Microsoft Employees Beg Company Not to Bid on US Military's Project JEDI

Megalith

Megalith

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Microsoft wants in on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a $10 billion project to build cloud services for the Department of Defense, but many of the company’s employees want nothing to do with it. Echoing Google and the drama over Chinese search engine “Dragonfly,” Microsoft workers have officialized their disapproval with an open letter: “don’t bid on JEDI.”

Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same.
 
When it comes to military projects I don't think they should be built and then fix mistakes. MicroSoft windows
 
Everything you build can use for war one way or another. Even working for big tech company like MS, they are still that stupid.
 
MS/Google are all in on the Jesuit/Pope agenda, it's so easy for the govs/companies to manipulate populations.
 
Since when did employees get any input into what a company does? Shareholder own it, the board and senior management run it, they just fucking work there. Damn snowflakes.

I'm sure Chinese and Russian companies take employee suggestions into account. ;)
 
By signing this you have subjected yourself to increased NSA scrutiny. Consequences go up to and include being prosecuted for treason, a capital offense. Find a job elsewhere. Buh Bye, snowflake.
 
It sounds like you're proposing blind feilty here. As if people shouldn't ever be able to disagree.

Well, news flash, even political party members disagree with party platforms at times...

The political process breaks down when we lose the ability to have respectable debate. Just look at China. You want to be more like China?

Twisted Kidney said:
People should only be allowed to have party assigned principals.
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Since they're the talent. No matter what you do, if you don't have the talent, you've got nothing.

RealBeast said:
Since when did employees get any input into what a company does? Shareholder own it, the board and senior management run it, they just fucking work there. Damn snowflakes.

I'm sure Chinese and Russian companies take employee suggestions into account. ;)
Click to expand...
 
Look, it's no joke that militaries around the world have developed many things that do in fact improve the lives of humans worldwide.

But don't you guys want to eventually have a human race where we stop killing each other and instead work on bettering all of humanity?

I'm of the mindset that there needs to be that outcome, one day, where we're completely done waging war on our own species. And perhaps opting out of this can take us just that much closer to it.

Statistically speaking, those of us in North America are experiencing the safest point in history ever (apart from climate change). And that is primarily due to all the hard work of our militaries (more than one) in the past.

But when are we going to kick up our feet, and say "okay, that's enough", and we just all enjoy some cold ones... Together.

You want to live forever? I do.
 
Employment for veterans, be it tech or otherwise, totally needs to be improved. Like you really can't find people with better work ethics. I don't understand why they aren't in more demand.

gigaxtreme1 said:
There is a glut of IT talent and a lot of those are Veterans. Hire Veterans.
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BloodyIron said:
Look, it's no joke that militaries around the world have developed many things that do in fact improve the lives of humans worldwide.

But don't you guys want to eventually have a human race where we stop killing each other and instead work on bettering all of humanity?

I'm of the mindset that there needs to be that outcome, one day, where we're completely done waging war on our own species. And perhaps opting out of this can take us just that much closer to it.

Statistically speaking, those of us in North America are experiencing the safest point in history ever (apart from climate change). And that is primarily due to all the hard work of our militaries (more than one) in the past.

But when are we going to kick up our feet, and say "okay, that's enough", and we just all enjoy some cold ones... Together.

You want to live forever? I do.
Click to expand...

It is all find an good to aspire to utopia and work towards it, but in the mean time when there are people out there that want to kill us just because we are who we are, do we just sit and sing khumbyyah while they cut off our heads?

The project is to develop a new cloud based secure database to help the military function more efficiently, be it in war time or in peace time working to help during times of natural disaster. If the employees at MS and Google want to opt out, let them. I hope some new startup, maybe even one build by veterans, comes in and gets the contract and does a great job of it and becomes a larger company than either of these.

We need to think of our nation and communities, not just ourselves. The younger generations have been taught to believe "I'm number one" and forget everyone else and it is part of what is leading to the decline of our country. Funny how now if you repeat the quote "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" most would believe it was spoken by some conservative Republican nutjob. Sad.
 
I don't understand why an organization this large (DoD) wants to use the cloud anyway.

If you're a mom and pop operation it makes total sense. Medium and small enterprise? Ok, sure.

Multi-billion dollar operation? Oh hell no, you can buy your own and get ROI in months.
 
If I were China, Russia, N Korea, or Iran I would be pleased with this. "Perhaps we will outpace the Americans in the the field of militarized AI". In fact, why not meddle and use my influence to encourage this behavior among American employees?

I wonder what world we'd be in if US didn't develop Nuclear weapons and left it to the Russians.
 
Stories like this give Putin an erection. Funny part is that those involved think that by fighting Trump and the USA they are giving the finger to Putin.
 
BloodyIron said:
Look, it's no joke that militaries around the world have developed many things that do in fact improve the lives of humans worldwide.

But don't you guys want to eventually have a human race where we stop killing each other and instead work on bettering all of humanity?

