Summary
This "AI Principles Project" was launched last October by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. The first major public meeting took place Tuesday at Harvard, where Pentagon officials met with about a dozen AI experts, some of them strong critics of U.S. military actions.
The Pentagon outreach was deliberately aimed at engineers who don't like the idea of working with the U.S. military.
This bridge building to the tech community follows a potentially disastrous rupture last year, when Google employees rebelled at a Pentagon AI effort called "Project Maven".
Neither the company nor the Pentagon foresaw the controversy that erupted when thousands of Google employees signed a protest petition; the company had to retreat and declined to renew the contract.
Google employees felt misled, and Pentagon officials were enraged that the tech engineers had scuttled a project aimed at detecting terrorist threats.
A Pentagon official recalls trying to explain to one of these AI gurus that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights would prevent excesses by America.
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