Internal Crisis

Google is facing an internal crisis with more than 3,000 employees objecting to its work with the Pentagon. The workers signed an open letter to top management calling for cessation of applying artificial intelligence to the Defense Department’s drone imagery program. The activity is not designed to help identify targets on the battlefield, but it could be, and that is what distresses employees. Google’s management now has a choice. It can back out of the contract and preserve its employee base or it can move forward and risk losing valuable engineers to competitors who will be happy to recruit them. There isn’t a good outcome in all this. Either way, Google stands to lose revenue or much-needed talent. How they respond will determine the PR of the company. It will be interesting to see what Google decides.