Under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta is plunging headfirst into the world of military technology. Literally.
Last month, in a joint statement, the social media and technology giant announced it’s working with defense contractor Anduril to develop virtual reality devices that will deploy artificial intelligence to train military service members.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which interviewed Anduril founder, Palmer Luckey, the devices include "new rugged helmets, glasses and other wearables that provide a virtual-reality or augmented-reality experience." The outlet reported:
The system, called EagleEye, will carry sensors that enhance soldiers’ hearing and vision — detecting drones flying miles away or sighting hidden targets, for instance. It will also let soldiers operate and interact with AI-powered weapon systems. Anduril’s autonomy software and Meta’s AI models will underpin the devices.
But the deal, and Meta’s apparent eagerness to wet its beak under the seemingly endless spigot of U.S. defense spending, raises a question for all to consider. That is: Should a company that's been tied to various disinformation scandals, even admitting at one point that its platform was used by violent extremists to promote genocidal propaganda, be given such access and influence when it comes to training the American military?
In comments to Bloomberg last week, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, described a "silent majority" within the tech industry eager to pursue such projects:
Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said that the “tides have turned” in Silicon Valley and made it more palatable for the tech industry to support the US military’s efforts. There’s long existed a “silent majority” who wanted to pursue defense projects, Bosworth said during an interview at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. “There’s a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for,” he said. Silicon Valley was founded on military development and “there’s really a long history here that we are kind of hoping to return to, but it is not even day one,” Bosworth added.
For the record, that history Bosworth speaks of — which includes Silicon Valley’s development of nuclear weapons — isn't as glowing as he suggests. In fact, journalist Malcom Harris’ book, “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” helps chronicle the death and plunder that have historically undergirded the relationship between Silicon Valley and the defense industry.
And Meta itself has repeatedly been used as a tool to promote propaganda and misinformation. In 2018, the company publicly acknowledged that its executives didn’t do enough to prevent the spread of hate speech that helped fuel the genocide of the Rohingya people living in Myanmar. And in 2019, a bipartisan Senate report concluded that various social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, had been used by Russian officials to suppress the Black vote in 2016 to benefit Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The fact that Meta is currently facing Senate scrutiny over allegations it sought to develop censorship tools for China’s autocratic regime in the past certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that patriotism is its guiding light. A Meta spokesperson downplayed the company's development of those tools in comments to The Washington Post, saying the news had been "widely reported beginning a decade ago" and that the company "ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.” Nonetheless, one could say Meta has a blemished record of upholding human and civil rights that makes its foray into defense technology for an antidemocratic Trump administration all the more unnerving.
It’s not hard to imagine any number of horrifying things a virtual reality military helmet could train its users to do in the hands of a Trump administration led by a man who A) brazenly uses political propaganda against his perceived enemies, foreign and domestic, B) opposes efforts to root discriminatory bias out of artificial intelligence tools, and C) has threatened to deploy the armed forces against American citizens.
In lieu of much needed regulation designed to rein in artificial intelligence, Americans ought to keep close watch of this Meta partnership, perhaps to ensure it isn’t deployed in ways that undermine human rights and civil society — just as our previous president warned AI, in the wrong hands, could do.