This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: An investigation showed that Israel has used an artificial intelligence program to determine bombing targets in Gaza with little human intervention.
In 1970, two Polaroid employees, the chemist Caroline Hunter and the photographer Ken Williams, found out that the company was selling photo equipment to agencies of South Africa’s apartheid government. The government was using that technology to produce passbooks, a tool to restrict the movement and activities of Black people in the country. Hunter and Williams co-founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement to demand that the company stop operating in South Africa. Shortly after, Polaroid workers and their allies organized a rally calling for an international boycott of Polaroid products. Thus began one of the first boycott, sanction and divestment campaigns against a United States company over its involvement in South African apartheid.
The work of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement echoed that of another group, Science for the People, an antiwar coalition of scientists and engineers founded in 1969. Science for the People’s magazine published critical analyses challenging our understanding of science as apolitical, and the organization spoke out against corporate intrusion into research, the use of scientific progress for military purposes, harmful environmental policies and more.
Both groups used their advocacy to highlight the inherent tension between how technological progress is marketed and who it actually benefits the most. We often read and see proclamations about how technology will revolutionize our lives and that we should trust tech companies to wield the massive power they’ve accumulated in our best interest. Tech, we’re told, is being developed for us. But in reality, so much technological progress is tied directly to government and military funding, which I find detached from Silicon Valley’s language about strengthening our communities and bringing people together.
More than 50 years ago, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement and Science for the People asked a simple question: What if we were to build tools that served the needs of society’s most vulnerable members instead of letting entities interested in creating efficient killing machines dictate our scientific and technological futures? Or, to put it more clearly: Who is tech really for?
Today’s tech workers are asking that same question. At the risk of being censored or even fired, they are intensifying their protests against the use of their labor for discrimination, apartheid, war and what we consider to be genocide. In 2018, Google workers protested the company’s contract with Project Maven, a U.S. military initiative training algorithms to analyze drone footage and track people, vehicles and buildings. The public facing leaders of the movement resigned in 2019, writing that they were pushed out of the company for their activism.
And this year Google fired around 50 workers for protesting Project Nimbus, a contract to provide the Israeli government and its military with cloud computing services.
My own experience is similar. I worked at Google, co-leading a group that focused on minimizing the harms of artificial intelligence systems. In 2020, the company fired me and Margaret Mitchell, the group’s other co-lead, after we wrote a paper on the dangers of large language models, the underlying technology in many of today’s generative A.I. systems. We warned about their catastrophic environmental and financial costs, as well as their discriminatory outputs, which could lead to significant harm. One of the examples we noted was Israeli police arresting a Palestinian man after Facebook’s automated program mistranslated his “good morning” post in Arabic to say “attack them” in Hebrew.
Israel has also deployed its own technology to maintain what Amnesty International called “automated apartheid” in a 2023 report. And earlier this year an investigation found that Israel used an A.I. system to identify bombing targets in Gaza with minimal human involvement, even after Israel was accused of committing genocide there.
At the same time, Silicon Valley’s elites appear less open to dissent or debate, with investors and executives rushing to add A.I.-enabled warfare to their portfolios.
In 2023 the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote that “A.I. is going to improve warfare” by “reducing wartime death rates dramatically.” His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has created a new fund with militaristic branding and is reportedly in talks with the Saudi Arabian government to create a $40 billion A.I. fund. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI — a company that seems to be playing both sides by warning against the alleged existential danger of artificial general intelligence while also proclaiming it as our path to salvation — is reportedly courting the United Arab Emirates to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the company’s expansion. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are supporting rival factions in Sudan’s devastating war, which a senior United Nations official has called “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory.” Evidence suggests that the Emirates is arming the Rapid Support Forces, a group of fighters whose actions may amount to crimes against humanity, according to a U.N. fact-finding mission.
Given that the Big Tech establishment and the venture capitalists who fuel it are accelerating their investments in military tech, today’s activism likely won’t abate any time soon. And with a more robust movement, we can also expect more attention paid to that most important question: Who is tech really for?
I first got into tech to address the needs of my community, not to build tools that make armed conflicts — like the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that I escaped in 1998 — even more dangerous. But none of my training at elite universities like Stanford, nor my work at corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Google, allowed me that opportunity.
After Google fired me, I founded my own institute where I could finally ask questions like “What would an internet that served my elders look like?” My grandma was paralyzed and couldn’t read or write. The only language she spoke was Tigrinya. She was from Eritrea, a country that has one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world and is currently run by a totalitarian government that can shut down the little internet connectivity there is whenever it wants.
An internet built for someone like my grandma might include automatic speech recognition technology to help her communicate not just in writing but with speech, in her mother tongue. The contents would be relevant to her community. And she wouldn’t be forced to go online for basic tasks like scheduling an appointment. This is technology built to address people’s needs rather than change their behavior, or worse, obliterate them altogether.
History has taught us that suppression will only cause tech workers’ activism to grow. The scientists and engineers who created the Science for the People coalition in 1969 came to that conclusion, and they were proven right when Polaroid fired Caroline Hunter for her activism. She continued to organize from the outside, and the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement pressure helped lead to Polaroid’s divestment from apartheid South Africa in 1977.
And today, tech workers are similarly laying the foundation for a future where their labor will be used to serve the needs of their communities instead of developing more weapons or profiting from violence.
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