>almost anyone can dissect and sell human bodies
https://twitter.com/JakeSherman
>Hunter Biden paints himself into a corner as mother of his love child demands he reveal identities of mystery - and perhaps foreign - buyers who have paid $500k for his works after he cried poverty
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT
>https://www.vox.com/recode/23507236/inside-disruption-rebellion-defense-washington-connected-military-tech-startup
Inside the chaos at Washington’s most connected military tech startup
Can tech bros save the Pentagon? The messy tale of Rebellion Defense.
Rebellion Defense set out to disrupt the way the Pentagon handles new technologies. Silicon Valley’s elite and Washington’s national security leaders lined up behind the startup. Three and a half years later, Rebellion is falling short.
Founded in 2019, Rebellion wants to create AI-powered software for the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. The startup has claimed its tools could sort through heaps of sensitive data to help officials make decisions, and that it will ultimately build software capable of making battlefield decisions. Its backers are as big as they come, with high-profile investors like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Even Obama’s personal IT guy joined. Rebellion has also won several million dollars of military contracts from the Pentagon, the start of what some observers think will be a gusher of government dollars. In 2022, the company raised $150 million in funding and was valued at a staggering $1.15 billion.
Now some industry experts say Rebellion has failed to meet its own mission, and some former employees allege the company has been stymied by problematic internal politics. Many startups face disarray, but the dangers are bigger here, far beyond the potential waste of taxpayer dollars on products that don’t actually exist. That’s because Rebellion is quickly developing military technologies, according to former staffers, without ethical guardrails on which governments products would be sold to or how they would be used. (Rebellion responded to this by sharing an “Ethical Principles” page from its website.) At worst, Rebellion’s ambition to automate decision-making could lead to algorithms with lethal power. Think Skynet in the Terminator films.
Recode spoke with seven former Rebellion employees who, speaking on the condition of anonymity, alleged that the company is mired in dysfunction, due to a toxic workplace. Two of them said that Rebellion’s products are still not market-ready. And the startup has been sloppy: Sources claimed that classified material, which is typically handled on secure platforms, has been shared in Rebellion’s unsecured Slack channels and Google documents, which poses risks to US national security. Spokesperson S.Y. Lee disputed this and said Rebellion “strictly complies with applicable government regulations.”
Rebellion is just one startup in a new generation of billion-dollar companies focused on selling to the military. If and when the technologies they’re building — including next-level facial recognition and autonomous decision-making — reach the battlefield, they could usher in an age of algorithmic warfare with lives at stake. In the coming years, AI may be capable of making decisions on whom to target abroad or eventually in the US.
“The stakes are different when you’re talking about creating a market for some plugin for Google Chrome or something like that, versus creating a market for weapons systems and surveillance technologies,” said Jathan Sadowski, a researcher at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Rebellion’s software might endanger the soldiers using its products and, Sadowski emphasizes, “the lives of the people who are the targets of these technologies.”
The Silicon Valley mindset has led to breakthroughs in apps and smartphones. But is the move-fast-and-break-things culture what we want shaping the future of war?