Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

That's not true, there are a few internal-only lists that have different contents (lots of overlap but not 100%). Different PAs have adopted different lists.

This is the public one: https://developers.google.com/style/word-list

I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"

Fun fact: the longest known distance between two points on Earth is the distance between Google product managers and ordinary people.

To be less flippant, boy could I not give a shit less about the problem this feature is trying to solve. As I look outside, I try to imagine the idea of any of these people in my neighborhood, playing with their dogs, mowing their lawns, driving garbage trucks, potentially losing sleep over someone using “policeman” as opposed to “police officer.” It’s absurd.

To be clear, I do feel genuine empathy for someone if they experience abject pain from minor transgressions. However, I am skeptical that almost anyone actually has that issue. And if they do, this is not how I believe you solve the problem. At all.

And if someone did use the term “police officer” instead of “policeman”, it would be no skin off my nose. That’s totally fine, both are natural and reasonable. Whatever. But I don’t need my fucking word processor telling me to self-police my language harder. That’s not a feature I want. In fact, I don’t even like the idea of this feature.

This all feels like cargo culting. If we pretend we’re in a society further removed from a racist, sexist past, does that make us further removed? I don’t think it does. Before the issues with blacklist/whitelist or slave/master were brought to the forefront, I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind. I think they had completely abstract concepts in their mind. Plenty of words probably have a deeply racist origin, but if that’s not what people actually think about when they hear the word, does that history even matter? Aren’t we just creating more problems?

Even if you disagree with all of my viewpoints, I hope you’ll agree that this is going to serve to make people much more radical over time as they perceive these features to either serve as an attack on themselves or their way of lives, or as evidence that people who don’t self-correct incessantly are secretly neo-nazis. To me, it just seems like a lose-lose, because it feels like no matter what I do, people are going to view my rejection of these ideals and pigeonhole me into either of these camps. Or is using the word “camp” also a bad idea due to World War II?

I’m sure some people will read this some day and think I’ve lost my mind. I don't care. For the love of fuck, Go Outside once in a while.

As a first comment here, I'd point out that defining women independently from solely their role as mothers is judging them on character rather than identity, so you should support such a thing if that's your rallying cry.

But also, on MLK and postmodernism: postmodernism dates back to the 1940s, To Kill a Mockingbird is postmodern. MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is very clearly postmodern (e.g. when he says "But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.", he's alluding to a failure to consider the viewpoint of the oppressed in the situation).

That letter is also very modern-leftist. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 and elaborated on it in 1991, saying "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate oppposition to patriarchy race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose". The letter from a Birmingham jail includes another famous line from MLK: " Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". To me, those express similar sentiments: that oppression exists in many forms in many places, and it is unwise to pretend that oppression that fails to inconvenience me is therefore unworthy of my attention.

And of course he says later on "there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. " which to me describes the people often criticized as "modern far leftists", those people who create the tension and discomfort in society are, in MLK's view, doing us, collectively, a great service.

I'd recommend you read the whole letter[0]. If you're so willing to lionize MLK, but disagree with so much of what he preached, I implore you to consider why exactly that is.

[0]: https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-...

Why would they push back? There is evidence doing so can get you publicly shamed and fired if other take sufficient offense.

I wouldn't be so worried about non-native English speakers. 'Whitelist' and 'blacklist' are common enough terms that they've become loanwords in other languages. In Chinese, at least, the equivalent terms are 白名单 'white name list' and 黑名单 'black name list' and 拉黑 'pull (into) black(list)' is common vernacular for blocking someone on social media.