Why Business is Booming for Military AI Startups
upstart writes:
Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley's help, he argued in an open letter.
[...] Militaries are responding to the call. NATO announced on June 30 that it is creating a $1 billion innovation fund that will invest in early-stage startups and venture capital funds developing "priority" technologies such as artificial intelligence, big-data processing, and automation.
[...] The relationship between tech and the military wasn't always so amicable. In 2018, following employee protests and outrage, Google pulled out of the Pentagon's Project Maven, an attempt to build image recognition systems to improve drone strikes.The episode caused heated debate about human rights and the morality of developing AI for autonomous weapons.
[...] But four years later, Silicon Valley is closer to the world's militaries than ever. And it's not just big companies, either-startups are finally getting a look in, says Yll Bajraktari, who was previously executive director of the US National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) and now works for the Special Competitive Studies Project, a group that lobbies for more adoption of AI across the US.
In a piece for Prospect magazine co-written with Lucy Suchman, a sociology professor at Lancaster University, she argued that AI boosters are stoking Cold War rhetoric and trying to create a narrative that positions Big Tech as "critical national infrastructure," too big and important to break up or regulate. They warn that AI adoption by the military is being presented as an inevitability rather than what it really is: an active choice that involves ethical complexities and trade-offs.
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