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Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

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Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#211

Post by red75prime »

bonoboTP wrote: post #87
bzb6 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A black woman? How is she black?

She's Eritrean-born and identifies as Black. Races aren't an exact science but social constructs. There's a gradual continuum in people's appearance along geographical areas, linking Sub-Saharan west Africa where most slaves were taken from in the Atlantic slave trade, to East Africa, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the Mediterranean coast, to central Europe to Scandinavia to Siberia to Central Asia to East A…

It doesn't mean that a person cannot genetically belong to a well defined group with little admixture.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#212

Post by [deleted] »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #133
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #117

Wow, Google's ethical AI group sounds like the most toxic group of individuals I've ever heard of. I'm going to sidestep the debate about whether Gebru was "fired" or she "resigned", because that debate primarily centers on how one defines the words. But clearly she did do this: She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands, outrageous because it essentially attacked other people at the company, and…

I've noticed a trend where toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause, usually something related to social justice. It's effective and usually short circuits the public's willingness to see the nuance of the issue.

[deleted]

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#213

Post by cbozeman »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #49
shoo wrote: post #30

One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation? I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence. It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someo…

Without actually knowing the history, I think it's probably stupidly conceived. We seem to generally imagine that the biggest problem or challenge with AI is ethics because we frame ethics as being largely rooted in something emotional, like empathy or compassion, and not logic. The movie I, Robot explores what happens when "logic" is taken to its logical outcome by an AI. It posits a robot with feelings as the antid…

Wow. That is a masterful explanation, and I think right on the money. Thank you. :)

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#214

Post by mpweiher »

pron wrote: post #186
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #117

Wow, Google's ethical AI group sounds like the most toxic group of individuals I've ever heard of. I'm going to sidestep the debate about whether Gebru was "fired" or she "resigned", because that debate primarily centers on how one defines the words. But clearly she did do this: She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands, outrageous because it essentially attacked other people at the company, and…

I don't think anyone would claim corporations are democracies, but the view that the corporation is its CEO and/or its shareholders isn't so obvious, either. There are clearly cultural differences here (e.g. see the situation in Germany [1]), but I don't think that the American view of what a corporation is and who it serves is necessarily the only reasonable one. I don't know any more details on this matter than tho…

As a German who has tested the labor laws himself: behaviour such as that displayed would absolutely be grounds for getting fired without the notice period ("fristlose Kündigung") here. And it's actually pretty hard to legally fire people.

The reason is "Verlust des Vertrauensverhältnisses", i.e. loss of trust. You start making demands coupled with threats, and public ones at that, you are no longer an employee.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#215

Post by pontus »

GVIrish wrote: post #146
pontus wrote: post #99

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is knowingly engaging in illegal activity then by all means, be a whistle blower and set ultimatums, but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interv…

People certainly could just quit when they feel their company is not doing the right thing. But people who care about their mission and the company might stay and do something like this because they genuinely want to improve things. Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or…

Yes, I think if people were really trying to improve their companies from within that's a great idea. I don't think that's what's happening here though. I like to pose the following thought experiment to people who like driving fancy cars: if your car looked like an old honda civic from the outside but had all the bells and whistles and looked stunning from the inside, would you still want it? The point of the experiment is to show that a nontrivial part of the reason why people drive fancy cars is the signal that it sends to other people. Similarly here, if there was a mechanism to improve a company from within that was anonymous so that you wouldn't get any credit whatsoever for it's improvement, would they use it? It's human nature to want credit, so I wouldn't blame people for not wanting to use it, but let's be honest about there being a nontrivial part to all of this that is founded in virtue signaling and in-group/out-group tribalism).

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#216

Post by googlethrow3134 »

panpanna wrote: post #168
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I'm not really trying to defend Google one way or the other. At the end of the day it seemed like Gebru published a paper that was quite critical of how Google intends to make a sizable portion of their revenue, and anyone should understand that when you do that in a large company, it's going to get extra scrutiny. And it could very well be that the whole purpose of Google's "ethical AI" team in the first plac…

So basically Gebru was fired for turning Googles fake ethics group into a real ethics group?

She wasn’t fired for trying to publish the paper.

She threatened to resign if her demands were met, so Google pre-empted it by accepting her resignation.

The narrative around her being “fired” is completely false and is a lie that needs to be stopped in its track.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#217

Post by pron »

pontus wrote: post #99

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is knowingly engaging in illegal activity then by all means, be a whistle blower and set ultimatums, but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interv…

> but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interviews and leave the company!

Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome.

If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#218

Post by googlethrow3134 »

js8 wrote: post #114
pontus wrote: post #99

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is knowingly engaging in illegal activity then by all means, be a whistle blower and set ultimatums, but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interv…

> I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. It is within their rights, true. But it's not just a question of law, but also ethics. We accept that, in democratic societies, we can freely criticize our government and still stay the citizens. There are good principal and practical reasons to have it so. However, in private companies, for some reason, we don…

I don’t want to work activists, neither do the majority of my colleagues at Google that I speak with.

If you want to be an activist, go join a non-profit.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#220

Post by cscurmudgeon »

JPKab wrote: post #203
BitwiseFool wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed a trend where toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause, usually something related to social justice. It's effective and usually short circuits the public's willingness to see the nuance of the issue.

"toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause" Anyone who has grown up around religious fundamentalists like I did learns this at a very young age. Frustratingly, when you grow up around that, you recognize the behavioral pattern very quickly, but the upper-middle class, suburban raised people with two college educated parents that make up the bulk of software engineers at the FAANGs don't, and therefore th…

Struggle sessions don't and can't have facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...

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