If Google were to take the (highly unlikely) step of nixing participation in Project Maven, employees gung-ho about military tech can always jump to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which has never seen a Pentagon dollar it wouldn’t glom (most of its budget is secret, so I’m compelled to make this reasonable assumption). With new machine learning algorithms, joystick warriors currently mired in a glut of data from drones “should be able just to sit there” and enjoy hot target alerts in real time instead of wading through endless boring video feeds, according to APL senior research scientist Pedro Rodriguez. Whether this kind of innovation is fulfilling enough to move pampered engineers from the Bay Area to crusty old Baltimore is, of course, problematic.
Update 5/30: Wonder why weaponized A.I. is “red meat to the media,” Prof. Li?
Update 6/1: Maybe next year, Crabtown.
