I think both discussions are worth having. The involvement of private contractors in military affairs seems to have amplified over the last few decades especially as war has become more and more focused on technology.
Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?
There's something especially weird and shady about the fact that someone writes some tensorflow code for image recognition, goes and gets a smoothy from the office bar while the DoD just hooks itself into the API and bombs the hell out of people at the other end of the world.
That's a lot more opaque and blurs the line between civil and defense work in entirely new ways.
Then there's I think a unique angle to this specific case. If you're going to work for Lockheed Martin or Blackwater you at least know what you're getting into. Google does not present itself as a military contractor. Did everybody who works at Google really know that their code is used for this? Have they been informed, consulted?
There's something especially weird and shady about the fact that someone writes some tensorflow code for image recognition, goes and gets a smoothy from the office bar while the DoD just hooks itself into the API and bombs the hell out of people at the other end of the world.
That's a lot more opaque and blurs the line between civil and defense work in entirely new ways.