Author: Zena Assaad, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Australian National University

Last week, Google quietly abandoned a long-standing commitment to not use artificial intelligence (AI) technology in weapons or surveillance. In an update to its AI principles, which were first published in 2018, the tech giant removed statements promising not to pursue: technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights. The update came after United States…