- Protests against military and paramilitary AI applications. Over the summer of 2018, a remarkable wave of technology-worker resistance to military and militarized policing projects swept through Silicon Valley (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019). At Google, workers organized to shut down Project Maven, a Pentagon project that uses ML to improve targeting for drone strikes, and succeeded. Following this, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, published a statement of principles on AI development, saying the company would not work on AI weapon or surveillance contracts, although reserving the right to pursue other military projects. The company also withdrew its bid on a \$10 billion Pentagon contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing project (BBC 2018a). Meanwhile, at Amazon, workers petitioned Bezos to stop selling the corporation’s Rekognition facial identification software to US police departments and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, notorious for its ‘zero-tolerance’ enforcement policies. At Microsoft, workers similarly demanded the termination of a \$19.4 million cloud computing contract with ICE (Frenkel 2018), and at Salesforce, workers tried to block the company’s involvement with Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Alongside these events, and belonging to issues of sexism and discrimination discussed in point five below, we can include the worldwide walkout of Google employees against the corporation’s handling of sexual harassment issues. Dissent against the security state is nothing new, but the Silicon Valley revolt was exceptional. It mobilized an elite, high-technology workforce centrally involved in the production of digital weaponry that had for decades been considered immune to serious politicization by virtue of its wealth, status and libertarian mind-set. Such events do not come out of nowhere. In part they indirectly reflect an increasing restlessness among high-tech workers whose wages, good as they are, have not kept pace with the obscene expanding wealth of their bosses. Behind the outbreak, however, lay organizing by groups such as the Tech Workers Coalition, which for years had worked with labour organizations to unionize contracted programming work and patiently campaigned in Silicon Valley and Seattle to develop a critique of corporate power, opposition to racism and sexism, and solidarity between programmers and low-wage support workers (Tech Workers Coalition 2018).
automating the social factory
103