Live data from Hacker News

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

cnn.com

441–450 of 460 posts

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

#441
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No one told me that I was fired." "Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation." https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364734418726912

That's not quite the whole story. She set a deadline (a few weeks?) after which she would resign, and Google terminated her immediately that day.

They didn't fire her; Google cut off her access and paid her through her notice period.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that there's nothing much to take over, because very few people know the term Latinx and almost nobody identifies with it. It's only common in one specific subculture.

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She didn't offer to resign immediately.

That's true but irrelevant. Google cut off her access and paid her through her notice period.

She didn't give notice.[1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947719354/ousted-black-google...

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

#444

These so-called ethical AI researchers are not really doing much science, not even truly researchers. They are more like politicians, and are playing the game of politics.

Everytime someone calls out non-technical folk pretending to be doing something while they are only virtue signalling.

America will learn hard way that diversity hiring of sociology idiots won't work.

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

#445
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this particular job does require a certain independence to do it properly Does it also require a certain intellectual integrity to do properly? Because claiming that you were "immediately fired" online, then later having to "clarify" that you actually submitted your resignation because some demands weren't met sounds pretty dishonest to me.

That is not an accurate description of events.

She made an unreasonable ultimatum. They held her to it.

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

#446
post #114
post #99

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is knowingly engaging in illegal activity then by all means, be a whistle blower and set ultimatums, but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interv…

> I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. It is within their rights, true. But it's not just a question of law, but also ethics. We accept that, in democratic societies, we can freely criticize our government and still stay the citizens. There are good principal and practical reasons to have it so. However, in private companies, for some reason, we don…

Interestingly there are those who argue that use of social platforms as a consumer requires confining oneself within certain accepted bands of opinion unless you suddenly want your account shut down. As such employees being held to the same standard doesn't surprise me. Even more so due to the fact that "work" requires cooperation which requires some level of compliance.

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

#447
post #424
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see why it's like that at all, but you realise that this is not how it's always been, even in America, and certainly not elsewhere? What seems "logical" to you is merely a current snapshot of a social construct that's been built built over decades of political activism by shareholders.

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

#448
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's also an is-ought fallacy. America is also the only rich country that's built that much of its wealth on slave labour, so does that mean slave labour is a good thing? I'm curious about this one. Most of what I've read indicates that modern American wealth was largely circumstantial due to european economies being obliterated during WW2. Do you have a source for how much slavery affected American wealth?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/05/03/...

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...

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

#449
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Yes, but you claim to know changing which set of variables, by which amount, produced what result, while you don't actually know that. Your epistemology is emotional rather than rational.

> 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.

Not that I think Google is a great company (it's a pretty lousy one, all things considered) but it is unique, and still you don't know precisely what combination of variables unique to the US produced this particular result.

> which is why they fired her.

That's fine, but you blamed them for being sort of victims in the first place.

> 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.

I never said that.

> It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.

Sure, but there can be more than one right balance, and you don't know all of them. You make the mistake of thinking that if the current situation is X and you think X is good, then any other balance Y is likely worse than X.

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

#450
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are two sides of the same coin, but the law in some countries recognises that the employer has more power, and so favours the worker and makes it harder for the employer to terminate an employee without making it harder for the employee to quit.

Making it harder to fire someone makes it harder to hire them in the first place. This hurts everyone because it reduces the number of available positions by increasing the cost of hiring. Give too much power to the employees and you wind up with corrupt unions that effectively have a cartel over entire areas of the economy. It’s just layers of red tape and misery for everyone. Getting fired isn’ta problem if you can…

Such systems are sensitive to multiple variable, and it's not true that all values except from the current ones lead to a worse result, or, at least, we have no reason to believe that's true. What we do know is that over the past several decades the US, and other Western countries, and especially in the past two, have conducted a massive redistribution of wealth away from workers.
Post reply on HN