Five Microsoft employees were removed during a company town hall meeting after staging a protest against the company’s contracts supplying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing services to the Israeli occupation military.
The demonstration took place on Monday, following an Associated Press (AP) investigation that revealed Microsoft and OpenAI’s advanced AI models had been utilised by the Israeli occupation military to select bombing targets in recent attacks against Gaza and Lebanon.
Only five people at Microsoft gave enough fucks to protest. It should have been all of them. They should strike for fucks sakes.
In my experience the majority of tech workers don’t give a fuck about the moral implications of their work. They often justify it with “if I don’t do it someone else will.”
Source: am tech worker, see it all the time
No matter where you are in an organization, unless you’re csuite, you’re nothing. Always remember that. You do not get a say, your opinion is tolerated at best. I’ve known people at MSFT for decades and they think they’re opinion matters. It doesn’t. Tomorrow some exec will come in and stomp on you. Work to live, don’t live to work. Them saying this is good, but I like to remind people that they won’t care. Money talks.
Imagine thinking you have any moral high ground but work for a massive corporation.
If you worked on creating Ai sorry but you must have known it would eventually be used for evil
If you worked on smithing knives sorry but you must have known eventually someone would get stabbed
If you worked on building cars sorry but you must have known eventually someone would drive one into a protest
If you worked on producing painkillers sorry but you must have known eventually someone would trigger an opioid epidemic for their personal gain
…
A tool is a tool. Regulation and responsibility determine the associated dangers.
Microsoft: has town hall
Also Microsoft: “approved opinions only!”