I'm of the mindset that there needs to be that outcome, one day, where we're completely done waging war on our own species. And perhaps opting out of this can take us just that much closer to it.

Statistically speaking, those of us in North America are experiencing the safest point in history ever (apart from climate change). And that is primarily due to all the hard work of our militaries (more than one) in the past.

But when are we going to kick up our feet, and say "okay, that's enough", and we just all enjoy some cold ones... Together.

You want to live forever? I do.
Click to expand...

First off, thanks for noting defense research and how it has benefited people. So tired of people saying nothing good comes out of it.

Take this from a person who has lived in multiple cultures (3-4 years) or stayed there for a short while (6 months to a year). My beliefs on why we won’t...

Religion - Since there are still parts of this world where people straight out kill for their god. The only approach I see is to unify under a single religion or get rid of it all together. Till then problems and issues will arise when people have a difference of beliefs.

Culture - Everyone’s views across the world all similar and yet vastly different. We might have the same end goal on how we want to get there but how we do it is done differently everywhere. Many times we do not even have the same end goal to agree on since our cultural differences are that extreme.

Hominigized societies - Not everyone is a mixing pot of the best and the worst from around the world. Places do exist at a nation level to try and be as pure as possible and that bleeds down into the people and culture. Even where I am now my half Japanese kids will never be full Japanese, to top that off living in Okinawa some kids do not like them because they are mainlanders. Hell what a wonderful thing to teach the kids, hate.

Those are my top picks and I am sure there is a lot more reasons why we will not be a unified earth. It take some pretty evil acts of cleansing different views, alien invasion or a near world apocalyptic event.
 
Would they even want Microsoft in their current state to even touch such an important thing?

"Hey Jim, where did all this free space suddenly come from? We didn't install extra capacity".

"Microsoft pushed an update".
 
I understand their 'feelings', but people are stupid. This is not about spying on American citizens. This is not about making a cloud-based water boarding app. This isn't about making weaponized robots that skip through the battlefield like dancing dogs. This isn't even about sending drones around the world to bomb children. It's about delivering data to diverse systems in near-real time.

An F-35 launches from a carrier in support of soldiers who are pinned down by a larger force. The F-35's main weapons have a destructive radius that is easily larger than the engagement radius of the infantry, and his pass over the battlefield is probably going to be at speeds greater than 100 MPH. The soldiers are carrying devices similar to cell phones, and a keeper (probably a man-portable drone) knows the location of each soldier on the ground. The soldiers have also identified key enemy heavy weapons, things like mortars and machine guns. Regional commanders know where enemy reinforcements are staging, and they also know the best flight corridors for avoiding anti-aircraft. It's all information. Now it's important to move that information from the soldiers, the drones, and the regional commanders to the F-35 in a way that can be easily used by the pilot's 360-degree, see-through-the-hull HUD.

Currently, a jet used in support of ground forces will circle the battlefield receiving information from the Forward Air Controller (FAC) as the FAC tries to explain the battlefield and orient the pilot. A FAC is a highly-skilled person. It takes years to train a really good FAC, but even after all that training the FAC often doesn't have a perfect idea of the positions of the key players - he's a human being on the ground, looking at a map, listening to the radio, and observing the battlefield from the portion that he can see with his own eyeballs, His best method of assembling information is probably a grease pencil. These people are professionals, they're very good at their job, but we need something better.

One aspect of JEDI, just one, would make it so that the F-35 can receive all that information in a format usable by his million dollar HUD - a visual format that he can use so he can immediately deploy his weapons. A visual overlay of all the troops in an augmented VR method, highlighted over his image of the ground, so that he can choose a weapon, fire it, make only a single pass, and then move to a standoff range while the ground troops evaluate his attack. That's one aspect of JEDI - aggregating information and delivering it in a method that is the most useful to the person receiving it.

It's like the changes the telecom's made when they went from human 'operators', who listened on a regional trunks and connected phone calls using jack plugs, to the computerized switching systems telephones use today. Except for the military it's way bigger, and way more important.
 
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Statistically speaking the issues aren't here in North America, there's no threat. Terrorism and violent threat from invasion or anything like that isn't even close to top 100 of things that will kill you in North America. Vehicles, Tobacco, Alcohol, Cancer and so much more, are orders of magnitude more likely to kill you, than some extremist from another country.

From what I understand, the concern isn't about doing a better job to equip and inform those in threatening situations elsewhere in the world, it is about building tools similar to the NSA that can be, at the flip of a switch, used against the populous. Just like it is in China today.

"What is leading the decline of our country", well it certainly isn't second guessing whether something is a good idea or not (Google/Microsoft employees having ethical disagreements with these programs).

Half way through your post it went from objective counter-pointing, to emotional rhetoric. Cut the crap dude, I'm not going to be convinced by some heart-warming story that will somehow magically convince me that all cloud services are safe. This is not an emotional forum, it's a tech forum, where we speak in objective, tangible, provable facts. Not fluffy heart-throb stories about how the sky is falling, society is unravelling, and how we need to "think of our nation and communities". Because the supposition that we aren't, is just plain insulting. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't subtly insult me (intentional or not).

jedijeb13 said:
It is all find an good to aspire to utopia and work towards it, but in the mean time when there are people out there that want to kill us just because we are who we are, do we just sit and sing khumbyyah while they cut off our heads?

