Personally, I am shocked at how unrealistic and immature the demands of these activist employees are:
> 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. It also calls for the company to offer Gebru a new, higher-level position, to commit publicly to the integrity of research conducted at Google, and to guarantee it won't harm any workers who advocated for Gebru.
I sincerely hope Google’s leaders don’t cave in and instead hold firm on their prior decision. Employee activism is highly toxic and distracting, especially when activists organize like a mob to prop up someone as toxic as Timnit Gebru. Anonymous forums like Reddit ML and Blind are full of stories from victims of her aggression/toxicity and yet the alliance of employee activists and tech journalists continue to make her out to be a victim of injustice.
It could mean that the others are all doing what management wants them to do without wading into contentious but important areas. Simply having a team hired is wonderful propaganda for Google management because people can make exactly this claim without going into specifics.
This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets.
It emphasises blackness as an identity, i.e. it is a proper noun, the name of an ethnic group, and not just an adjective describing their skin colour.
I can't say I agree that society should be fracturing into more identities instead of fewer, or that people should strongly identify with their race, but that's the trend and that's we're at with the terminology.
> This is now in the official style guides of several major media outlets.
It's not particularly new; labels used as names of racial identity groups have been capitalized for a long time; “Black” as a proper noun or proper adjective in that context has been capitalized for a long time (used as a common adjective describing skin color it isn't, and the usages can be hard to differentiate otherwise.)
Is blackness an identity though? I feels rather racist to diminish substantial cultural differences and experiences just because a group of people may have one common physical characteristic.
I'm far from an expert on this topic, but I believe the reasoning is that (at least in the USA), African-American ancestral links don't necessarily go back far enough to identify an ethnic group because of slavery. In the absence of the ability to say e.g. "I'm from the Yoruba people", the primary group identification just becomes Black. I agree that it seems kind of reductive from the outside, but I'm mostly inclined to let people decide their own names.
It's an editorial style that some publications (including CNN) are adopting in service of racial sensitivity. CNN has mandated that all staff must capitalize both "Black" and "White" [1]:
> Both words denote a racial or ethnic identity and therefore should be upper case when referring to a person, community, culture, etc., in the same way CNN capitalizes other descriptors of race, ethnicity and shared identity, including African American, Native American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Asian American, African, and other terms
It’s remarkable that journalists can claim, as the AP does, that white peoples don’t have a shared culture when they also write articles ascribing a culture to white people and blaming it for all of society’s problems. The obvious inconsistency just seems like racism against white people.
I was surprised that so many NYT reader comments (including almost all of the 'NYT Picks' comments) disagree with the decision.
I read the NYT comments somewhat regularly and cannot recall ever seeing such a high proportion of the highlighted comments criticizing the NYT's position.
I give the NYT credit for highlighting these many critical comments, which appear to reflect the sentiment of the 'Reader Picks' comments as well.
Being black is mostly an empirical fact. But being Black is about your experience and culture. Calling a random black person "Black" is making the same mistake as calling a random black person "African American".
> In some contexts, the meaning of the words ('racist' and 'sexist') has shifted from “assigning lower value to a person because of their race or gender” to “infidel” and “heretic”. If you question virgin birth, you don’t correct important facts. You state that you are a heretic, and you’ll be ostracized.
> Every religious movement asks its adherents for a public commitment to a sacred creed to show allegiance. The creed cannot be literally true, or random people would profess it. If you deny it, you will invoke ire of all adherents. If you go down defending it, you are a martyr.
> This leads to some unpleasant effects on the margins, but many young people see a genuine need for a new, atheist religious movement, since both the theist religions and the rationalist liberalism of previous generations are failing to adress their social and existential issues.
LatinX. As a native Spanish speaker I never understood the X and now I get it. Anyways is incorrect according to the Real Academy of the Spanish Language
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.
Any word can be worked into any language if the speakers care.
The truth the inventors and promoters of "Latinx" don't want to face is that Latinos, African-Americans, and almost every other minority is far far more intolerant of everything LGBTQQIA2etc. than liberal elites are.
Pew polls in 2019 showed that 49% of Black Americans did not believe gay people should be allowed to be married. And the more liberal elites try to change people's day-to-day lives in intrusive ways to force them to accept LGBTetc. (like with awkward forced language) the more and more such groups will repel from accepting that.
Truly astounding when the rallying cry to "end white supremacy" and "give representation to underprivileged/underrepresented groups" involves light-skinned Anglophone people dictating to darker-skinned Spanish-speaking people how the Spanish language should work, and in a way that betrays total ignorance of actually communicating in Spanish.
Wow, that's unbelievable! Much of the dialogue in the screenshots is extreme cringe. Do wokes ever interact with actual human beings, not to mention high school kids? And I still don't know how we're supposed to pronounce "Mx" like in the developer's handle. "Mix?" "Mux?" (Would a male be "Demux" in this scheme?)
The saddest part are the glowing reviews in Vice Motherboard and The Verge.
Not everyone is as prejudiced as to judge something from screenshots alone. You need to see at least one episode. It kicks left and right, and is funny, unless you take yourself too seriously.
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 of the cool club. The vast majority of Latinos have never heard of it, and most of those who have don't like it.
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.
There is also Chicanx [..] Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for Mexican Americans in the United States. The identity has also evolved into Xicano or Xicana and, more recently, Xicanx. Chicano/a is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings.[..]
I would think Latino/a applied more to Europe than in the Americas. When I first came to the States, I was surprised that Mexican-Americans were called Latino/a. Hispanic seemed more apt/correct than Latin. I had always associated it with Rome, not Spain.
The Latins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latins [..] The Latins were originally an Italic tribe in ancient central Italy from Latium. As Roman power and colonization spread Latin culture, during the Roman Empire, Latins came to mean mostly unified Italic Latin-speaking people and the Latin-speaking people of Dacia, Iberia, Illyria, and Gaul whose land was settled by Roman colonists (see Latin peoples). Today, Latin people are those whose languages are derived from Latin; Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanians, etc.
In the late 15th–16th centuries, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Portugal and Spain began to create world empires. In consequence, by the mid-19th century, the former American colonies of these nations became known as Latin America and this region's inhabitants as Latin Americans.[..]
why is it even being mentioned? i miss hacker culture from the early internet, where it didnt matter your age, your sexuality, your "race"; we're all human beings :/
here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. like seriously, how does it continue to exist? is it just an excuse? how can you look at a whole population and just hate em? is it something like an emotion? and if so, how do we solve it? it can't be corrected with education if it's a feeling. people can't help their feelings. drugs?
> here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil".
In South Africa they teach young schoolchildren about the country's apartheid history (and knowing this history is a good thing, because it provides context for the country's modern day inequality).
Sadly there are some older generations who have oppposing (and often contradictory) views of exactly how and why said history played out the way it did.
This disagreement of history often leads to modern day racism.
Sadly it's here to stay - at least for a while still - but I do hope that one day it becomes a thing the past.
EDIT: I see you removed your opening line. Leaving it here for context to my comment.
Yugoslavia is a cautionary tale. Humans (and possibly much older than humans) have an builtin in-group / out-group mechanism which, left unchecked, leads to widespread ethnic hatred. It doesn't take much to prime the bomb besides a steady dose of confirmation of the other group's evil ways, of which we have an ample supply thanks to the proliferation of sensationalistic (social) media. Our lives have become an incessant outrage stream. The clock is ticking...
Hacker culture was born at the zenith of American liberalism, just after its ideals had triumphed over Soviet Union's self-destructing spiral. Those times may never come back, and liberalism itself is on life support :(
> it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad.
The problem here is the presentation of a counterexample in this way is casting it as an exception, and implicitly confirming the validity of the negative stereotype as the default assumption:
This is also the underlying problem with certain compliments, eg. "Wow, you're a really good developer (unlike most women)!", "You're so well spoken (unlike most Black people)!", and so on.
Given the human ability to rationalize, even a never-ending flood of in-your-face counterexamples is more likely to provoke reactions like "Well, women are just less talented developers on average, of course there are exceptions", and so on.
Weird they don't say how many employees signed this letter. I guess saying ".02% of Googlers send letter" doesn't have quite the impact as an unstated number of employees.
Also interesting how they bring up diversity figures when talking about Timnit leaving, but not that these employees are trying to get Megan Kacholia fired or demoted...yes that's right - a Woman in a field composed mostly of Men(to borrow the article's rhetoric). Not only that, but a Woman with Children of Color.
