Cooperation with the military was originally Google’s business growth point.

The Translation Bureau is a compilation team that focuses on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on foreign new technologies, new ideas, and new trends.

Editor’s note: Google used to be the most innovative company. From search engines to Gmail, maps, Chrome, Docs, Photo, translation, to unmanned vehicles, Project Loon and other moon landing programs, Google can always use one. Innovations attract everyone’s attention. But in the last three years, the situation has changed. Since the strike against the ban, the Google employees have continually challenged the company’s decisions, and other employees have challenged those challenges, causing the company to struggle to cope with the endless hamsters in recent years. It seems to have been extinguished by employees one by one. What happened to Google in the past few years? Or at a deeper level, what kind of trend is the US technology giant facing? “Connected” magazine used a long article to reveal the secret to us. The original author is ASHA TIKU, titled: Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech. This article is compiled by 36kr and published in sections. This is the fourth part.

Google: The 3rd year of the most happy technology company (4)

Google: The Three Years of the Happiest Technology Company (1)

Google: The Three Years of the Happiest Technology Company (2)

Google: The Three Years of the Happiest Technology Company (3)

4, Project Maven

August 11, 2017, after a mess in the Googleplex prompted Pichai to cancel the conference on the Damore issue, Google executives hosted an unlikely visitor: Secretary of Defense James Marty Sis. In GooglAt the e headquarters, they met the retired general at a luxurious conference table with Brin, Pichai, Greene and Walker on one side and Matisse staff on the other, all sitting in the latest Aeron. The seat is “Mineral”.

Matisse is there to talk about business. The Pentagon is realigning its relationship with Silicon Valley. In the 1950s and 1960s, Silicon Valley grew by a number of military contracts. The rise of artificial intelligence has made it possible for the potential relationship between the two parties to become mutually beneficial again. In recent years, in part, at the urging of technology executives such as Schmidt, the Pentagon has begun to seek contracts to modernize its digital infrastructure. But before the Pentagon can fully engage in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it must tag its stored data and move it to the cloud.

When Matisse visited, it was said that Google was bidding for a project to initiate this shift. This project is called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, also known as Project Maven. The project involves marking the shots taken by the drone to train computer vision algorithms, and once all the content is in the cloud, the system can automatically analyze the new drone footage. Although the contract is relatively small, Maven represents an important potential reward for Google. Greene recently scorned himself, and analysts estimated that the Google Cloud, with a market share of only 5%, would probably surpass Amazon by 2022. Federal government contracts provide a quick means of achieving goals. Maven can pave the way for Google to quickly get the more profitable defense and intelligence agency contracts it needs, such as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a $10 billion cloud in the Pentagon. Calculate big contracts – if any of your competitors are taking away from Bezos.

Google, Amazon and IBM are all competing for Maven contracts. But Google is a particularly sneaky competitor. The company quietly bids through the contractor and prohibits the Pentagon from filing Google without prior approval. As Google seems to be close to winning the contract, executives of the cloud computing team are considering an agreement with the Pentagon — especially with automated weapons — how to reflect Google’s brand image. In September, after a few weeks of meeting with Matisse, they discussed some positive public relations tools, with the goal of focusing on the “vanilla cloud technology” in the Maven contract. Li Feifei, a professor at Stanford University and the chief scientist of Google Cloud AI, wrote: “Do not mention or suggest anything about AI at all costs. Li does notParticipated in the Maven contract, but she expressed concern about the hype and trouble surrounding the public image of AI. “Weaponized AI may be one of the most sensitive topics of artificial intelligence. This is a piece of red meat for the media that tries to destroy Google.”

Li Feifei is right about how everyone thinks about Maven, but the media is not the only group she needs to worry about. When Google won the Maven contract at the end of September, the company chose not to make any comments – even for its employees. But not long after, Liz Fong-Jones learned about Maven from a group of engineers. They kept her silent until they tried to convince management to change course in January. Fong-Jones agreed and focused her focus on another fire that is quietly burning inside Google.

Google: The 3rd year of the most happy technology company (4)

James Damore appeared with lawyer Harmeet Dhillon at a press conference held in San Francisco on January 8, 2018, and announced a lawsuit against Google.

On Monday, January 8, 2018, just before 8 am, a San Francisco-based public relations firm, Praetorian PR, founded by a Republican political adviser, sent an e-mail inviting reporters to a major press release. Will, when James Damore and his lawyer Harmeet Dhillon (a member of the California Republican National Committee, “frequently taking over the highly controversial and compelling case”) will appear.

“You don’t want to miss it,” email promised.

Damore sits next to Dhillon, who tells a smug tech journalist and local news branch that her client has filed a class action lawsuit against Google that discriminates against whites, Asians, men, and conservatives, or these roles. Any combination. Dhillon looked at the thick indictment and explained: “Our indictment generally does not exceed 100, 200 pages of complaints. But I am afraid that everyone does not believe these ridiculous words, so we attached the screenshots.”

In fact, in December 2017, Damore had already indicated the intention to sue Google. The information submitted at the time indicated that Kevin Cernekee was also the plaintiff.One, but the name of Cernekee did not appear in the indictment published by Dhillon that day. The indictment cites Google’s warning letter and details of his interactions with executives and human resources as evidence of Google’s discrimination against conservatives, but Cernekee’s identity is largely invisible to the outside world. At least 169 other Google employees are less fortunate: the screenshots in the lawsuit show dozens of email addresses, profile pictures and discussion clips. Most are selected from Google’s internal social network, including an anonymous message board that focuses on mental health and a mailing list for gender-non-binary employees.

A new round of harassment is starting soon. The threat rushed in and called for the heads of the employees who would criticize Damore to be headshot, poisoned, killed, human… and then thrown away. As before, many of the selected employees are homosexual and transgender. In forums like 4chan, the names of employees exposed in the lawsuit are related to their social media accounts. Personal information of at least three employees was dug up and posted online. Another employee became the subject of the Kiwi Farms online forum, which was described by New York magazine as the largest follow-up community on the web.

Fong-Jones’s usual practice is to keep different opinions within the company, but that month is an exception. She and 14 other current employees revealed the “dirty war” on Google’s diversity issue to Wired. Most of the news reports on the Damore case exaggerated Google’s blow to conservatives. But these employees think that something else is happening. They said that HR has been “weaponized.” Google employees on both sides of the battle have been good at tricking colleagues into saying things that might violate the company’s code of conduct before going to the human resources department to make a small report. But the right-wing Google employees go further, they broadcast the company’s uncensored quarrels to the world, and dig pits to their colleagues to cause them to be harassed.

For its part, the GoogleHR department feels that it is about to be overwhelmed by a variety of policy violations. According to Fong-Jones and her colleagues, this department is too focused on expressing its own impartiality. Because the words “white privilege” and “white boy” were used to criticize Damore’s memo, employees were condemned and even fired. Google said in a dismissal statement like this: “It is forbidden to promote stereotypes based on race or gender.”

After talking to Wired, Fong-Jones helped draft a statement explaining why colleagues and others were looking for the media. She asked her colleagues to sign a petition calling for a safer workplace, calling for increased management of mailing lists and rules to prevent human flesh from colleague. The petition received a total of 2,600 signatures.. But this is just a spray in the wave of petitions that winter.

Translator: boxi