Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front.

What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of.

Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support).

That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.

It took 10 years for that to really sink in, but I knew that every paper has an angle well before that. There’s a position of inevitability about AI around Google, and, to an extent, I agree. Unlike tobacco, alcohol, firearms, cars, fuel, AI is applied mathematics. It’s virtually impossible to restrict functionally, requiring macro behavioral constraints on businesses and governments that are very difficult to enforce if you want to regulate it. Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.

Some things are going to be hard to explain. Some skin tones, hair styles, accents, pitches, timbres, writing styles, etc. may have more/less separable entropy, and that’s going to inevitably make models seem racist/sexist for some applications. However, we’re pretty far from those edges. Instead, our model biases have likely been driven by our datasets, drawn from our coworkers, family, and friends. In this industry, that’s currently a recipe for over sampling in some demographics and under sampling in others.

Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.