Artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other technologies are raising new and profoundly important issues, including the ability of weapons to act autonomously. As we have discussed these issues with governments, we’ve appreciated that no military in the world wants to wake up to discover that machines have started a war. But we can’t expect these new developments to be addressed wisely if the people in the tech sector who know the most about technology withdraw from the conversation…
In the United States, the military is controlled by civilian authorities, including the executive branch, the Congress and the courts. No tech company has been more active than Microsoft in addressing the public policy and legal issues raised by new technology, especially government surveillance and cyber weapons…
But when it comes to the U.S. military, as a company, Microsoft will be engaged.
We believe that the debate about the role of the tech sector and the military in this country has sometimes missed two fundamental points. First, we believe that the people who defend our country need and deserve our support. And second, to withdraw from this market is to reduce our opportunity to engage in the public debate about how new technologies can best be used in a responsible way. We are not going to withdraw from the future. In the most positive way possible, we are going to work to help shape it.
That was Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft, in a blog post.
He followed that up with a statement that Microsoft is “going to provide the U.S. military with access to the best technology … all the technology we create. Full stop.”
Here is some push back:
Other tech industry executives pushed back against the idea that Silicon Valley workers are less inclined to work with the Defense Department solely because of cultural differences or qualms about the moral implications.
“It’s much more an economics issue,” said Rachel Olney, founder and chief executive of geographic location data start-up Geosite. “Dealing with the U.S. government is extremely time consuming” and often doesn’t provide the same kind of profits as commercial work, she said.
That was my assessment when discussing the JEDI contract. Google didn’t drop out primarily because of ethical concerns from employees, but because it didn’t follow the epic journey of the Fed-RAMP regulations, which includes thousands of pages of specific requirements. They realized they were getting into a quagmire when they started working on major defense programs, which will eventually bring far more oversight than Fed-RAMP.
There’s a reason that defense firms have failed to effectively diversify into civilian sectors for over 50 years now. The processes and regulations are a cultural burden, and for accounting purposes government and commercial work should be separated anyway. And at that point, the utility of a common headquarters for these business units is not great.
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