The public has come up with a variety of reactions to Microsoft employees questioning the visual augmentation contract from last November, whereby their top-notch engineering products would be delivered to the battlefield. While many signed a petition in solidarity, others stressed that the deal is common practice and serves the nation's interests.
Microsoft workers are calling on the company's management to drop its almost $480 million contract with the US military to build versions of its HoloLens augmented reality headsets for war purposes.
The staffers stressed that the company's deal “has crossed the line” into arms development for the first time, adding the use of HoloLens, stipulated by the contract terms, “is designed to help people kill”, employees wrote in a Friday open letter directed at Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith. In it, they further urged the company to cancel the IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) contract, which was clinched in November, calling for stricter ethical principles in the corporation.
“The contract's stated objective is to ‘rapidly develop, test, and manufacture a single platform that soldiers can use to fight, rehearse, and train that provides increased lethality, mobility, and situational awareness necessary to achieve overmatch against our current and future adversaries'”, the letter specified regarding the contract, which,
