corporation appears to have decided to throw his weight behind the US military and to offer them full support.
Brad Smith, the president of the Microsoft, said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California that Microsoft is “going to provide the US military with access to the best technology … all the technology we create. Full stop.
Smith also sought to explain his decision, and argued that the military should not be left out of global technological progress in the field of artificial intelligence, which is “of importance to everybody and not just young people who happen to live on the West Coast.”
However, he was still unable to totally ignore the ethical concerns expressed by Microsoft employees, amid the growing opposition to the tech giant’s cooperation with the Pentagon among the company’s own staff members.
Actually, Microsoft staff didn’t just express some “concerns” about their superiors’ deals with the Pentagon, but in fact openly rebelled against the tech giant’s bidding for the US military project called the JEDI.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or JEDI project will offer cloud computing services to the US military. According to publicly available information, JEDI aims to keep the military’s computing systems up-to-date by moving them onto one big cloud.
They also accused executives of betraying the company’s artificial intelligence policy that states AI should be “fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable” in pursuit of “short-term profits.”
Another big tech firm, Google, also dropped its bid from the JEDI program, after the company witnessed a massive outcry from its employees over another joint project with the DoD – Project Maven.
That one was aimed at creating an AI program that would improve the targeting of drone strikes, which prompted warnings from some critics, who argued that it would eventually allow drones to choose targets completely on their own people.
Ethical and honorable must mean something different from what I learned as a child, because it sure doesn’t describe the mass murderers the US military and it’s leaders, including the ‘Commander in Chief’ have been for a long time.
How does it feel supporting mass murder Bill Gates? How about you Mr. Bush? Obama? To many to list… Any programmer with advanced coding knowledge knows the military protocol similarities, from terminology to team’s tasks.
And all this to mass up against Russia, which military technology outperforms the Anglo Zio-Nazi crime ring agenda for at least for a decade to come.
Actually they forced Gates out of the game quite a while ago. They gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he’s too much of a moral geek to go along with them. He stayed on as a technology advisor. Today he owns only 4% of Microsoft stock.
RT.com / ABC Flash Point Cyber News 2018.
India working with Russian technology?