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Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

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Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She proposed working on a date. Google terminated her employment immediately and said it was for misconduct.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392

She said, or Google said? An any rate, this seems to me to be an excellent case study in ultimatums. Namely, don't give one to someone more powerful than you.

She quoted Megan Kacholia. Jeff Dean didn't dispute that part of her account.

She expected she would have to leave after her ultimatum. She was fired for a different email.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#422
post #120
post #24

I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?

> Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? [..] If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on? Because owning a company doesn't necessarily mean owning people working for it. Ask yourself the same question about the government, why should your government be expected to keep y…

I think your analogy is 180 degrees out of phase. The obvious difference is that the government works for us, and our CEO doesn’t. That’s why they agreed to part with a mutually agreeable sum of their cash - something they do not have to do. If one party fails in their obligations to make this transaction mutually beneficial, the rational counterparty will sever the relationship.

And yes, we fire the government all the time. We pay them, and if we don’t like their performance, they’re out. If they start publicly trashing us, they’re out even faster. This is why mayors have to appear meek and apologetic, instead of calling the voters a bunch of fools. Like when half of the population felt like Hillary called them a basket of deplorables, for example. Not many want to hire that person.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#423
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment (and these foolish entitled SJW employees) fail to observe that companies like Google only exist in America in no small part due to that fact. No other country has produced companies that are even remotely comparable, and the US produces them regularly. Assuming, of course, that one’s preferred alternative doesn’t involve serving the CCP. Maybe some folks prefer it that way, but they seem all too happy t…

> that companies like Google only exist in America in no small part due to that fact That's a non-sequitur. There are many things that make America, and every other country, unique. Maybe America produced Google because it's the only country with that population size that's made up virtually entirely of immigrants? It's also an is-ought fallacy. America is also the only rich country that's built that much of its weal…

No, that’s not a fallacy. Your rebuttal is a bit of a fallacy because it talks about what is a “good” thing. I am not talking about good and evil or right and wrong. I am talking amorally about cause and effect in complex systems. Making an analogy to slavery to illustrate a moral wrong isn’t responsive to that point.

Different systems produce different results. It tends to be the case that when you drastically alter the fundamental properties of a system, you won’t get the same results - because it isn’t the same system.

If you want a system where a company is not the property of its shareholders, and you fail to observe that all current implementations of that idea have never demonstrated a single instance of producing Google-like companies since the industrial revolution, your ideas are not going to be very robust.

If you don’t want that, sure, this is a perfectly valid position. But you are not to be taken seriously if you make these claims while earning 7 figures at Google. You haven’t even demonstrated that your ideas are viable to you, let alone all of society.

And since the principles of capitalism apparently quite unironically elude you, yes, they expect their own bank account to be padded more than yours (as it must, game theory prevents the transaction otherwise), which is why they fired her.

And the conditions that make Google better for them were not created exclusively by employees and especially not by employees who didn’t share the mission. Nor were they created and sustained without leadership. Nor were they created without venture capital. If you cherry pick certain properties of Google and expect to be reproduce those results, you aren’t making payroll. It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#424
post #292

This issue reminds me a lot of what we do in security and privacy, which are ostensibly engineering disciplines, but are really technology governance functions. Ethical AI is also a governance function, and like hackers in security, there is an invisible yet stark limit to the value activists can provide in actual governance roles. Litigating demands is just not how governance gets done. The irony of Google hiring so…

> The problem with both is that if you fail their purity tests, they will also sabotage your company because they're indexed on a greater good. But the very outcome that this is just your company rather than yours and theirs is, itself, a result of decades of activism; it's not a law of nature, nor is it the law in all Western countries. Company executives and shareholders are themselves activists (Google certainly i…

Because management (or rather, shareholders) pay workers to do work, and not the other way around. Abstractly, workers telling shareholders how to run the company (out of the scope of what shareholders hired them for) would be similar to shareholders telling workers how to spend their paycheck.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#425
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s ridiculous. It’s completely unnatural and can’t be worked into the language in a day to day way. They should have chosen another vowel like the short ‘e’, latiné.

