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AI firms and their US military ties, "a whole civilization will die tonight" edition (Brian Merchant)
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-firms-and-their-us-military-ties-snip-
Yet there was one group that was (and remains) uniformly silent as Trump threatened to use the military, and presumably its store of nuclear weapons, to enact genocide: the leadership of the tech industry, which in recent months has inked numerous lucrative deals with that very same military. Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.
None of the leadership from any of those companies has expressed any discomfort with Trump’s genocidal threatmaking, let alone the entire war of aggression against Iran. It’s worth sitting with this for a moment, I think; the fact that Alex Jones has expressed more moral concern over a US president’s calls to kill an entire civilization than any major tech executive. (Any tech executive that I have seen, anyway, and I’ve spent the last couple of days looking.) It is occasion to examine the extent to which Silicon Valley has become an enabling partner in Trump’s military adventuring.
Now, the foundational story has been more or less the same since Silicon Valley began its embrace of Trump in earnest last year: The tech giants and largest AI firms made public shows of fealty, embedded themselves in the administration’s broader project and explicitly aligned their interests with Trump’s, in exchange for access to the state’s largesse, deregulatory agenda, and multifaceted support.
But this week should serve as a clarifying moment. The sitting American president explicitly promised a genocide then forced the Iranian people to wait for hours to see if they would be bombed “into the stone age” and the rest of the world to see if he would start World War III in earnest this time. Even a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives might have spoken out against such horrific declarations; intents to, in part, harness their AI, tools and technological infrastructure to such abject ends. Now they are silent; content, apparently, as long as Trump continues to give them favorable land use policy for their data centers and state AI law moratoria. If an industry that rose to cultural dominance by promising to be harbingers of progress—to improve people’s lives, to do no evil, to bring people together, to make a dent in the universe, and by using all of the above as a powerful recruitment tool—cannot draw the line here, then what’s left?
-snip-
Yet there was one group that was (and remains) uniformly silent as Trump threatened to use the military, and presumably its store of nuclear weapons, to enact genocide: the leadership of the tech industry, which in recent months has inked numerous lucrative deals with that very same military. Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.
None of the leadership from any of those companies has expressed any discomfort with Trump’s genocidal threatmaking, let alone the entire war of aggression against Iran. It’s worth sitting with this for a moment, I think; the fact that Alex Jones has expressed more moral concern over a US president’s calls to kill an entire civilization than any major tech executive. (Any tech executive that I have seen, anyway, and I’ve spent the last couple of days looking.) It is occasion to examine the extent to which Silicon Valley has become an enabling partner in Trump’s military adventuring.
Now, the foundational story has been more or less the same since Silicon Valley began its embrace of Trump in earnest last year: The tech giants and largest AI firms made public shows of fealty, embedded themselves in the administration’s broader project and explicitly aligned their interests with Trump’s, in exchange for access to the state’s largesse, deregulatory agenda, and multifaceted support.
But this week should serve as a clarifying moment. The sitting American president explicitly promised a genocide then forced the Iranian people to wait for hours to see if they would be bombed “into the stone age” and the rest of the world to see if he would start World War III in earnest this time. Even a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives might have spoken out against such horrific declarations; intents to, in part, harness their AI, tools and technological infrastructure to such abject ends. Now they are silent; content, apparently, as long as Trump continues to give them favorable land use policy for their data centers and state AI law moratoria. If an industry that rose to cultural dominance by promising to be harbingers of progress—to improve people’s lives, to do no evil, to bring people together, to make a dent in the universe, and by using all of the above as a powerful recruitment tool—cannot draw the line here, then what’s left?
-snip-
Brian thinks the executives at those companies may be lost causes, but workers may be another story. I'd like to think so, too, but the execs are increasingly focused on a very small number of very highly paid AI experts, rather than their workers in general.