"In a message sent to Pichai and others that linked to the letter, Alex Hanna, a senior research scientist on the Ethical AI team, said it was sent on behalf of her team. A source familiar with the team said it includes roughly a dozen members."
That's a strange way of looking at things. The other 199988 employees aren't on her team. If they had circulated their letter widely and then only got 12 signees then we could say only 6 thousandths of a percent supported the letter.
Yeah but her own team will probably be the most likely to advocate for her.
Go to any university in the US right after a prof is denied tenure. His students will inevitably protest this decision the loudest.
Also, what were they supposed to do after she sent an email to a huge listserv at the company telling all her subordinates that they should not participate in the company's D&I initiatives and should essentially quit working there? You can't pay people to tell your own employees to stop working for you...
Firing someone is not automatically bad if they happen to check particular boxes. It's the other way around: Firing someone because they happen to check particular boxes is an issue.
If someone is actively bad at their job or is sabotaging others in the workplace, it's quite reasonable to demand their resignation regardless of their sex, age, or family situation, even if it's unpleasant.
This is bound to be a sticky wicket with no easy answers, given the detail that this group is tasked with studying how to do "ethics" better and the charge is the company can't meet the stated standard of ethics for how it treats its own people internally and this is what led to the departure of the employee in question whose identity makes it hard to claim the charge is wrong.
I don't know if the charge is correct or not. I'm guessing it is, but I'm really just saying appearances look pretty damning here and there isn't likely to be a convenient means to successfully white-wash the story.
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?
It was, yes. Public statements she made before getting fired include:
> A Black woman can't survive around here doing any type of research let alone research thats designed to make those in the majority uncomfortable. And guess who can apparently unilaterally order you to do things without even thinking you're someone they should converse with. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824)
> [The VPs in her org] are very useful for gaslighting and marginalizing Black women to eternity. They're very useful for blocking any upstream work that needs to be done to change the status quo. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331772727615602690)
She's Eritrean-born and identifies as Black. Races aren't an exact science but social constructs. There's a gradual continuum in people's appearance along geographical areas, linking Sub-Saharan west Africa where most slaves were taken from in the Atlantic slave trade, to East Africa, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the Mediterranean coast, to central Europe to Scandinavia to Siberia to Central Asia to East Asia to Inuits to Native Americans etc. No sharp borders.
The question is how geographically localized that "well defined group" is. Are Eritreans in the same well defined group as Ghanans or as Lebanese? Are Cypriots the same as Lebanese or Italians? Are Italians in the same well defined group as Greeks or as Germans? Are Germans like Slovaks or like the Sami?
You can surely say that the overlap in a Ghanan and a Sami person's ancestry is quite small regarding recent millennia. But I don't see well defined groups at all. The reason it seems so in the US is because of the huge Western European (German/British) immigration early on and the large population of descendants of West African slaves. These two are sharply distinguishable (discounting for intermixing effects) but there are no "well defined groups" such as "black" and "white" when looking at it globally, not just in America. They are linked continuously via North/East Africans/Arabs/Turks and Mediterraneans.
This is an old paper. A lot more work has been done on Japanese and on Kalash (see Reich) and the Altaic language family is on the backfoot these days. Reich himself is also very sloppy with attributions about Dravidian language.
So what, someone being born in Europe does not automatically make them white. It just seems fishy to me. When she’s getting this amount of privilege from “being black”, saying that she identifies as black when she is clearly not black should not be enough.
Well, seems like other black people recognize her as black too, so I don't know what else can you expect. A person identifies as part of a group and the group agrees.
It's kind of like asking if Obama is really African American/Black. Races aren't sharply divided, it's a social grouping thing based on history, culture, etc.
Haile Selassie is also quite commonly regarded as having been Black despite not looking like "stereotypically black". Edit: although seemingly he did not self-identify as "negro" (term of the time), but is looked up to as a black emperor by rastas.
They are getting downvoted but may be genuine. I as a European person also didn't immediately see her as black, just based on appearance. Closer to North African / Arab / Middle Eastern. Given that Eritrea is right next to the Arabian peninsula, it's not surprising.
It wasn't necessarily meant as an insult. Perhaps in America it's clear she's black, in countries with more North African and Middle Eastern immigration, it may not be.
The geographic distance from Eritrea to West Africa is the same as to Denmark (like 5000 km) and the terrain isn't easy to traverse. If someone imagines all black people "must" look the typical West African way (Ghana, Ivory Coast etc), they may be legit confused when seeing someone from the other side of the continent. The reason that both are considered black is social.
She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”. The first is a common adjective that never really applies to humans except very loosely, the second is a racial identity group formed by and defined largely through oppression by European and (in US usage; usage and identity elsewhere has evolved through different local forces and experiences) later European-descended American bigots, that has only loose correlation to complexion, ultimately starting with the division of humanity (by people in the last of these groups) fairly arbitrarily into the three broad racial groups of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which later evolved into White, Black, and the last split into Asian and Native American.
Hey, look, I'm not the engineer of the European oppression that created the modern racial identities (largely through shared experience of oppression, except White identity, which was created through shared experience as oppressors) and shaped most of the language around those identities. If you want to argue that the categories make no fundamental sense, you aren't wrong in their original delineation; they are groups of shared experience (which is also why even when the terms are the same or deeply etymologically linked, they have different concrete meaning in places where the historical experience worked differently; places, for instance, where the “one drop rule” [0] was a major historical force will, all other things being equal, have a far more expansive concept of “Blackness”.)
That’s a lot of words and I don’t really understand what you’re saying, but she is Black and identifies as Black. Or is she just a tool of the patriarchy for adopting such grossly over simplified self-descriptions?
She wasn't fired. She resigned, because of a her-way-or-the-highway mentality.
FTA: In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, she said Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because it felt that her email reflected "behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."
Because the academic standard for research, and the original motivation for tenure, allows for researchers to criticize anyone, including their own institution, as long as it's done and presented as the proper product of research. In other words, if a researcher is doing their research properly, it shouldn't matter if they're attacking their own institution or even colleagues, because it passes scientific muster and the quality of the research is what justifies it.
When companies like Google or IBM employee researchers, they're positioning themselves as supporting that model of inquiry, and the benefit for them is the credibility that comes from participation in scientific inquiry. Gebru attacking Google's AI practices actually lends Google credibility for disinterestedly supporting basic research and taking its results seriously.
A company that employs an ethicist and takes that ethicist's output seriously even when it challenges the company is a company that genuinely cares about the academic standard in that field. A company that hires an ethicist and then fires them when they point out the company's wrongdoing is sounding an alarm about their own unethical conduct.
The part I struggle to understand here is how Google could be so stupid. Who cares, from a commercial perspective, if an academic they employ drags them? Keeping Gebru on payroll was straightforwardly purchased ethical credibility; firing her is a PR disaster and an open statement that their ethics AI group is a propaganda unit rather than a genuine research entity. It would have been trivial, even beneficial, to air the academic dispute. They gained nothing by retracting her paper and then firing her.
We praise whistleblowers left and right on HN, at the expense of objectivity (assange, snowden, et al), despite ethical issues with them. Yet when a woman of color does it, "oh they are their own company and can do what they want and it's her fault for trying to be ethical in this space in industry." What??
Had a white male done this, it's hard not to think he'd be praised as a hero on here.
Maybe the reason it isn't praised in this case isn't due to her being a woman of color but due to other differences in this case and those that are praised?
If that were the case there wouldn't be "Tensions in Google's ethical AI group" would there be? Read the article, clearly the team, and many Google employees, were angered by this.
Perhaps we shouldn't just sweep it under the rug. It seems there is very real merit, this was not just a disgruntled employee. The subject matter is directly related to diversity - to remove race is to, again, cover up the systemic race issues we face as a society.
You'd be hard-pressed to find an ethical issue with how Edward Snowden handled the revelation of mass illegal spying on the American people.
And I don't think anyone's disputing her desire to promote and encourage ethical implementations of AI technology. The crux of this issue is how you handle yourself, and it seems the more I read about how she handled these things, the more it seems like how children act.
"If I don't get my way, I'm quitting!"
Yeah, you get to sit atop your high horse and lord your morality over the rest of the mortals beneath you. You don't actually get to do shit, though, and you've actively lost the ability to control how this unfolds, at least at Google.
