Saturday, June 30, 2018

Technology: Palantir; (Powerful facial recognition technology): Major Development: Business Insider reports: "Over 100 Amazon employees, including senior software engineers, signed a letter asking Jeff Bezos to stop selling facial-recognition software to police."...The letter to Bezos is the latest in a recent string of employee revolts at some of the tech sector's biggest companies. Many tech workers don't want to help create software or other tech that might be used to wage war or conduct surveillance on the public. The Hill first reported about the existence of the letter. At Google, employees not only circulated a petition that demanded Google stop supplying artificial-intelligence tools that assisted the US Department of Defense to analyze drone-video footage, but someone within the company also leaked some embarrassing emails that showed the extent of management's ambitions on working with the military. Eventually, Google relented, and earlier this month the company promised not to make AI weapons or use the technology for anything that could cause harm. Microsoft employees followed suit by calling on management to end its cloud-computing contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE."