Should technologists prevent their tools from being used to wage war?

This question was answered with a furious yes at Google recently, when more than 3,000 employees signed a memo protesting the use of the company’s algorithms in Project Maven, a Defense Department effort to automatically identify objects in video. Citing the company motto, “Don’t be evil,” the employees asked their chief executive, Sundar Pichai, to stay out of “the business of war.”

Other critics of Silicon Valley-Pentagon partnerships have made a different argument: not that collaboration risks compromising Silicon Valley values, but that contact with the military’s inefficient processes would contaminate the fast-moving culture of Silicon Valley.

Both arguments misunderstand the nature of technology and the military’s role in accelerating the commercial ascendancy of the United States. A closer relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is good for industry and for national security — as well as for the debate we as American citizens must have about how technology is used, especially in war.

Google’s engineers should be applauded for raising questions about how the machine-learning algorithms they invented are employed in Project Maven. Their aspiration that Google never “build warfare technology” or “outsource the moral responsibility” for using technology is a noble goal. It would be morally convenient if technology for war could be cleaved so cleanly from technology for everything else. But it can’t be.