Again, if that were the case, there wouldn't be "tensions in google's ethical AI group."
They're clearly unhappy, and so are many google employees. This clearly isn't just one person, this clearly is bigger than that.
> You'd be hard-pressed to find an ethical issue with how Edward Snowden handled the revelation of mass illegal spying on the American people.
What ethical issue is there with the revelation of problems in the ethical AI division of google? You just "don't like how they act." I've heard many people say the same of individuals on street corners...not a great look.
The problem, as I stated in another comment, is that these people don't really understand what their job is and that's causing this confusion.
Their job is to build a bulwark for the company to guard it against negative press, and that will allow Google to create an AI that leverages all its data and currently existing infrastructure to increase shareholder value. They actually think their job is to prevent bad things from happening. Its not, and that's where the confusion is occurring. That confusion is turning into frustration, which in turn becomes anger.
You'll probably say something like, "Well that's a cynical viewpoint..."
Any company's "Ethics" committee/board is there to do that. Just like Human Resources is there to protect the company from you, not you from the company.
The only problem is that entirely too many Googlers think they're actually employed to make the world a better place. They're employed to create shareholder value. Sometimes making the world a better place will align with increasing shareholder value. Sometimes it won't.
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.
> We praise whistleblowers left and right on HN, at the expense of objectivity (assange, snowden, et al), despite ethical issues with them.
HN has a large audience with a broad range of opinions. In my opinion, Snowden and Manning are traitors and the latter should have been left in prison.
> Had a white male done this, it's hard not to think he'd be praised as a hero on here.
I'd be equally dismissive of any person who committed the following actions.
1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter.
2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity.
3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided.
> HN has a large audience with a broad range of opinions. In my opinion, Snowden and Manning are traitors and the latter should have been left in prison.
Just like any large audience a hive mind exists. There are more posts in favor of Snowden/Assange on here than in favor of this google employee. In general, more come to their defense, than hers, despite doing similar things.
Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
> Just like any large audience a hive mind exists. There are more posts in favor of Snowden/Assange on here than in favor of this google employee. In general, more come to their defense, than hers, despite doing similar things.
These cases are completely different.
Snowden and Assange exposed a global surveillance network that many are opposed to. I think of Snowden as the Kim Philby of the 21st century but that's a different discussion.
Dr. Gebu disagreed with the peer reviews of a paper, threatened to resign, and Google accepted her resignation.
> Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
She may feel that her paper was rejected because the reviewers are racist; I think it's more likely that they disagreed with the quality of the work. There was probably an administrative screw-up with its submission, though.
Neither of us can prove anything. It's unlikely that all the facts will come out in any event; Google would settle the case if it went to court.
> I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
Have you read the email (https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) that she sent? Would you expect to keep your job if you sent a similar email at work? Diversity is the third rail of modern companies - criticize or discourage it and you're gone.
> If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
Anonymous peer reviews are a standard practice in industry and academia. If you demand the names of reviewers and threaten to resign if they aren't provided then don't be surprised if your employment ends.
I think you're missing the point: companies like Google set up research units like this to act like tenured positions, like mini-universities, and then employ academics like Gebru just so they get the credibility that comes with employing them. "See, we're not all about profit, we support basic research in this area, even when it criticizes our other work."
Critical to that credibility is actually having the same standards as Harvard with respect to allowing the researchers to publish what they will, whether or not they're the target. By appearing to fire Gebru because her paper was insufficiently pro-Google, they damaged their whole purpose of having an ethical AI group.
The demands of the group may seem childish or absurdly far-reaching, but if Google wants to rebuild their credibility here, this is the standard they have to hit. Otherwise, their own researchers have less credibility because their output will be viewed as "approved by Google management", not real research. This is critical if they need to say "our own AI ethicists say this is ok."
Google didn't fire her for her research, they fired her for being toxic. She was toxic because some of her coworkers didn't accept her research, but most people would have handled the situation without being toxic and if she did she wouldn't have gotten fired.
The only evidence of toxicity was an email she sent after being forced to retract a paper that she wouldn't have to retract under proper academic circumstances, based on feedback they weren't even going to provide to her.
That's not toxic, that's anger. One angry incident, justified or not, does not make the case for firing a "toxic" employee.
>The only evidence of toxicity was an email she sent after being forced to retract a paper that she wouldn't have to retract under proper academic circumstances, based on feedback they weren't even going to provide to her.
"I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias"
I went back and looked at Timnit's twitter history. She has a history of calling out her bosses and saying outrageous things, from well before this incident. People have linked, for example, a tweet where she called out Jeff Dean based on things he said in an internal meeting, and he had to do a bunch of apologizing and backtracking. I can't see how an employee can remain viable after doing that.
She also doxxed an HRBP despite having no evidence she was involved during Gebru's firing. I do think she comes off as more passionate than "toxic." a lot of otherwise good people say regrettable things. My issue is that activists will take her accusations of racism at face value, but will dismiss anything outright ridiculous as irrelevant. You can't have it both ways.
I disagree. There were several incidents where she appears toxic (and we only know about the ones made public).
1. Absolutely refusing to update her paper with feedback from a colleague - the whole purpose of the internal review
2. Demanding that Google reveal who gave her critical feedback - presumably to attack them in some way
3. Sending an e-mail to her superiors/colleagues, making ultimatums and threatening to leave if her demands were not met
4. Sending a message to a group at Google, telling them to abandon any attempts to help Google with diversity initiatives and instead start attacking their co-workers
5. Publicly blaming Google and saying that she was "fired" for an e-mail. She was relying on information assymetry, knowing that Google would be hesitant to respond fully to all allegations
You forgot publicly calling both of the best known researchers in the AI revolution racist: Yann LeCunn and Jeff Dean (her manager's manager). And suing her own employer for not being feminist enough, or something.
From what I understand, they didn't fire her, they accepted her resignation?
When you append, "Or I will leave" to a request and the company isn't interested in your request, you're resigning. You can dress it up in fancy language, but that's the bottom line.
It's good to be critical and reflect on the company you're working for. There are bad cultures and attitudes in any big company, not just tech.
But if you're going to sprout your opinions publically about your (ex)-employer like that, sorry, but I wouldn't want her in my team. She sounds like too much of a headache to deal with. Her work must be truly extraordinary to warrent having that headache.
I wouldn't want to run a racist company. And I wouldn't want to create phony pretense for firing someone if there was ostensibly valid justification they could have used.
I'm pretty sure her work as an ethicist can be summarized as "Any application of AI/ML must be stopped until it is absolutely GUARANTEED that there won't be anything that could be deemed discriminatory by proponents of critical race/gender theory." Which is obviously an untenable position for a tech company.
I think she will be happy when we develop natural language understanding to the degree where we could implement an automatic critical theory censor, that would check for undesirable biases.
> when we develop natural language understanding to the degree where we could implement an automatic critical theory censor, that would check for undesirable biases.
That sounds like more of a nightmare scenario than having to deal with this person... Its hard to even know where to begin with how something like this could go off the rails easily.
Indeed. Imagine how people of color feel at the possibility of an AI running ever-larger parts of society that has racism built right into it at the start because the people building it are blind to anything but the most obvious instances of it.
Like entirely too many people, you're confusing "racism" with "prejudice". They're not the same thing.
Actual racism is very rare in America. Prejudice is commonplace and has a lot more to do with the inherent tribalism of humanity than it does actual malice for someone's "race". And to take it even further, I think if people were honest, what they really dislike is cultural differences that vary dramatically from theirs.
To me this is just like trans issues... we'll never get anywhere significant with this stuff, because in order to come up with meaningful answers, you have to ask meaningful, hard questions. No one wants to ask these kinds of questions, because no one wants to have to deal with the answers that may come up, because that will also invite further study and further difficult, unpleasant conversations.
> She sounds like too much of a headache to deal with.
Yeah and your average software engineer is roses.
Difference is engineers positively impact the bottom line and society is less tolerant (empirically researched fact) of pushback from women or people of color.
For sure there may be complications on both sides of this issue but let’s not pretend that this shit isn’t real.
This is it exactly. She's applying a standard of academic rigor to Google and they can either accept it or not. If they want to filter what kind of research they publish, then they have to admit to themselves (and their employees) that they baking pro-Google bias into their work and it need not be taken too seriously by academics. Maybe that kind of bias is irrelevant when you're publishing algorithm or mathematical work where bias is less inherent, but if you have an AI Ethics team you should be prepared for some controversy. And they clearly weren't and panicked.
