Opinion | Tech Workers Have Fears About A.I., Too. They Can Do Something About It. - The New York Times

This month, U.K.-based workers at Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research laboratory, decided to unionize. One of their motivations was concern that their employer was supplying A.I. tools to militaries. In April, more than 600 Google employees sent a letter to the company’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, demanding he refuse any Pentagon contract that would deploy Google’s A.I. for any classified work — to ensure it couldn’t be used for lethal autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, or in other “inhumane or extremely harmful ways.” “The only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms,” they wrote, “is to reject any classified workloads.” Across the tech industry, the people who understand A.I. most intimately — the ones who write its code, train its models and watch its capabilities expand in real time — are increasingly alarmed by what they are building and for whom. Some, like the Google employees, are concerned they are contribu

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• Elizabeth Qiu