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
Many Microsoft employees are on Visas. So they can’t really risk losing their jobs as they’d risk deportation. I suspect this is one of the reasons why big tech companies hire so many workers on visas tbh.
Microsoft: has town hall
Also Microsoft: “approved opinions only!”
At most large companies, this isn’t too uncommon. Town Halls are not the same as town halls elected officials might stage.
I think that should be expected given the governing structure of almost all large companies, because they’re dictatorships. Employees have no say over who’s in leadership, and can be fired more or less without recourse. You wouldn’t expect a town hall in Russia or North Korea to allow dissent, would you?
100% correct.
When you work for a corporation, you are working for a dictatorship. You have the power to choose which dictatorship you’d like to work for, but you only have whatever power they let you have.
Power that can be snatched away any time of their choosing.
If you worked on creating Ai sorry but you must have known it would eventually be used for evil
I don’t blame them for protesting. Yeah, admittedly AI is cool n’ all, but you don’t need to encourage an entire military to get in on it.
Dictators gonna dictate.
