Pentagon Using Google's Artificial Intelligence For Military Drone Program

The Pentagon is teaming up with Google to use the company's artificial intelligence technology to improve the United States' military drone program. According to Fox News, the aim of the partnership is to improve the ability to identify objects in drone footage. 

The Pentagon needs a way to "efficiently process the deluge of video footage collected daily by its aerial drones" because they collect more data than their staff is capable of sorting through. According to Gizmodo, the Pentagon hopes to use the artificial intelligence to identify vehicles and other "objects in as many as 38 categories."

When the news that Google had shared its artificial intelligence technology with the government started circulating inside the company, some employees expressed concerns about working with the military and giving the government access to their machine learning technologies. 

A Google spokesperson said the company is working “to develop policies and safeguards” around the use of the technology and that is for "non-offensive uses only."

“We have long worked with government agencies to provide technology solutions. This specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data,” the spokesperson said. “The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only. Military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing this important topic internally and with others as we continue to develop policies and safeguards around the development and use of our machine learning technologies.”

The partnership is part of Project Maven, which was established in April 2017. The government has spent $4.7 billion on researching and implementing artificial intelligence in the last year. 

Photo: Getty Images