Because this particular job does require a certain independence to do it properly. If business concerns would override and silence the Ethical AI team, then you might as well not have one in the first place. It would be purely a PR thing, which it well might have been after all.
Having someone that is known to speak their mind in such a team does lend it more credibility. But you also can't complain if they then speak their mind about things you would like them to shut up about.
The paper she was fired over was leaked, though, and it's.. not novel.
It's the same things everyone else has been saying for years (global warming bad, also don't build a racist speech reproducer), and Google wanted her to reference their efforts to mitigate those things in addition to repeating yet again that they can happen. Self-serving? Sure, but not really censorship and honestly would make the paper better to include analysis of mitigations.
>Google wanted her to reference their efforts to mitigate those things in addition to repeating yet again that they can happen. Self-serving? Sure, but not really censorship.
You have a really funny world-view where compelled speech doesn't fall in the censorship bucket.
My employer asks me to change wording or add in bits of marketing fluff to my presentations all the time and I don’t go screaming to the hills for ‘compelled speech’. If you’re producing work on your companies dime it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they want you to represent the company well.
For Google, a huge percentage of the value in having an ethical AI division comes from having a credible and independent collection of experts who oversee the company's efforts. The minute that team ceases to be viewed as independent and credible, their value to Google is vastly diminished.
What Google wants to say to the world is "hey, you should totally trust us, we have the best ethical AI people in the field looking over our shoulder!" But now Google can't say that, because the world knows that their experts aren't completely free to exercise judgement or state their opinions. That may only be true to a limited extent, but the damage to Google is larger: mostly because we don't know how limited it is.
Insofar as your employer feels free to add marketing fluff to your presentations, that's because your value to the company is not predicated on your being an independent voice who provides a check on management.
Is there any chance evidence to suggest that they hired Timnit merely as a PR show, rather than because they actually wanted a good product?
Although it’s fun to assume bad faith when it comes to every action by every company, she was not supposed to be an independent critic to launder evil. She was supposed to work in cooperation with them to make a high quality product. They don’t want to create something that causes suffering. Even if you don’t buy that their motivation was pure, doing so would obviously be bad for business. What good is a product that only works for white people?
Instead of adding perspective and cooperatively furthering a unified goal, she was divisive and created dysfunction.
She was in an incredibly privileged position to do good and shape the future of some civilization-changing technologies. Instead of shaping a better future, she threw hand grenades and stuck wrenches in gears. Now not only does the future of their tech lack her perspective, but they are unlikely to engage with anyone who even smells like they could be a bad-faith activist.
> Is there any chance evidence to suggest that they hired Timnit merely as a PR show, rather than because they actually wanted a good product?
I didn't mean to imply that the ethical AI team is empty PR. What I'm saying is that the obvious corporate justification for an (expensive!) AI ethics team is to reassure regulators and customers that Google's AI techniques will follow best ethical practices. Obviously the best way for Google to achieve that goal is to hire a bunch of really strong researchers, and then incorporate their recommendations into Google's products. And of course, to have those researchers publish their findings so that the world can see that a standard is being followed.
But the flipside can also be true, and damaging the credibility of your ethical AI team comes at a cost. It would not surprise me if some observers have come to negative conclusions about the independence of Google's researchers, which means those people are more likely to mistrust Google's products in the future. The irony is that even if Google has the very best intentions, they might now find it harder to convince people of this. This does meaningful harm to Google, and nothing Google's gotten out of this mess has been worth that cost.
But Google didn't ask her to add the references, they demanded she retract the paper. In the meeting when they demanded the retraction they refused to even explain why.
If those references to recent developments were the real issue, it seems very odd that Google responded that way.
Was she fired over the paper? Or was she let go because she, with a position as a manager, told other people at Google not to participate in the DEI program because it was useless?
I think a third explanation is more likely: management already had reasons to want to get rid of her and her 'do as I say or I quit!' email provided a convenient excuse to do so.
From the type of things people are saying on r/machinelearning about what she was like to work with, it's not hard to imagine what those reasons might have been.
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.
Looks like Timnit Gebru made an ultimatum and offered her resignation if the terms of the ultimatum were not met. Google accepted her resignation and chose to have it effective immediately (as is often the case when you resign and a company feels like it would not be beneficial to have a longer departure period).
It's not like I'm taking only the words of others. I'm reading what Gebru herself chose to put out there.
I agree that it could be viewed as firing language, but only if we had no context.
However, we have context. We know that an ultimatum including a resignation threat was given.
Accepting that resignation and making the termination of their employment relationship immediate with some extra "Yeah, this is for the best" language doesn't mean that she was fired.
If you only want to consider the limited context of ignoring that she submitted a resignation ultimatum, aren't you just cherry picking?
No, I am not ignoring the context. If anything, phrasing Google's response as additional "Yeah, this is for the best" language while denying her terms for ending employment (when in practice it is very rare to immediately let someone go when they want to set up an exit date on their own terms) is cherry picking.
Even an ethics researcher at Google can't give ultimatums. Who elected her the supreme leader of AI ethics? For example I have read her papers and Twitter messages and never have I seen any shred of inclusiveness towards my race. If some people are passionate and strive to do something, work hard and advance in their career, then all their accomplishments can be explained away as race privilege. The irony is that she's being presented as a fighter for equality.
Because the entire reason for hiring someone like this is to find issues with what you're doing and stop them. The entire position is a pre-emptive move to stop government from stepping in to regulate the company. If you fire the person the second they talk about something they feel you're doing wrong, it kind of defeats the entire purpose (IMO).
You literally hired this person to the e-brake on your AI program and then fire them when they tell you it's time to stop.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this particular firing, but there's a very good reason for the company to employ someone who publicly disagrees with the way a particular department is being run or a decision they've made.
Candidly: this would be another example of why unions exist. Just because you publicly disagree with the company doesn't mean they should have carte blanche to fire you.
Exactly - your last paragraph is the crux for me. They could have been fired for no reason, and no notice under the most common at-will agreements. The system does not favor employees at all, and I wish we were all more angry at that.
Is the problem that you can be let go at any time or that if that happens at an inopportune moment you can lose everything? With better social safety nets we (in the USA) wouldn't have to tie our well-being to a Lovecraftian body of law entangling employment with every other aspect of our lives, and it wouldn't be a big deal in the first place if employment ended.
> 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 you as citizen if you criticize their dirty laundry in public.
Yeah, but you're making a legal, not moral, argument. I argue that we often consider it unethical for government to silence its citizens, regardless of the law governing that country. Why we accept this in private companies? Should that be the nature of the ownership and why?
Because Companies and Governments are different entities?
I can easily choose which company I want to work for, switching countries is something much harder.
A government that does not like what I say can do all sorts of horrible things, jail me, confiscate property and event kill me. Companies generally do not have that power.
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.
Ah, way to sneak some Hillary-bashing into a completely unrelated discussion. Friendly reminder that three million more people wanted to hire her than the other guy.
Not only that, but she threatened Google with a lawsuit _before_ any of the current drama happened (excerpt from her email with regards to the recent firing/resignation):
> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
That lawsuit threat is really a critical contextual element here. Having a manager who's openly threatening to sue the same company she acts as a manager for creates a host of complicated legal issues for the corporation.
It honestly baffles me. I also expect had I - or any of the people I know - made similar threats, we would be fired on very short notice. The fact that Google just let this past threat slide seems highly unusual to me.
It just makes you wonder how much toxic behaviour did her managers put up with before deciding that enough is enough, and (more or less) firing a prominent, visible, black, female AI ethicist working in the field of gender equality and racial discrimination. They knew perfectly well how damaging it could have been and yet decided they had enough.
I find her totally out of line and disagree with her politics but I have to give her that in some sense she is quite brave. Most people would never consider tweeting out something like this because they'd be afraid of getting fired immediately and also suffering a reputational damage that would make applying for future jobs difficult. But she doesn't seem to be fazed by this.
IMHO she's an unethical ethicist, rude, and presumptuous at best. She has no idea what kind of depredations may have gone on in the lives of people she calls "privileged". I look like a typical fat white bald businessguy. I have been thrown into jail unjustly, raped, beaten, kicked out of schools and shunned from my social group for things I didn't do and would never do, rejected by multiple girlfriends' families because I was not in the right minority group, and more.
