Google’s decision to develop ‘military AI’ in China is one giant middle finger to the United States: Peter Thiel

By Jon Dougherty

(NationalSentinel) A decision by Google to end a contract with the Pentagon to develop artificial intelligence while deciding instead to build an AI campus in China is a massive slap in the face to the U.S., where the corporation is based, and a potential national security threat to America, according to one of Silicon Valley’s few conservatives.

In a recent op-ed, Paypal co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Peter Thiel made it clear that AI is being developed for military purposes primarily, and that it is a game-changer in terms of providing countries with hyper-advanced mil-tech.







But while U.S. corporations used to make business decisions that were also good for the country, Google isn’t interested in doing that and in fact appears to be consciously siding with a potential adversary.

â€œThe Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called â€˜cosmopolitanismâ€™ is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places â€” and incurious about them,â€ he writes. In the 1950s, the clichÃ© was that â€œwhatâ€™s good for General Motors is good for the country.â€ Google makes no such claim for itself; â€œit would be too obviously false,â€ Thiel added.

Google talks about what is good for the world â€“ but â€œby now we should understand that the real point of talking about whatâ€™s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of theÂ country,” he noted.

In his August 1Â New York Times op-ed, Thiel argues that, “at its core,” AI “is a military technology.” He noted:

A.I. is a military technology. Forget theÂ sci-fi fantasy;Â what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. Though less uncanny than Frankensteinâ€™s monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army â€” to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already livingÂ amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war.