Our lives, as grand as they seem, are nothing but an amalgamation of many tiny yet diverse elements. The diversity in these elements helps us in re-educating our perception to suit different contexts that appear as we move forward. Such flexibility in the way we function feeds directly into our growth, thus raising the floor, while also leaving out a ton of wriggle room for us to become whatever we want to. This particular theme has also seeped into a fair few things around us, but its biggest iteration to this date remains technology by a country mile. We are all well aware of technology’s brilliant efficiency, however, the fact that the said efficiency can very well appear across a range of tasks is what makes it a generational tool. Over the years, we have used this versatility to expand our boundaries, and one such bid of expansion led us to discover cloud technology. The idea of cloud is becoming increasingly popular these days, and it’s all on nothing but merit. After some uncertainties around its unique selling point initially, more and more industries are now able to recognize what cloud technology brings to the table. The trust in cloud has grown so much that national defense systems are also banking upon it to gain an edge. With a similar intention, U.S. Department of Defense has invited the applications for its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, and as per the reports, Google is going all in on it.
According to the New York Times, Google is putting-together an “aggressive” bid to win the contract from Pentagon for its latest cloud program. This news surprised a lot of people, as it wasn’t long ago that the company had found itself in hot waters for undertaking an assignment to develop a war videos AI analysis setup. At the time, Google employees had raised concerns about the company going against its own values, which led to Google eventually giving up the assignment. The company also made a pledge to not work on AI-powered weapons or surveillance projects, but whether the latest DoD program fits this bill or not is still unknown. If we look into the requirements shared by the department, they imply that the contract-winning applicant must be able to “enable access to crucial warfighting data” and “provide advanced data analytics services that securely enable data-driven and timely decision-making at the tactical level.”
As its last attempt to collaborate with Pentagon in the AI capacity caused unionization amongst the employees, Google is expected to be more mindful about what it chooses to offer in its proposal.