She has no idea what's gone on in their lives. They on the other hand appear to be treating her with as much public kindness as she is dishing out hatred (publicly).
Since when do people use "gaslighting" this way? She and colleagues seem to use it left and right on Twitter regarding all kinds of behaviors. I thought it had a quite specific meaning in the context of narcissist abusers intentionally making their victims doubt their own sanity.
They are using storytelling and emotion as a replacement for study and analysis - the preferred method of identity politics.
Identity politics means individuality-less politics, where individuals are seen as mere parts of a group, or symbols for the common suffering of the group, and not by themselves. You hurt one you hurt the whole group, is the way they are thinking.
We have seen this recently in the Timnit vs Yann LeCun and Pedro vs Anima scandals, even the allies of wokes would be accused of being racist the moment they dared express a slightly more nuanced opinion. You have to approve the lead woke and not add anything or you're instantly the enemy.
"gaslighting" does have the specific meaning you describe, or at least it used to, but these days it's mostly just used to mean "saying something I disagree with." It seems to come from a special kind of narcissism in which people are so devoutly convinced of their own moral rectitude that they can't believe anyone might disagree with them in good faith. They're so cocooned in their bubble that they can't process anything resembling a contradictory opinion; it sends them into emotional haywire and their only response is to cry victim.
When I hear someone talking about "gaslighting" it significantly lowers my inclination to take them seriously.
One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation?
I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence.
It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it. Conversely, it may be difficult to remain employed and continue drawing that paycheck if you publish research that does not portray your employer in a good light, especially if the underlying reason for your role is public relations.
Here's a fun experiment: open up Alphabet's annual report from last year [goog10-k2019], search for the keyword "ethic", and there are two hits, both under item 1A, risk factors. The latter keyword match for "ethic" in the 10-K is regarding supply chain risks, and the potential for unethical behaviour by alphabet's suppliers. But the former keyword match is far more interesting:
> Our ongoing investment in new businesses, products, services, and technologies is inherently risky, and could disrupt our current operations and harm our financial condition and operating results.
[...]
> In addition, new and evolving products and services, including those that use artificial intelligence and machine learning, raise ethical, technological, legal, regulatory, and other challenges, which may negatively affect our brands and demand for our products and services. Because all of these new ventures are inherently risky, no assurance can be given that such strategies and offerings will be successful and will not harm our reputation, financial condition, and operating results.
the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_
Exactly. The secondary motivation is the possibility of benefiting from some basic research. It's ultimately a credibility play, which makes their handling of the whole affair so mind-bogglingly dumb. There would have been no problem at all for Gebru to have presented her supposedly anti-Google paper; zero practical consequence for Google.
As we debate this, Google has been credibibly accused of the most basic and wide-ranging antitrust violations, and whether they actually pay a price for it, assuming the accusations are true, isn't a slam dunk.
Knowingly committing ethical violations with AI seems likely pretty low on their list of concerns.
Without actually knowing the history, I think it's probably stupidly conceived. We seem to generally imagine that the biggest problem or challenge with AI is ethics because we frame ethics as being largely rooted in something emotional, like empathy or compassion, and not logic.
The movie I, Robot explores what happens when "logic" is taken to its logical outcome by an AI. It posits a robot with feelings as the antidote to this issue.
We tend to overlook the fact that humans themselves come in varying flavors with regards to degree of emotional affect, empathy, compassion, etc and how ethical they are. We haven't gotten this sorted for humanity yet and when tech goes sideways and hurts many people, we like to blame it on the tech itself fundamentally lacking "a heart" or ethics instead of blaming it on the character defects of the architects of the tech.
We still haven't really figured out how to do human intelligence well and that's scary and not something we want to admit, so we project our deficiencies onto the tech and this incident is uncomfortably casting light on the fact that it's not really clear cut like that. It's really not the case that you can readily separate the people from the tech when it comes to things we label "ethics."
I love this take but it's way too over-thought. As is the PR explanation.
I'd be willing to bet some money on it being simply the result of some employees saying, "AI ethics is super important. We feel strongly there should be people working on AI ethics to make sure it's not racist or sexist". And anyone who objected was yelled at with words to the effect of, "are you saying ethics isn't important? do you not care about ethics?" until opposition was silenced and management felt it was a small sop to quiet the ranks.
The right approach to this would have been to say to those advocating for it the following:
"Ethics is of course tremendously important. That's why we carefully select our workforce and insist on the highest ethical standards from everyone, in their work. Ethics is not something that can be compartmentalised or delegated to a separate team. Ethics underlies all we do. If you see something you believe might be unethical, please raise it with your manager so it can be resolved company wide. Until then, return to work."
Creating a dedicated ethics team was a dumb idea because it can only possibly end like this: you hire people and tell them "your job is to ensure we are ethical" and they're not going to sit back and say, you know boss, I sniffed around and everything seemed above board. Nothing for me to do here right now. I'll check back in a month. Of course they're going to see unethical stuff everywhere they look, regardless of merit. Their salary literally depends on it.
I'd be willing to bet some money on it being simply the result of some employees saying, "AI ethics is super important. We feel strongly there should be people working on AI ethics to make sure it's not racist or sexist".
Oh, no doubt. But that scenario would be rooted in this larger context of how we generally relate to this topic.
Creating a dedicated ethics team was a dumb idea because it can only possibly end like this
I agree, which is why I say "it's probably stupidly conceived."
I find social stuff fascinating and I've had the following college classes: Intro to Psychology; Social Psychology; Negotiation and Conflict Management. I also raised two fairly Aspie-ish sons and I've had to explain social things to them in very exacting terms, which forced me to really up my game on being precise in order for it to be useful to them. My sons and I still look for things that meet our rigorous standards for "How do you know that's actually accurate?" because social phenomenon are inherently hard to test: People behave differently when they know "This is a test. This is only a test." than they do in real life (which is why I think UBI experiments are useless: These people know the study will end and the money will stop rolling in, so it doesn't tell you how people would really behave if we really instituted a UBI).
Anyway, I find social stuff fascinating and people routinely interpret my social observations as being ethical or moral judgements and I get this reputation for being a real judgy bitch, basically, even though I"m a lot less judgy than most people. But when push comes to shove, "ethics" is generally about determining which behaviors protect one or both of two things: individuals from group abuse or groups from individual abuse ("tragedy of the commons" type stuff et al).
So when I talk about what works or what doesn't, in some sense I am talking about ethics, but I'm usually not trying to be some kind of moralizing priss, which is how that gets interpreted. I'm usually trying to say something like "Objectively speaking, you can't be both heavy and light at the same time. That fundamentally doesn't parse." and then someone is all up in arms about "Don't talk about my momma!!!! grrrrr!" type stuff.
So I feel strongly that what they really were probably wanting to study is "How do we do AI well in ways that interact with this social stuff like racism?" and out popped the word ethics because that's how people think of that. And it was a terrible idea on the face of it because of the inherent assumption of judgment rather than a more objective framing about studying AI and social phenomenon and how does that work? When you start using AI to do things like parse faces, what are the practical pain points there that we need to be aware of and try to address?
But I think most people can't readily separate that out in that way, which is part of why I am so often in hot water for saying "Well, actually, I think that simply doesn't work because...." And when I say that about social phenomenon, I am often de facto talking about "human ethics" whether I want to be or not and it's very often a giant pile of manure that I've just stepped into.
Almost there. Each individual comes with a distinct set of biases. Social collective action is the contextual weighted average of those individual biases. This results in quite resilient societies: at equilibrium individual biases balance each other across the population, small changes in a relatively small number of individual preferences result in societal course corrections, avoiding dangerous shocks. Smooth ride.
A subtle AI risk is simply the centralization of the decision making process. This leads to the reinforcement of some subset of biases, until they completely overshadow alternative options. The system becomes rigid, having lost its day-to-day individual level feedback, thus its capacity to adapt to new circumstances. Sooner or later, it will fail.
See also 'too big to fail' and 'central planning'.
Doesn't the obvious, honest answer make the most sense? Someone in Google management doesn't want their products acting unethically - merely because it is unethical?
This makes a lot of sense to me in the way you have said it.
The department probably exists in the first place as a result of an internal political struggle and compromise - with some decision-makers wanting Google to be genuinely more ethical, and others wanting to avoid any genuine oversight.