The project is to develop a new cloud based secure database to help the military function more efficiently, be it in war time or in peace time working to help during times of natural disaster. If the employees at MS and Google want to opt out, let them. I hope some new startup, maybe even one build by veterans, comes in and gets the contract and does a great job of it and becomes a larger company than either of these.

We need to think of our nation and communities, not just ourselves. The younger generations have been taught to believe "I'm number one" and forget everyone else and it is part of what is leading to the decline of our country. Funny how now if you repeat the quote "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" most would believe it was spoken by some conservative Republican nutjob. Sad.
Click to expand...
 
You're misinterpreting what I said. I was not trying to convey unification, I was trying to convey peace, true, unadaulterated, peace. Where we stop killing each other. Period.

The one "true" religion well never have a chance of being a thing. Pandora's box is open, those that don't believe in religion/god/etc now have the ability to be treated as equals, and more and more people are seeing there is no god.

Yes, I'm preaching, right now, because these are my beliefs, just as I'm sure you have yours.

But the point I'm trying to convey now, is that I agree with you that the majority of killings that happen now are religious based. And in my observation, the way this is counteracted, is knowledge. Primarily, access to the internet.

It is tangible that in areas where internet access is readily available, unfiltered (unlike China), individuals can explore religion and their spirituality without repercussion, judgement, being labelled a criminal, etc. And more and more, people in situations like that, "discover" that the idea of a god, or gods, is just plain bunk.

In the regions where we see strong religious motivations for day to day life, motivation for objectives, and things like that, for example iraq, there is no readily available access to internet, and freedom of religious thought. This is also visible in other areas too, such as the Gaza strip, Israel, Turkey, China, UAE, etc, etc, etc. Go watch how the native people talk, what they care about, and you will find more times than not that religion is their daily driver. "God is beautiful" "God is great" they preach. Because that is what they live.,

But again, this is a significant, and complete, digresion from my original point. That I want to see the day when we can just stop killing each other for whatever reason, completely.

Don't you want that?


Hakaba said:
First off, thanks for noting defense research and how it has benefited people. So tired of people saying nothing good comes out of it.

Take this from a person who has lived in multiple cultures (3-4 years) or stayed there for a short while (6 months to a year). My beliefs on why we won’t...

Religion - Since there are still parts of this world where people straight out kill for their god. The only approach I see is to unify under a single religion or get rid of it all together. Till then problems and issues will arise when people have a difference of beliefs.

Culture - Everyone’s views across the world all similar and yet vastly different. We might have the same end goal on how we want to get there but how we do it is done differently everywhere. Many times we do not even have the same end goal to agree on since our cultural differences are that extreme.

Hominigized societies - Not everyone is a mixing pot of the best and the worst from around the world. Places do exist at a nation level to try and be as pure as possible and that bleeds down into the people and culture. Even where I am now my half Japanese kids will never be full Japanese, to top that off living in Okinawa some kids do not like them because they are mainlanders. Hell what a wonderful thing to teach the kids, hate.

Those are my top picks and I am sure there is a lot more reasons why we will not be a unified earth. It take some pretty evil acts of cleansing different views, alien invasion or a near world apocalyptic event.
Click to expand...
 
You mean to tell me that the military doesn't have people in it's employ who could build a cloud infrastructure? LOL, that's like saying an infantry person doesn't know how to fire their gun! Use the people you already pay and employ to build it and save billions.
 
freeloader1969 said:
You mean to tell me that the military doesn't have people in it's employ who could build a cloud infrastructure? LOL, that's like saying an infantry person doesn't know how to fire their gun! Use the people you already pay and employ to build it and save billions.
Click to expand...

They aren't supposed to. The military does not make 'things'.

If the military wants a tank, they ask for bids. If the military wants an airport, they request bids. If the military wants modernized logistics software, they make a proposal of what they want and ask for bids. If they want new software for battlefield management between artillery and armor, they request bids. If they want a nuclear missile with a silo to deploy it from, it goes out for bid. The military is allowed to analyze and review civilian products that might have a military purpose, a job I used to do in Fort Lewis. But they are almost forbidden from making their own stuff.
 
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phred15 said:
When it comes to military projects I don't think they should be built and then fix mistakes. MicroSoft windows
Click to expand...

Microsoft makes some very solid and stable products. Just not everything they make is solid and stable.
 
No problem, let another company with talented folks win the bid. With 10 billion dollars - highly likely they will be able to pay what they need to get the talent needed to do the job right. Some of the expressions or what is reported of Google and Microsoft employees makes me think what planet do they believe they live on??? Unfortunately we have to have police, armies, weapons etc. to keep the human race from killing itself not use it to kill off the human race.
 
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