161–170 of 864 posts
At the same time, Google unveiled a "Black owned businesses near me" on Google Maps. How has that been received? We need look no further than Twitter: (the Tl;Dr. racists are using this to lower all ratings of these Black owned businesses) https://twitter.com/dmetaxak/status/1362856231212212224 Google recently added a feature allowing users to search for "Black-owned businesses near you". They're advertising it all o…
It’s a really common refrain here that if you are employee critical of your employer you should expect to get fired… Well perhaps, but you’d think that specifically someone in AI ethics needs to be empowered to speak up against both internal external issues. Or did google just want an research ethics hit team against other companies technologies? Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible wi…
Dr. Mitchell was likely talking with the same legal team-- it sounds like Google cited cause for Dr. Mitchell sending documents (non-IP) outside of Google's network. So Dr. Mitchell is almost certainly also a victim of retaliation.
The bottom line: Sundar Pichai has again and again admitted to Google's struggles with retaining or regaining trust, and here he has again failed to act effectively. Google's behavior here is, legally, maximally adversarial and strictly for Google's benefit. Sundar Pichai has failed yet again to show Google can be trustworthy.
It seems the tobacco industry had more luck with their scientific advisors.
Well, the problem with hiring an Ethics specialist will tend to be that they already have a strong ethical compass.
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.
Wouldn't that conflict with Google's no-politics policy?
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-...
>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…
They also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either. All of…
- 135,000 Google employees - 2,000 signed a petition to support Timnit [1] - 2 employees resigned to support Timnit [2] When it comes to voting with your feet, no one actually gives a shit. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-fo... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/in...
This is something I feel like few people learn in life in the US. You may be morally right, but nobody ever has your back. The few that do you can probably call friends, but the many that don't will never lift a finger to help you legitimately when it matters.
Out of curiousity I checked out Dr. Mitchells Twitter feed. On her feed for the past several months, shes been posting and reposting articles that are heavily critical of her employer. Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio. So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer…
I wouldn't be surprised to find more companies shifting to a "leave politics and religion at the door" stance again: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/03/dissent-insiders-and-outs...