WASHINGTON  - Google is defending a thin strip of moral high ground. Facing a revolt from some of its employees, Alphabet’s largest division is walking away from the Maven program, which develops artificial intelligence to help military drones identify targets. It's understandable that executives decided to wash their hands of a distasteful business. It might not be the right thing to do.

Sacrificing revenue to a higher moral standard makes for great public relations. And it was not a costly sacrifice: Google was getting less than $10 million for its work on the program, a source told Reuters.

It also sends a good message to staff. Most Google engineers applied to work at a company which put "Don't be evil" into its corporate motto. Developing software for flying robots that have fired missiles into innocent wedding parties isn't what they signed up for.

There may be longer-term financial consequence. Alphabet, and the rest of Silicon Valley, wants to get its foot in the door at the Pentagon and other government agencies as they start putting more of their payroll, email, and military applications onto private cloud servers.

Amazon Web Services has a unit dedicated to competing for such contracts, having already won a bid to build a so-called Secret Region for the domestic intelligence community.

Next in everyone's crosshairs is the bitterly contested $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, or JEDI. Industry insiders consider it a key test of whether the Department of Defense will portion out functions to multiple bidders, or grant one company a de facto monopoly on running their data.

After walking away from Maven, Google might find it harder to convince procurement officers to award them contracts for more benign services. That clears the way for rivals like Amazon and Oracle to grab a bigger share of the White House's $95 billion IT budget.

Nor is shunning the project necessarily in the public interest. The Pentagon's passion for drone warfare is an ugly reflection of a common perception of U.S. democracy; American voters have become inured to the human cost of air war as long as only foreigners are hurt or killed, but their stomachs – and potentially their votes – turn at the prospect of fellow citizens taking casualties.

Drones reflect both priorities. Assuming they keep flying, helping them discriminate between terrorists and wedding parties is ethically critical. The biggest risk with AI is that officials put too much trust in their profiling. Arguably keeping Google's competent, skeptical, squeamish engineers in charge might result in fewer civilian casualties, not more.

CONTEXT NEWS

- Alphabet's Google will not renew a contract to help the U.S. military analyze aerial-drone imagery when it expires in March, Reuters reported on June 1.

- The program, called Project Maven, was opposed by a group of employees who objected to Google technology being used in warfare.

- Tech giants including Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle are awaiting a new request for proposals from the Department of Defense for bids to build a $10 billion cloud-computing contract called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI.

- President Donald Trump has proposed a $95 billion budget for information technology for the 2018 fiscal year, a 16 percent increase in spending from the last year of Barack Obama's term in office.

(Editing by Antony Currie and Martin Langfield)

© Reuters News 2018