As a result, you have this bodge solution where the department gets to exist (helped by the PR benefit as mentioned elsewhere), but not to act independently. Anyone in the department offering genuine oversight is at risk of being forced out.
throwaway2245:9 says >"The department probably exists in the first place as a result of an internal political struggle and compromise - with some decision-makers wanting Google to be genuinely more ethical, and others wanting to avoid any genuine oversight."<
I certainly hope you are right. And with some foresight, the ethics department is a "Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B" now fully loaded and ready for departure. Bon Voyage!
In a world rife with deceptive marketing and advertising, PR spin, greenwashing, lobbying, astroturfing, and backroom deals, taking a corporation's actions or words at face value without considering if there might instead be an ulterior motive rooted in avarice is simply naive.
In a world of lies, deception, half-truths, fabrications, and hypocrisy, it would be simply naive to put any faith into a random internet comment. What could your ulterior motives be for posting this?
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 join google, look themselves in the mirror every day, and know their employer is trying to do things right.
I don't know what the reality is of an Ethical AI group. But having a good one that works might make the difference hiring exceptional people.
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.
It's just marketing/pr. It's supposed to give them a clean enough image while they keep doing whatever they want under the hood. It won't certainly alter the status quo or influence any decision that could result in reduced profit for shareholders.
A less synical conclusion would be that the longterm viability of a AI-centric company like Google benefits a lot of reasonable development in the early stages. If Google can avoid ethical hiccups it might provoke less regulation and provoke it later.
All else equal, being a reasonable and ethical company IS good business. Problems arise with ethics and business collide.
This kind of liability mitigation use case is at odds with academic freedom. Your view would imply making AI part of your InfoSec / CyberOps team, not an academic research group.
Beyond PR, if all the ethical AI people work for Google and none for governments or other regulatory entities, then Google has cleared the path for themselves in terms of regulation or they will be able to run circles around whatever does come up.
> Black woman in a field that's largely White and male.
so irritating that it has to be twisted into being about racism. is it really? wouldn't we know that more explicitly? besides what if she identifies as a White man? has anyone asked?
This, basically. Ethics is, at times, incompatible with capitalism, so conflicts like these are essentially inevitable. Would anybody expect it to end well if Google hired Richard Stallman to the Free Software Ethics team? Of course not, he would be appalled by the decisions Google has made in the name of earning money, and every single publication coming from him would be a PR nightmare.
In all honesty, the most reasonable way to do corporate ethics is to give funding to external nonprofit organizations whose mission is the actual ethics, and then separately turn that organization's work into actionable KPIs for your engineers - if ethics org says "we need racial parity in facial detection", then you make that a KPI for your team of non-ethicist engineers and hopefully your organization becomes more ethical in the process without an endless deluge of PR nightmares.
I have no idea why this matters. Timnit gave an ultimatum (i.e. do this or I'll leave). Google agreed to her condition of parting way.
This is like I go to my boss and ask for a $1 billion dollars. Otherwise, I'll leave. Then, my boss decides that I should leave since the boss can't give me $1b. Then, I keep telling my friends that "well, I'm actually fired.". huh?
She gave a set of conditions and stated that if they couldn't be met, that she would work with Google to schedule a resignation date. Google then cut off her corporate access and terminated her employment immediately, ergo, firing.
If someone says, do this or I'll jump, and the other person pushes them, that's not the same thing as the person taking the leap on their own. The result might be the same, but the way the result was reached was different.
As someone who just learned about this kerfuffle a few minutes ago, that doesn't make sense to claim that she was fired.
If you offer to resign if new conditions of employment aren't met and the company accepts your resignation without honoring your exact terms of schedule, it sounds like you largely were responsible for terminating your own employment. Claiming that you were "immediately fired" as she tweeted just sounds dishonest to me.
The GP illustration of jumping it being pushed is quite apt. Your comment suggests that if someone threatened to jump under certain circumstances but was instead pushed you would be ok with that.
This isn't just a framing. She was fired. Now you may say "she was asking for it" but that doesn't change the fact that she was fired.
No, the jump/push analogy is too contorted to be meaningful. Employers and employees have a relationship that has processes that have common meanings and names like "resigned" or "fired".
There's no accepted relationship if you push someone threatening to jump. You're just an a-hole committing assault and possibly murder.
Is there a link to the letter that she sent? That could help to clarify.
The demand is something around exposing the identities of the peers who reviewed and rejected her paper. If Google doesn't give her the identities of those peers, she say she will leave the company.
Comparing to suicide is a bit much though. When considering death, everything else becomes secondary, so we can't use that analogy for comparison.
The push/jump illustration holds just as well if you are at the edge of a pool. You don't need death on the line to understand the difference between who is making the decision.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll commit suicide." - I'll probably skip dinner to save life.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll quit my job" - then, I'll probably tell person that they can quit their job. I'm not gonna skip my dinner for that.
I hope this illustrates that, when death is involved, everything else becomes secondary, and we prioritize not death over everything.
So, it's a bad analogy to use in Timnit's situation where she will quit if she doesn't get to see the identities of peer reviewers. This situation is not life and death.
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...?
I actually spent a bit of time searching for a letter she sent with an ultimatum to her management. I've seen this referenced multiple places as "the email that got a Google researcher fired": https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
But that doesn't seem right. That looks more like a different type of letter, sent to a wider audience than just Timnit to her manager(s).
I've seen referenced that there was a timeframe for when she was going to quit that she mentioned. I see no such reference in that letter.
Maybe there's a real copy of the letter floating around. My guess is that people pretend that they've seen "the letter" but only read this other one I referenced above.
I'm happy to be proved wrong, though. I have no dog in this fight except to understand the truth of the situation. If you've seen a different letter than shows her ultimatum and time frame, please share.
I've been following this story quite closely and afaik I know the email Gebru sent that included her 'do this or I quit' ultimatum hasn't beenade public. The email you link to is an an earlier email that, like you say, was sent to a wide group of people within the company
If someone states I will do X if you don't do Y, it still comes down to the person choosing to take some action X. If you don't take action Y, it is still on the first person to choose to take action X. She may have intended to hand in her resignation, but she did not get the chance.
She said if these conditions are not met, I will work with you on an end date. That's not what happened, she was terminated immediately with the rationalization being that they didn't like the tone of the email she sent to the Google Brain Women and Allies listserv. That alone points to it being a termination.
Is she largely responsible for her employment ending at Google. You could say yes, but fact is that Google is the one who cut things off.
Once both parties decide to part way, I don't think it's reasonable to think that you will get to choose the exit date at your own liking.
Either party can choose an earlier date, but not a later date.
I don't really care if she left or Google fired her. But framing it as Google is evil for firing her seems dishonest when she was the one who gave the ultimatum.
Someone says they will quit noon tomorrow if you don't meet their demands. You will not meet their demands. You tell them not to bother coming in tomorrow and disable their security badge, did you fire them?
They made the decision they did not want to work for you as had been previously agreed. You only changed the timetable.
To put this another way, if I tell my company that I will be quitting in 2 weeks and they tell me not to bother coming back to the office, did they fire me? I would not say they did.
So this gets into nuance and I will preface this with, we don't know what her email specifically said.
If you give your company a date for the cessation of your employment, that is giving notice. If you say I "will resign if", is saying that you will do something in the unspecified future.
So if you give your two weeks notice you have formally turned in your resignation. In your example I would agree that they just changed the timetable. If you haven't given your notice, and they terminate your employment citing an email you sent, you have been fired.
By all accounts she didn't submit her resignation, she simply said that she would. Sometimes situations like that result in the person getting cold feet, or the two parties working out a compromise. Maybe things would've always ended up the same way, but either way Google didn't wait for her to actually resign.
From what I've gathered the contents of the email were largely like "Either we do XYZ or we can work towards setting a date where I leave the company." So it is open to interpretation and vague enough that both sides can get their interpretation in. The way I phrase it to myself is that she was fired for threatening to resign. IE, that relationship wasn't good to begin with and this was just the last straw that pushed them to severing it. I suspect that people who try to claim she was fired/that she resigned don't focus enough on the broader context where that relationship was bad in the first place. This doesn't seem like it was something out of the blue, this has definitely been going on for a bit, so given that, which party took it over the line to breaking up their employment relationship seems like a detail rather than an important fact.
I'd agree that the relationship looked like it was all but unsalvageable. The thing I don't understand is why Google insists she resigned rather than just owning that the ended things early.
