It’s not pretty when Trump’s personality starts to rub off onto tech billionaires who don’t really deserve their wealth, but will pay any price to hold onto it.
It appears that Google has changed it’s mind about it’s viewpoint on mixing AI with militarism. Up until about a month ago the company was against it, to the point that it put its anti-militaristic thoughts in writing as the second item out of four on its AI Principles page under the heading “applications we will not pursue”:
“Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.”
A couple of weeks back we learned through the media grapevine — meaning from TechCruch, who learned from Bloomberg — that the company has removed the vow from its website. In fact, it’s taken the whole “applications we will not pursue” thing off the table, which we can only assume means that Google is now ready to pursue AI “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” “that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” or “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights,” which are all things the company said it opposed until a couple of weeks ago.
Sundar Pichai as a Trump Tech Bro
Part of this, of course, is because Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has become emboldened by his newly acquired membership as one of the tech bros in Trump’s version of the Rat Pack, but that’s not the whole story. The Google gang has been not-so-furtively sliding from wannabe nice guys to outright ruthless capitalist since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took the company public with their 2004 IPO.
Going into the IPO is when Google adopted the once famous but now infamous phrase “don’t be evil” as the company’s code of conduct. This was done, the company said, because, “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.”
Even before Google unleased Android on the world the phrase was already being largely ignored, and it had become something of a bitter joke by the time the phrase was dropped from the company’s code of conduct altogether during the first Trump administration.
The company has also gone from being a company that had a reputation for treating it’s employees well, while these days, not so much.
For example, in 2018 the company announced that it was walking away from the lucrative Project Maven AI contract with the military after backlash from employees who didn’t want to be involved with the project. Flash forward six years, to last April, and Google’s giving the ax to 28 workers for protesting the company’s $1.2 billion contract with Israel.
Of course, it’s not just Google’s Pichai that’s boarding the Trump express. To figure out who’s who among the billionaire tech bros who’re walking lockstep behind Trump as he attempts to remake the US in his own image, all one has to do is follow the money to determine who was helping finance Trump’s campaign, or if you’re too lazy to do that much research, grab a pic to see who was setting front and center at the Orange One’s inauguration last month.
Other than Pichai, that list includes Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and of course Elon Musk, who appears to be president by proxy, probably because his immigrant status bars him from becoming president outright.
Clean Cut Zuckerberg Makes a Badass Friend
Zuckerberg was always something of an annoying little twerp, as socially awkward little billionaires often are, but he gave the appearance of being well-meaning enough. Most of the software he developed — or had developed — has been legitimately released as open source — even though his AI platform Llama is a bit of a spit in the eye because even though it’s being called open source, that’s not really possible — partly because of training data issues, but more importantly because of restrictions in its license that even Zuckerberg understand are in 180 degree opposition to Stallman’s four freedoms.
Until recently, he’s also always seemed to be a fairly humanistic sort of chap. Except for the poor souls tasked with the thankless job of moderator at Facebook, most Meta employees seemed to be treated decently, and he at least paid lip service to acknowledging the importance of such niceties as workers’ rights as well as good old fashioned human rights. He also put DEI policies in place to make sure that no one was squeezed out or made miserable by any sort of majority mob rule.
Since he started buddying up to Trump that’s all changed, which is something that happens when you hang too close to mobsters and fascists. At first he was all about how he was dropping DEI because fairness doesn’t need to be codified, and that diversity and stuff would always be important at Facebook.
“We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government, and we’re going to take that,” he told Meta staff in January, evidently referencing his newfound friendship with Trump, who by then had already been sworn in. “We’re not going to compromise any of our principles or values to do this.”
Then, it started leaking a couple of weeks back that a large amount of layoffs had started to happen. We didn’t hear much from Zuckerberg about that, but according to Business Insider the leaks lead to a staff meeting in which Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said, “If your view is ‘everyone has to like all the policies we have and if they don’t it is appropriate to leak’ then I think you should consider working elsewhere.”
At some point in the discussion, and employee said, “”Blaming leaks for why Mark’s policy decisions cannot even be discussed, much less appealed, is the slap in the face. We’re all here because when we were hired, we were the best candidate for the job.”
To which Bosworth replied: “You should quit if you feel that way, I mean it.”
Which all makes me wonder how Zuckerberg will handle it when something happens in the Trump White House and Zuckerberg is suddenly the most logical choice to throw under the bus. Maybe nowbody’s yet told him that’s the way Trump works.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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