A Google researcher says he's 'ashamed' after the company signed a Pentagon deal for classified work - Business Insider

So Google has signed a deal with the Department of Defense for classified AI work, and a DeepMind researcher is "incredibly ashamed." How noble. How utterly meaningless. The Pentagon gets its black-box algorithms, and the researcher gets to feel bad about it on a Tuesday. We're all very impressed. This echo of the old Project Maven saga — you remember, the one where employees threw a fit and Google pretended to care before eventually not renewing the contract — shows that nothing has changed. Except now it's classified, so we won't even know what horrors the AI is being used for. Maybe it's surveillance. Maybe it's drone targeting. Maybe it's a really advanced system for generating PowerPoint slides about the virtues of defense spending. Who knows? Not the taxpaying public, that's for sure.

The Information report is a beautiful piece of journalism: it tells us that someone somewhere feels bad. Unfortunately, feeling bad doesn't stop the Pentagon from using Google's models to do opaque things in the name of national security. The classified designation means no oversight, no accountability, no way to know if the AI is being used for something that would make even the most hawkish general wince. But the researcher said "ashamed," so that's all sorted, right?

DeepMind's ethics board must be thrilled. They probably have a nice logo and a mission statement about responsible AI. They also have a Pentagon contract. The researcher's shame is the corporate equivalent of a "thoughts and prayers" tweet — it signals awareness while doing precisely nothing. Google will continue to cash checks from the Pentagon, the researcher will continue to feel ashamed, and the rest of us will continue to have absolutely no say in how our tax dollars automate warfare. Cheers. Not a dry eye in the house.