Saying she resigned sounds better I guess and is at least plausible to enough people that maybe they thought it better to characterize it that way.
But like you said, it's not really the crux of the whole situation. At least not IMO.
> Google then cut off her corporate access and terminated her employment immediately, ergo, firing.
It's also unreasonable that she will get to choose her leaving date at her own liking.
When wanting to part way, either side has the full right to choose an earlier date.
> If someone says, do this or I'll jump
This is not a great analogy. I actually would go as far as saying people who use this analogy have malicious intent.
When death is involved, everything else becomes secondary.
Let's look at a small example. Say I'll commit suicide if you go and see your kids today. Now it's only one day, and you (as a decent person) will probably skip seeing your kids for one day to save one life.
Now if I say I'll quit my job if you go to see your kids today. You would probably say "Then, please quit."
> It's also unreasonable that she will get to choose her leaving date at her own liking. When wanting to part way, either side has the full right to choose an earlier date.
People choose their end date all the time. That's just standard. Sometimes the company moves a date up, sometimes the two parties negotiate a different date for some reason, sometimes people are fired.
If it's an at-will employment state, both parties can choose whatever date they like. But if the employer terminates employment early, that's generally a firing. If an employment does so, we call it quitting.
> Let's look at a small example. Say I'll commit suicide if you go and see your kids today. Now it's only one day, and you (as a decent person) will probably skip seeing your kids for one day to save one life.
> Now if I say I'll quit my job if you go to see your kids today. You would probably say "Then, please quit."
Use whatever analogy works for you, ultimately the point is the same. Someone can threaten to do something, but if you do it for them it's different than if they do it themselves.
If someone says "I'll quit" and the company disables their badge and security escorts them out, they've been 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."
Please no, Pedro Domingos has spent the past week picking fights on ML Twitter, at this point a random grad student probably scores higher on "maturity".
> 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?
They write papers to propose the idea of "AI Cards" which are descriptions of AI models, the situations they are useful in, and some stats about their performance when used on subjects who are from minority groups and/or women.
Most of them are full time researchers publishing papers. For example someone might do a study on facial recognition accuracy on different ethnic groups and how that impacts user experience or other disparate impact of automated systems.
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 interviews and leave the company! I find it sort of humorous how there are companies out there that are actually doing some pretty bad stuff that somehow don't have these problems. For example, I don't hear a lot about the walkouts at Exxon or at Raytheon.
For fun reading, here are the companies that the Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns (they recently removed Raytheon from this list when they exited the business of cluster bombs): https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/exclu...
> 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't accept it.
I think the primary reason for this is because people (generally speaking) in democratic societies share control of their government (for the people by the people etc). This is not true of company->employee relationships.
It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values.
Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
This. A country is governed by its leaders for its people. The leaders have a responsibility to the people to act on their behalf in their benefit.
Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees.
Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them.
Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.
> It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values
More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners.
> Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere.
You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.
Seems to me you have an overly simplistic view of what a corporation is. A corporation is not merely its stockholders. A corporation is accountable to multiple stakeholders, and it's stockholders are just one of many such stakeholders. A corporation's employees and customers are also stakeholders, as well as the society and nation in which it is embedded. It is perfectly legitimate for any of the various stakeholders to attempt to influence the behavior of the corporation.
If you are for tolerance and the coexistance of different values in society, you will understand that values come into conflict constantly. And you will respect the prerogative of employees and customers to push back when their values conflict with corporation management (who represent stockholders).
When you insist that employees must unilaterally disarm by walking away at the first sign of conflict with their employers, you are essentially expressing a class preference. You are asserting that the working class must submit to the stockholding upper class. A corporation requires capital to compete in our economy. And when the top 10% own 80% of the wealth, workers cannot simply walk away.
Stockholders can't walk away either. They need workers, just as workers need capital. So they will need to find a way to coexist, but that doesn't mean there won't be conflict. There will always be conflict. The virtue of our democracy is that the conflict is manifested as demand letters and PR statements instead of clubs and bullets.
Even in government, there are limits. To accomplish any meaningful results, you need to work with others and avoid faux pas
Try being a member of the Democrat (or Republican) party and openly criticize the leaders of the party. You would be immediately ostracized and none of your legislation or ideas would make it through again.
At the core, we are a social species that relies on cooperation. It is critical to have people constantly questioning the herd mentality so we don't run off the cliff. But the whistle-blowing can still be done in a respectful way (unless, of course, it is egregious like breaking laws, moral issues, etc).
In this case, even if you take a critical eye towards Google, they didn't want a paper that they paid for published externally. Tough. If you want free reign, you can't be part of an organization that pays your paycheck every two weeks.
Also note that this does not mean that the paper was not read and reviewed within Google and might have effected some change there. And it could have been published externally if she had taken the review comments into consideration and included some of the ways Google was trying to mitigate the problems - something that would actually be interesting and relevant to the paper
Freedom of speech has always applied only to the freedom to say things without prosecution. Any extension of that idea into the private sector is completely ungrounded in what the law actually does.
The idea that we can’t criticize companies in a thread full of criticism of Google is just plain silly. Of course you can criticize companies. But if you’re criticizing your employer, you do have to accept the risk of there being private consequences. This has always been the case.
Heck, it’s not just limited to employers. If I was to walk into my local Starbucks and make a nuisance of myself by screaming, I’ll be banned. That’s not a violation of my free speech rights, nobody is prosecuting me, but it’s an obvious consequence of my speech.
That's a strange position at a company whose board and top executives are huge political activists spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying. Political activism is a big part of what Google does, and at a scale that exceeds many if not most non-profits.
The government works for me. I work for my employer. Do you see the difference?
Imagine hiring a plumber at twice the market rate, and instead of fixing your toilet, they start cashing your checks while making demands and telling the world on twitter that you’re abusive and racist. Who would tolerate such nonsense? Nobody.
This isn’t about criticizing an employer anyway. She could have discussed her concerns with them in a civil way. But that was not her goal. She is a narcissist, and there’s no winning with those people. They need an enemy in order to prop themselves up as righteous, and anyone will do. Working in good faith is a fool’s errand.
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.
People certainly could just quit when they feel their company is not doing the right thing. But people who care about their mission and the company might stay and do something like this because they genuinely want to improve things.
Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or lawsuits to force companies to change.
Their "mission" is to find conflict, or lacking that, create it. What is the "mission" otherwise? The entire field of "Ethical AI" is a total joke that serves as nothing but a conduit to inject college-grade identity politics into the work environment. There is literally nothing else to this field. Frankly Google should terminate the entire team.
Agreed. Sometimes we like to pretend that "corporations" are entities themselves, but the truth is they are just groups of people. The people have all the power, and all the accountability.
Yes, I think if people were really trying to improve their companies from within that's a great idea. I don't think that's what's happening here though. I like to pose the following thought experiment to people who like driving fancy cars: if your car looked like an old honda civic from the outside but had all the bells and whistles and looked stunning from the inside, would you still want it? The point of the experiment is to show that a nontrivial part of the reason why people drive fancy cars is the signal that it sends to other people. Similarly here, if there was a mechanism to improve a company from within that was anonymous so that you wouldn't get any credit whatsoever for it's improvement, would they use it? It's human nature to want credit, so I wouldn't blame people for not wanting to use it, but let's be honest about there being a nontrivial part to all of this that is founded in virtue signaling and in-group/out-group tribalism).
I could be wrong but I would think that most people would prefer being able to quietly lobby for improvement at their company rather than going public and putting their job and career on the line. There are certainly rabble rousers out there whose first instinct is always to draw public attention to themselves but it doesn't seem like that's the case here.
Yes, I agree. I just suspect that the people involved here are not like that. If what they really wanted was to improve things at Google, they would not be asking for her to be rehired and promoted. There is literally zero chance that will happen and surely they know this.
Maybe works like Faust have deep resonance with people because we all make deals with the devil and are conflicted and make choices that balance not good vs evil or even evil vs some other evil but a whole menu of ambiguous options against each other.
It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.
> 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 interviews and leave the company!
Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome.
If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees.
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 to compartmentalize the reality of the situation and let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account, make them gourmet meals, babysit their kids, and do their laundry.
Google screwed up by creating an environment that fosters perpetual children. They’re fools to put up with this behavior. Walkouts should be a one way door. Call their bluff. They will not quit in any significant numbers. Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
> 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 wealth on slave labour, so does that mean slave labour is a good thing?
