There are three widely circulated illusions in the Internet industry: the rise of WP, the bankruptcy of Sony, and Google's return to China.WP has no chance of recovery, Sony's bankruptcy has become a joke, and Google's return to China is always followed by a sigh after the trend every year.
These days The screenshot of Google-CH (www.google-ch.com) caused a stir among the netizens, but in fact, this website was just established by Chinese fans to help Chinese users use Google in mainland China, and it has nothing to do with Google.
And before returning to China, Google still has to sort out its own housework.
Google's Maven project, a collaboration with the military, has directly triggered the largest collective protest in Google's history. So far, more than 3,000 employees have submitted letters of protest to the CEO, and nearly 20 Google employees are collectively resigning in protest.
But in fact, information technology and military warfare have been deeply bound together since World War I. Even many large and glamorous companies have made themselves rich through war.
Everyone loves to make money from war
1. Von Neumann and ballistic testing in World War II
John von Neumann, the father of modern computers, was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. After completing his education in the United States, he became an American citizen in 1937. In the same year, Japan launched the war of aggression against China, and four years later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
During this period, the U.S. military established a military weapons test site in a coastal town called Aberdeen in northeastern Maryland. Von Neumann was invited to serve as a consultant at the ballistic test site to study artillery ballistics.
Because the movement resistance and trajectory of the projectile through the air are nonlinear equations, the calculation engineering is also extremely complex.Von NeumannThe purpose of this research is to help artillery shells hit the enemy more accurately on the battlefield.This project, which involved large-scale complex calculations, also gave birth to the first computer, ENIAC.
2. IBM not only did business with the Nazis, it also directly produced weapons
Around 1930, IBM's main business was tabulating machines, slide rules, and time-printing machines. Due to the high cost of mechanical equipment, it mainly provided services to the government and businesses.During this period, IBM even sold a large number of tabulating machines and slide rules to the German Nazi government.
However, it was difficult to achieve sustainable development by selling mechanical equipment. At this time, World War II happened. IBM, which was known for producing precision equipment, converted its civilian production lines to military use and participated in the manufacture of the famous Browning automatic rifle and M1 submachine gun.The M1 submachine gun was the main equipment of the US military during World War II.
As the war progressed, the military needed to process more and more data, which further promoted the sales of tabulating machines. Throughout World War II, IBM established a good relationship with the US military, which enabled it to develop very rapidly during this period.
3. Palantir is all about military business
Palantir is known as the most mysterious unicorn in Silicon Valley. In just a few years, it has joined the tens of billions club and become the fourth most valuable startup in the world.
One of Palantir's businesses is to provide the U.S. military with a big data support framework based on full multimodal data fusion and collaborative mining and analysis. It can conduct large-scale real-time correlation and causal analysis of geographically and spatially dispersed people, equipment, environment, events, etc. to guide military operations in complex battlefield environments.
Palantir's main customers are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the US military and counterterrorism agencies at all levels.Palantir's most legendary achievement in the big data world is helping the Obama administration hunt down Osama bin Laden.
Sounds like a job for the Avengers.
4. Back to Google's Maven project
Let’s get back to the Maven project that caused a bloodbath within Google.
In April 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense collected a huge number of drone flight images every day, but human image analysts were far from keeping up with the growth in the number of videos. The U.S. military turned to Google for help and proposed Project Maven, hoping that Google could help them classify the images collected by drones.
Even though a large number of employees have strongly protested and feel that Google should not participate in military operations, Google has not yet given a clear response.Not only that, Google is actually vying to participate in another important cloud computing project of the US Department of Defense - the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which is currently out for bidding.
Why is it so active? According to the Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Defense spent $7.4 billion on artificial intelligence-related fields in 2017.
Is technology guilty?
It is undeniable that technology has brought tremendous convenience to our lives, but when humans used science and technology to promote the progress of civilization, they have shot themselves in the foot more than once.
Oppenheimer, the scientist who designed the atomic bomb, quoted There is a sentence in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am becoming death, the destroyer of worlds." He feels that in the age of thermonuclear weapons, either we (human beings) will destroy war, or war will destroy us.
In recent decades, the tech giants have taken advantage of the post-World War II recovery to make the information technology industry the most important economic force in society. While making enough money, the big giants have tried their best to show the public their investment in medical care, third world aid, and minority projects in order to create a responsible corporate image. The most prominent of these is Google's "Don't be evil" principle.
I have to mention here that there is an old joke in the American TV series "Silicon Valley" that makes everyone laugh.I hope that the technology giants can really fulfill their promises.:
"make the world a better place"
