By Tristan Greene
Wireds big 25th anniversary event (congrats!) culminated Monday in a summit featuring a veritable whos-who of big tech bosses. And, like everything else in the US this year, it turned out to be heavily-focused on politics.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was there to peddle patriotism. He graciously volunteered his company for future lucrative military contracts, apparently to save the US from less dutiful businesses. According to him, If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.
It seems likely Bezos was referring to Google as the big-tech-back-turner putting US interests on the back burner. The company recently withdrew its bid for the Pentagons Project JEDI, citing ethical conflicts. Evidently, not having the proper certifications to bid for the job is an ethics issue for the company.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who also spoke at the event, didnt get caught up in Amazons petty politics however. He had his own to attend to.
Pichai appears, as of late, more concerned with acceptance in China than anything his employees, the media, or the US government has to say. The 46-year-old executive didnt miss a beat as he talked about his companys embrace of censorship, as it pertains to Googles Project Dragonfly: A censored version of Search for China.
He says Google isnt yet sure whether itll ever launch Search in China, claiming Dragonfly is merely an internal test to see what it would look like. But, at the event, he gushed, It turns out well be able to serve well over 99 percent of the queries There are many, many areas where we would provide information better than whats available.
A report from Wired states Pichai went so far as to say his companys censored Search engine would help Chinese internet surfers get better information on cancer treatments: Today people either get fake cancer treatments or they actually get useful information.
It would seem a safe assumption that Chinas oncologists would be in the peak position to give Chinese citizens the best information on cancer treatments. But in Pichais defense, its incredibly difficult to make an argument in favor of censorship. Its not surprising that he seemingly tried to play on peoples emotional reaction to the word cancer to underpin his companys descent into communist ethics.
Pichai told the Wired 25 crowd, We are compelled by our mission [to] provide information to everyone, and [China is] 20 percent of the worlds population. He also went on to say that his company obeys the law of the land wherever it goes.
Amazon and Google werent the only companies in defense-mode. Apples Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, defended his companys secretive nature. He said:
I actually think it would be bizarre not to be. I dont know many creatives who want to talk about what theyre doing when theyre halfway through it. I think its just in our nature when were working on a difficult problem and so many of the problems were working on now are so complex it just seems rather odd to be telling everyone what youre doing.
Ives candor is respectable, despite the fact hes espousing a lack of transparency that paints Apple as a lone wolf something that might not be admirable considering the global race for AI supremacy unfolding around it.
With Google trying to convince the world its building a Chinese government-approved censored Search engine purely as an internal and speculative matter, and Amazon implying it has a patriotic duty to develop technology for the military, its become apparent that big tech has wrapped itself in partisan politics and the alternative facts that come with it.
This article has been previously published on The Next Web.
Tristan Greene is a sailor gleefully writing about consumer-friendly artificial intelligence advances, political policy, and concerning technology.