It's weird to put their Darpa funding together with this decision and then lump the whole thing as Google being confused or hypocritical.
Darpa funds fundamental research. They try to look ahead to what the military could use in 15 years, but it funds open and fundamental projects. They funded Google when it was 2 graduate students trying to search web pages. It was part of the "Digital Libraries" project to make libraries more usable. They funded research that led to the internet and self driving cars (Darpa Grand Challenge). Right now they are funding exoskeletons and implantable health sensors.
This project was to deploy tech to the military that could search drone footage for targets to bomb. It is a purely offensive technology that leads directly to killing people.
They chose to draw a line at not using artificial intelligence for weapons that target human beings or for surveillance that violates human rights.
Amazon is drawing a different line, something like it's ok to use our AI to target human beings as long as it's legal.
It all seems pretty straightforward, they hadn't drawn that line before or needed to and now they did.
Darpa funds fundamental research. They try to look ahead to what the military could use in 15 years, but it funds open and fundamental projects. They funded Google when it was 2 graduate students trying to search web pages. It was part of the "Digital Libraries" project to make libraries more usable. They funded research that led to the internet and self driving cars (Darpa Grand Challenge). Right now they are funding exoskeletons and implantable health sensors.
This project was to deploy tech to the military that could search drone footage for targets to bomb. It is a purely offensive technology that leads directly to killing people.
They chose to draw a line at not using artificial intelligence for weapons that target human beings or for surveillance that violates human rights.
Amazon is drawing a different line, something like it's ok to use our AI to target human beings as long as it's legal.
It all seems pretty straightforward, they hadn't drawn that line before or needed to and now they did.