61–70 of 307 posts
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Well, Google removed "Don't be evil" as their slogan quite some time ago. Don't think that was by an error.
This is a rumor that won’t die because it’s too enticing to believe and tack onto any anti-Google sentiment. The phrase was only moved from the introduction to the conclusion of the code of conduct, never removed.
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This is a rumor that won’t die because it’s too enticing to believe and tack onto any anti-Google sentiment. The phrase was only moved from the introduction to the conclusion of the code of conduct, never removed.
I was at Google (off and on) from 2007-2019. The company has definitely backed away from it both officially and unofficially.
> internal correspondence read to Reuters so, all of this opinion piece is based on hearsay?
How do you think journalists get stories like this if not from insider sources?
from a highly politicized topic with a lot of disinformation being thrown around from both side, it's hardly sufficient.
but apparently you all happy enough to live in a post factual society where journalist have no longer to validate sources' claims, so be it
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> The difference is that AI research teams are full of philosophy graduates who think if statements are racist. I'm not sure I understand. Are they worse or better?
That's an actually good question. AI is supposed to be fed with real-live data, after all it has to be something usable in the real-world. Now, you feed AI with crime data, looking at statistics such AI will suspect people having black color of the skin to be criminals more often than people with white skin. Is that ok? Is it ok to say that if some person happens to have black skin there is a bigger chance that it is…
Europe had philosophers long before it had Christianity.
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Do you have an example of one of these ‘philosophy graduates’ you’re describing? The only person I’m closely aware of here is Timnit Gebru. She has a bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering as well as a PhD. If you’re describing her and her ilk as ‘philosophy graduates’ because they have PhDs, I think you’re vastly mischaracterizing their education.
Maybe your parent commenter confuses PhD ("Doctor of Philosophy") with a graduation in philosophy?
Google is a for profit corporation, not a college campus, news at 11.
Everybody knows that. You can think it's a bad thing for a private company to do bad things, even if they're free to. Stating a fact isn't an argument.
E.g. noone is batting an eye when Apple chooses cherry-picked based datapoints for their performance comparisons or when Stanfords research department spins a paper to get them more funding.
For Google we keep getting this streams of "Google is acting like any other corporation, OH GODS". It's... wierd.
If the outcomes of research don’t align to Google’s business strategy, they’re going to get rid of the research/researchers. Previously, ethics was good PR; now, it’s a risk in antitrust cases. This will continue to ramp up.
You may well be right that this is Google’s current thinking, but it doesn’t look like a winning strategy to me. Once more, they are on the defensive trying to offer flailing justifications for an opportunistic initial move. Even if you don’t care about the ethics, or are on their side, I think you’d have to question their execution.
Consider the historical parallel to the tobacco industry’s research departments. And asbestos. And lead. And talc. And etc. The researchers found that the products were harmful, but their results were squelched. “Do no harm,” indeed.
My physics teacher worked for some kind of government air pollution modelling group in the past, and effectively said that they would often be told "Here's the result, find us data to make it work".
IMHO, a scientist capable of striking any tone in their work, positive or negative, is doing marketing / PR work rather than science. There's nothing wrong with that. Just like any other member of society, a scientist may want to contribute to a (for-profit or non-profit) organization of their choice, be it for material or spiritual rewards. However, I think it's important not to get science and marketing confused. S…
When I was young and (more) idealistic, my department chair pulled me aside after I’d been dogmatic about something and said “everything is political... The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.” 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, alc…
In other words, we need to use all the power we have to avoid "The computer said NO, you're homeless/jailed/poor forever now" scenarios.
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My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. 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…
> Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on…