What's especially ridiculous is that they did - latine and latin@ (pronounced with whichever gender the speaker finds convenient) have a reasonably long history in contexts where people want to be conspicuously gender neutral. "Hispanic" too, although some speakers consider that to have a slightly different meaning. As far as I can tell, the new coinage of "Latinx" has no purpose except for signaling that you're one…

Most Spanish speakers have never heard of Latine either.

Hardly anyone likes Latin@. It looks stranger than the others. It's hard to search for. There are at least 5 different ways to pronounce it.

Anglos use Latinx because it's the first gender neutral term spelled with all letters they learned.

I think most people who call themselves Latinx are fine with Latine when they hear about it. So probably Latine will take over.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Snowden's job was to keep the US government's spy systems working. So what? Just because it's their "job" doesn't make it right or not worthy of whistleblowing. If companies are doing bad things we want whistleblowers to tell us. I just don't understand your argument - "you can do bad things if it's your job." No. It doesn't work that way.

Yes, you can do bad things if its your job. You can't do illegal things. Difference.

If your point was to be purposefully obtuse and present a strawman, why bother?

Either way if we didn't have whistleblowers for very bad things that weren't illegal, we would never make laws to make them as such.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I eat dinner, you will want to quit and I want you to quit. Both want to part way. We can agree to disagree on being fired or not being fired. But why would 'being fired' (or not) matter since both sides want to part way?

The debate about her being fired or resigning is a debate about who to believe about what led up to it. People who insist she resigned see her saying she was fired as evidence of a victim complex and publicity seeking. People who insist she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.

> People who insist she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.

I don't see any unfair treatment. Her ultimatum isn't satisfied, so both part way.

This group of people also hyper-focus way way too much on this part, which is not the important.

It's much better to focus on other stuffs like her paper didn't get approved because o A, B, and C. Or how Google suppresses her paper because of X, Y, Z.

Instead these people are yelling that Timnit was fired unfairly when she was the one who gave the ultimatum first...?

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better people-skills and emotional intelligence would work wonders here, compared to immediately reaching for the hatchet and communicating through demands and ultimatums. Reflects very poorly on them for their inability, in this case, to start a civil conversation which can be ramped up in so many appropriate ways.

Read the "Toxoplasma of rage" by Scott Alexander or watch the "This video will make you angry" by CGP Grey. No immediately reaching for maximum impactful tools will leave you behind and those who are not so "shy" to use strong words will advance and get more exposure. It's a memetic race. You get more attention for more outrage. Rewards and incentives shape what we see.

Unless we decide to consciously work against that tendency, which it's nice to see people doing in this thread.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#429

> The demands in the letter include the removal of a Google vice president, Megan Kacholia, from the team's management chain; for transparency surrounding Gebru's departure; and for Google's head of AI, Jeff Dean, and Kacholia to apologize for how Gebru was treated. I would like to know which role played Kacholia in this. Just a scapegoat for management or was she directly involved?

Kacholia sent the email informing Gebru she is no longer employed, effective immediately.

And the retraction demand came from Jeff Dean and Kacholia.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#430
post #382
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one other use for it - and maybe this qualifies as PR - hiring. Super-intelligent folks are the target of google's hiring. I suspect these types of people can work anywhere, they get to pick and choose. If they can pick and choose, they will have other motivations, like being able to make a difference, and not blindly create a dystopia for everyone on the planet. So... having an Ethical AI group lets people j…

What makes you think those "super-intelligent" people would all agree what "do things right" means? What makes you think they would side with the Ethical AI group at Google? As an example, John von Neumann was as "super-intelligent" as they come, and yet he made it very clear he wanted to nuke Soviet Union.

could it also be possible an ethical AI group might provide guidance on what to do and where the lines are?

(and of course I don't know reality - for all I know enron had an ethics group too)

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