News Microsoft Employees Don't Want HoloLens to Train Soldiers

[abryant]

Microsoft employees demanded the cancellation of a U.S. Army contract through which the HoloLens augmented reality headset would be used to train soldiers. Read more here.

NATHANIEL MOTT
@nathanielmott
Nathaniel Mott is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software and hardware component news.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Don't really care what Microsoft Employees want. I support our Troops 1000%.

 

[Supahos]

Okay so ummm they want more dead people on the battlefield? This is just dumb. This makes no sense whatsoever

 

[LordConrad]

When you work for a company, you get paid to develop products for the company. You get a salary and they own the product and the research. Our parents and grandparents knew this, what part of this has become unclear?

 

[cryoburner]

The petition backing the demand was signed by more than 50 employees...

Oh wow, 50 employees? It sounds like this issue must be a big concern among the 135,000 people who work for Microsoft. That makes it even more notable than that petition on change dot org to bring back Altoids Mango Sours, which currently stands at just 14 signatures.

HoloLens dev kits cost $3,000--even if the entire contract went towards equipment procurement, that would only buy roughly 160,000 headsets.

Yes, because they can only train one person with each headset. After a Hololens has been used once, it needs to be thrown away, making it impossible to share a headset between multiple people, despite not everyone training at the exact same time.

Also, it seems to me that someone potentially buying hundreds of thousands of units might not pay the full list price of an individual unit. Of course, this is assuming that the version being sold is even the same as the current devkit, which I would imagine it is not.

 

[thx1138v2]

Each and every technological development in history, from flint to AI, has been weaponized and always will be. Demanding that MS cancel the contract is asinine. It would be much better to fire these people. They are idiots.

 

[Daekar3]

If there is any better evidence that they have no skin in the game, I don't know it. I understand not wanting to work on creating new nuclear weapons or something, but this is just training for somebody's brother or sister, son or daughter which could save their lives if they ever have to deploy. Would they also deny our troops effective body armor or helmets?

 

[bedencic]

I support the idea of MS workers. But army can simply buy HoloLens, have some private engineers and use the technology.

 

[photonboy]

??Don't want to be involved in training soldiers?
Okay, but Microsoft has been selling WINDOWS and other software etc to the military for a long time and THAT aids them in their efforts. In for a penny then in for a pound guys.

 

[alextheblue]

OK, we'll cancel the contract. No more VR training. Clearly moral superiority is only achieved when you trade virtual warfare for real warfare. Perhaps we'll bring in prisoners for live fire training? I guess this is what happens when a company becomes infested with nutjobs. Still, they're not as ate up with them as Google or Apple... yet. But almost our entire tech sector is increasingly out of sync with reality.

 

[ingtar33]

50 SIGNATURES?

50, how is this even a story? 50 people among 150,000, isn't even 1%. Of course Microsoft will ignore such a stupid thing. I can't believe those 50 people don't feel embarrassed submitting that "petition" in that state.

 

[thegriff]

??Don't want to be involved in training soldiers?
Okay, but Microsoft has been selling WINDOWS and other software etc to the military for a long time and THAT aids them in their efforts. In for a penny then in for a pound guys.

Yep, also it's 50 employees out of over 100,000. So, these fools would also want MS to not sell anything to any Defense Contractor also (MS Windows, computers/web services etc). How stupid. Hey maybe they would lose their jobs then, did they think of that or they can resign. Anyway MS can't stop anyone from buying their product and using it however they like. I think they can figure out how to use the Development kit (since they have scores of Computer Scientists/Engineers with higer level degrees).

 

[jimmysmitty]

Each and every technological development in history, from flint to AI, has been weaponized and always will be. Demanding that MS cancel the contract is asinine. It would be much better to fire these people. They are idiots.

Better yet a lot of the common technologies these people use day to day were developed for use by the military. So much of what we use today has come because the military used it.

If there is any better evidence that they have no skin in the game, I don't know it. I understand not wanting to work on creating new nuclear weapons or something, but this is just training for somebody's brother or sister, son or daughter which could save their lives if they ever have to deploy. Would they also deny our troops effective body armor or helmets?

These people would, yes. If they had their way we wouldn't have any military at all.

I support the idea of MS workers. But army can simply buy HoloLens, have some private engineers and use the technology.

What idea? Of Microsoft supplying tools to help better train young men and women for their job in protecting their country? Whats so bad about that? These are not weapons. Whats better is that while there are a lot of ground soldiers and every one is trained to fight, there are also ones that are trained beyond that. HoloLens has a huge market in the medical field and I don't see why the military medical team should be deprived of the same advancements the civilian world has.

Hell if anything this would help boost research and development of HoloLens that would eventually trickle down to the civilian world much like many other technologies have.

??Don't want to be involved in training soldiers?
Okay, but Microsoft has been selling WINDOWS and other software etc to the military for a long time and THAT aids them in their efforts. In for a penny then in for a pound guys.

Not to even mention Flight Sim. The military has used it in many ways to help train pilots and I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft didn't help develop the machines around the software to use it.

But I guess its better to just throw a bunch of untrained kids at it. That always works.

 

[Co BIY]

50 is a laughably small number in a gigantic corporation. Not only are they very few but they are lazy even in their foolish "moral" advocacy. Pretty sure I could have gotten 50 signatures for this position in fifteen minutes on any street corner, on a military base, in Texas.

I think this story counts as "fake news". Yes, it is technically true that 50 people signed a petition but it is not news that in a giant American corporation there are few people that don't agree with the current managing direction of the company or like a specific customer or product line.


My second take - This is probably the creation of the marketing department. They created a piece of controversy to get me to read and Toms to post but the real news in the "story" is that Microsoft has sold half a Billion dollars worth of new tech to a paying customer with good credit and long history of buying more each year than the last. I predict a rising stock price on this news.
So "fake news" of the "corporate puffery" type.

 

[Solandri]

If you wish on principle to not support the military, then logically you yourself should not partake of things produced by the military as well, right? So no:

• jet air travel (both jet planes and radar used for air traffic control)
• microwave ovens (magnetron is an offshoot of radar technology)
• space program (rockets were originally developed as missiles)
• sonar (automatic doors, the parking and blind spot sensors in your car)
• GPS (built and maintained by the military)
• digital cameras (originally developed since spy satellites became orbiting junk when they ran out of film)
• cellular data (based on spread spectrum communications developed by the military to transmit through jamming)
• Oh, and no Internet (military wanted a robust communications network which still would work even if large segments were destroyed)

 

[jimmysmitty]

https://www.businessinsider.com/nad...ithdraw-from-us-army-hololens-contract-2019-2

You should update the article as it looks like Microsofts CEO is taking the correct approach and not canceling a contract that's providing jobs and also providing American Soldiers with the best products they can get to increase their ability to survive.

 

[mihen]

Now that Google has backed out, that opens the door for Microsoft to make even more.
Also on your subsequent article, 100k devices is quite adequate for the US Army. There are roughly 472k active army personnel. They won't all require one and an initial rollout tends to be small. 100k to me seems like a lot.

 

[thegriff]

Yeah, loved his response.

 

[brian2799]

Time to keep "social justice" and politics out of most business decisions - there are just too many people to piss off. I don't need the folks taking my money preaching to me - a fair exchange is all I seek, with their product for my money.

 

[littleleo]

So 50 new job openings at Microsoft? Since these principaled individuals are so PC they should quit if MS is going to keep working with the military. Hire 50 that care about their country and not being PC.