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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#51

Post by kristianc »

freeone3000 wrote: post #44
schoolornot wrote: post #28

No qualms for Googlers getting a reality check. I don't get why people think they work at a liberal think-tank where no consequences exist for sharing opinions or confidential data about the company publicly. Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot. Shut your mouth and move on if your ideology conflicts with your employer's.

Hiring an ethics in AI research team presupposes you want to have ethics in your AI. It's disappointing, but not surprising, to find they want a bunch of syncopants. Perhaps they shouldn't have bothered creating the department if they didn't want people working there to speak out.

You’d have to think there was some middle ground between investigating and adding ethical accountability to AI programs and exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#52

Post by khazhoux »

lsb wrote: post #31
andyxor wrote: post #6

Google response (from Jan): "Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external account…

What were they afraid she was going to do, take all the ethics?

Releasing even a single internal document without permission is cause for firing, and possible legal action. I can't even fathom this being up for debate.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#54

Post by freeone3000 »

rmk wrote: post #4

For people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit. Many are tenured professors, so they also…

MSR has a very free research culture. People there are technically fireable by normal means, but Microsoft chooses not to terminate employment for "outside-of-work" engagements, or for the subject of their research. Some very critical papers of Microsoft's AI approach were published under the MSR header. Not all of the findings were put into place, and Aether has the unenviable job of balancing ethical behavior with potential profits. But their ethicists are leaving because they're shouting themselves hoarse into the void, not because they're being asked to change their results.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#55

Post by thewarrior »

jariel wrote: post #47
thewarrior wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a pretty serious accusation. Looks like relations between management and employees has seriously deteriorated.

A company with 100 000 people will have to quite a number of staff, literally daily, for all sorts of things, it doesn't remotely imply anything about the overall relationship between staff and management. Even when CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider 'team up' to overrepresent an issue because 'some number of Google employees walked out for some reason' - it really doesn't help tell the story of 'relations' because it's ha…

I meant to say relations between management and staff in the AI ethics division.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#56

Post by jancsika »

rsj_hn wrote: post #15

>Unfireable save for clear violations of policies such as sexual harassment I would take a look at (and consider donating to) FIRE to understand the current state of academic freedom in universities. https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/ Just to give two examples: Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day (and he was also subject to credible death threats, requ…

> Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day

Interpretation 1:

There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university, a professor named Bret Weinstein-- a white person-- was on the campus that day (either in defiance or without foreknowledge of the event), and was consequently fired for being white while on campus.

Interpretation 2:

There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university where white people were singled out to attend some off-campus event (whether mandatory or optional), Bret Weinstein-- a white professor-- did not attend this off-campus event (whether in defiance or accidentally, whether going on campus, or not), and consequently the university fired Bret Weinstein for his action of not attending an event targeted exclusively at white people.

Interpretation 3:

You are leaving some crucial detail that explains what actually happened.

If #3 isn't the case I'll eat my hat. If it is, you should consider the possibility that some kind of anti-academic axe-grinding is keeping you from writing as clearly as you could about historical events.

Edit: clarification

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#57

Post by snendroid-ai »

superlate wrote: post #35

And Jeff Dean doesn’t resign yet, no surprise.

Wut!? please tell me you followed the whole story and knows all facts. Jeff manages whole department, whereas this person was working in one team, "ethical ai". There are literally more than 20+ teams that answers Jeff. Each team got anywhere from 4-50 people.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#59

Post by rmk »

driverdan wrote: post #7
rmk wrote: post #4

For people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit. Many are tenured professors, so they also…

Apparently the way it works at Google is they fire you when you don't rubber stamp everything.

I hope you are using hyperbole here. Google employs hundreds of researchers who are free to publish their work as far as I can tell (plenty of seminal systems, AI, economics -- auction mechanisms and such, and other papers are testament to this fact). There appear to be some exceptions to this that are causing a furore.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#60

Post by minimaxir »

benlumen wrote: post #48

I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).

It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.
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