221–230 of 864 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speak up internally, sure. Externally?
Speaking up internally is pretty clearly ineffective, and has been since at least the days of the Real Names debacle.
I suppose it depends on the specific role, but oftentimes your job is to advise, not to win.
Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.
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…
I'd think ethical (AI or not) researcher would work far away from Google's influence as possible if they really want to analyze Google AI work.
> Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible
I wouldn't be surprised if project zero find as many vulnerabilities as possible in Google's software and give them a chance to fix quietly.
If there are huge security problems to be found in their software then independent researchers can make big name/fame and money by publishing them out.
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…
I don't know how common that refrain is but I have one a little less controversial: if you use corporate email to exfiltrate confidential documents or coworkers' personal information, you really should expect to get fired.
Dr. Gebru was fired for having consulted a lawyer. (Jeff Dean and others were aware that Dr. Gebru was consulting a lawyer long before her termination). Employers can do stupid things, but not illegal things, and it's beyond stupid to fire somebody for talking to an attorney. Google felt threatened and so they acted, fair and simple. While it's OK to feel threatened, it's not OK to retaliate, which is what Google, le…
Gebru is an absolutely toxic person, who can't keep her politics and racial justice activism outside of her profession or academic work (her work is cited so much, because she actively mails other scientists when they don't cite her work, threatening to call them marginalizing and ignorers of Black women in science -- pity cites).
She is bubbled in a network which supports her with tags suchs as "BelieveBlackWomen" when she publicly smears Google for being racists. No rationality, but stirred up angry feelings. Trust should not be assigned due to skin color or gender. Stop that racism and sexism, it has no place in business or academia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was reading a book about dry stone bridges, and one of the bridges featured was built across a stream in a protected watershed. The builder said he was surprised the permit for it was approved, he told the client to expect it to be rejected. Talking to the government bureaucrats & scientists, he found out that they had to approve a permit every now and then. Not just because of political reasons, but strategic ones -- if they denied every permit, people would start ignoring and circumventing their department. By approving one every once in a while, they kept themselves in the loop as gatekeepers and prevented more harm than they would have by denying everything. His own bridge project was minimally harmful, and was the token approval so they could keep denying the real problem applications.
I feel like there's a lesson there for other gatekeepers trying to fight the good fight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>She moved files when she wasn't supposed to If that's true, that's not very ethical is it?
She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee: > Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference. Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not repr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?
that's clearly a strawman interpretation of my comment. > why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? by all means, a healthy company should encourage internal critiques. but if you're going to take that criticism public, you can't expect to also collect a paycheck at the same time. do you make a habit of paying people to work against your interests?
So, yeah...I'll pay for that in every organization I get involved with from here on out.
Just cause it's not normalized doesn't mean it isn't useful. The reason to do it is for the sake of actual accountability, as strictly internal accountability is nonsense.
This is the business version of "keep it in the family": it gives all kinds of toxic behaviors a shade to hide and grow in, while keeping the public from actually choosing who gets their business based on their values.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You are talking about the Google ethicists who are leaving, right? Also, can you clarify what you mean by 'shouting themselves into the void'? Are they being denied venues to publish their research, thereby rendering their shouting inaudible, or did you mean something else?
In other words MSFT allowed them to publish freely, it just (allegedly) ignored the implications of the research.