> let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account
As a reminder, just in case the principles of capitalism, quite ironically, elude you, the company hires employees it expects will pad its own bank account more than it pads theirs.
> Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
It is certainly true that the conditions of most Google employees are much better than those of the rest of the world, but they are so because the company's employees created that wealth.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
This makes no sense to me. If you don't believe in the raison d'être of a company, you should not join the company. There is no need to delve deeply into competing theories of the corporation. I'm willing to bet that even over in Europe, Ruger, Sig, Glock, Walther, and Beretta don't have a ton of gadflies on staff who are paid to write papers calling for the outlaw of handguns.
It's possible that the company's values or behaviour have changed, but, more importantly, the decision to work at a company is mutual: both sides want it (the company expects the value an employee will bring exceeds the cost of their employment; hiring someone is not a charity), and they enter into this relationship when neither side knows everything about the other, certainly not how they would behave in the future. Just as the company can and does exert pressure on employees to do something they might not want, so can the employees try and exert pressure on the company to change a decision.
I don't disagree with you. I was at an adtech startup, and I had bright lines — no payday loans or for-profit education. Luckily we never needed to blur or cross those lines, but as our business evolved, the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations.
Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization!
Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."
Maybe, but I don't know enough details or background about this situation to debate over its nuances. I'm just criticising the views I see expressed here, that are bizarre even from a capitalistic perspective, that a corporation may do anything legal and will be judged by the market, while employees doing the same -- whether it's smart or not -- is crossing some line.
I don't know what general principles people are arguing for here, but the facts at the heart of TFA relate to someone laying down an ultimatum to an employer — "do these things or I'm going to quit" — and the employer replying "sorry to hear that buh bye."
That accepted conditional resignation (as someone mellifluously put it in an earlier HN discussion) is being interpreted by some as a firing. Having read the original letter, it sure sounded like a conditional resignation to me and, as a manager, I would've done my best to get the writer of the letter out the door ASAP.
Keep in mind that as an IC, I once worked for a company that imposed a 10% across the board pay cut without consulting me. I resigned the day it was announced, because my compensation is a term of employment mutually agreed to by my employer and myself, not something imposed upon me. So I've been on both sides of this.
As a general life rule, I go nuclear on people who play hardball with me, whether I am the manager or the managed.
> and the employer replying "sorry to hear that buh bye."
... and then other employees raising a stink, perhaps in the hope, misguided or not, that the company will reverse its decision or change its behaviour to help its PR. The employer can use whatever power they think they have, but so can the employees. It's one thing to say that what the employees did wasn't a wise way to achieve their goal, but it's a whole other thing to say that what they did is wrong.
You're bringing issues of morality into this when it seems to me that the employees are more focused on self-interest and the accumulation and exercise of raw power while Google is preoccupied with public relations.
Both sides use their power to further their goals. To what extent each side's goals align with those of society at large is a separate question, but I find it perplexing that some here think that it's fine for a particularly politically active company to use its power to its advantage as long as it operates within the law, yet when employees do the same, only on a much smaller scale, that's considered as crossing a line.
According to the movie the shells were all non-functional, so I'm not really sure why you brought that up.
"the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations..."
As a laborer, the greatest value you bring to the company is your labor. That's the only real thing that gives you leverage to negotiate the terms of your employment. At least, that's what I do when I'm looking for a new job, I'm not sure if you're just morally opposed to negotiating or something. It sounds like what happened here is this person spent a lot of time having these DEI discussions in which they did not feel heard, and that combined with an (allegedly) unprecedented change in the publication review process led to them concluding that these discussions weren't actually doing anything, so they tried to use their full leverage: the withdrawal of their labor.
It's neat that your discussions were always fruitful and you felt heard, but that isn't always the case.
Sexual harassment is illegal, that is very different from something you find unethical.
eg. Disabling safety equipment so that a job can be completed faster - illegal
Locating toys and candy to low shelves at registers so that children see them and nag their parents to buy them, increasing sales. - unethical in my view but called good marketing by many others.
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 many smart people is that they get a cluster people who were institutionalized by academia, and now they have a CEO who has to act like an institutional dean.
Hackers hold your products to their standards, and ideally that adds value to your customers. Ethical AI people seem to do the same. 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.
That the company is dealing with factions of what are essentially student activists issuing demands seems like an inflection point where any further growth is going to be a function of market domination and not their ability to align to make things.
I wish I had more upvotes to give for this comment.
It gave me multiple upsights about how to clean up my approach thinking about the issues here:
+ framing an analogy using technology governance functions - whose functions and values can be clearly quantified and measured by many independently - with a ethical (moral) functions - whose values and results are much more nebulous
+ drawing a parallel between hackers - whom many technologists 'understand'- and value activists - whom many technologists don't 'understand
+ pointing out the now-self-evident axioms that i) activists, like hackers, hold you to 'their' standard, not yours and ii) will fight you 'their' way when you fail to meet those standards
+ the point about academia and corporate leaders needing to act as deans and dealing with navigating conflict resolution in a new 'tribe' they don't understand. Not forgetting they currently deal with multiple other tribes - investors, media, government etc.
I would like to add a couple of small points:
+ Personal risk to executives is the change in the mix with highest impact. This becomes more important as this risk is transferred up the corporate ladder.
So, leaders examining issues, from this 'new' perspective, in a balanced nuanced way while still considering profits, politics, strategy, foresight, ability to manage change ( et al, ad nauseam ) increasingly becomes a key career soft skill. Especially if decisions are delivered in communication styles that are still clearly understood by all relevant other tribes they deal with in situations like this.
+. I would like to suggest that some folks are missing PART of the point (not all of it, just an important small nuance)
No single party gets to frame this debate. Ethics is now inside the corp. fence so it has to be heard.
Just consider that every side of the debate has their perspective and the other side is "crazy" from this viewpoint. E.g a key tool for academics with leadership is demanding the removal of leaders with a "or we go " chaser - this is normal in that world and it would be crazy not to use the tool as part of a "normal" negotiation. But it is not normal in the corporate world.
Point being everyone's normal is some version of some other person's crazy.
Well, these folks are from another 'tribe". The way things are done in their world is different'. Corp is the one behaving in a way that "does not make sense" from their perspective.
Just considering that the view from someone else's vantage point could be different would go a long way here.
> Ethics is now inside the corp. fence so it has to be heard.
Do you believe this is a viable trend? This debacle seems to point to the death of 'Ethics research' inside of corporations. What do companies stand to gain from hiring ethics researchers who are a liability to the shareholders? My guess is that the model will go back to using CSR budget to invest in 'social good' non-profits and think tanks that stay at a safe distance while still mentioning you as a 'Platinum Sponsor' and bringing you in for fireside chats.
(this is not me advocating against ethics research, or against bringing ethics into AI research; I'm just trying to be as cynically realist as possible)
> What do companies stand to gain from hiring ethics researchers who are a liability to the shareholders?
The same thing media companies’ gain from controlling content rating systems plus the same thing any company gains from dominating research relevant to it's product area; if they do a good enough job at pretending to care, they forestall state regulation, and even if they don't succeed at that, the more influence they have over the research field, the more any outside regulation will be dependent on information that they have the ability to at least subtly spin before it is even published.
> What do companies stand to gain from hiring ethics researchers who are a liability to the shareholders?
Trying to tackle both questions at once: this is a viable trend and companies do stand to gain.
If the market is saying that you have to consider other motivations and goals aside from profits and growth, and you have built this machine that is super-efficient and effective at delivering on growth and profits irrespective of all else, you need outside skills to change.
To give a specific example, take the Norway Sovereign Fund which is one of the biggest investors in the world: it has indicated that it is incorporating environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues into their decision-making,
So, if you want to get their investment, you have to have these goals in the your corp. leadership and performance management mandate.
To enable this, you need folks with these skills, who currently are not management, in the fold ( meaning folks like social scientists, ethicists etc. having really significant corp leadership roles and authority ).
I read an interesting article that argued modern activists learned how to protest on college campuses which are unique due to the influence the student/activists wield. And that when these activists protest later in life they are not as prepared for the more challenging environment where your antagonist is unsympathetic to your cause.
This seems to be playing out here. I can't really see how Google could acquiesce to their demands without setting themselves up for this tactic to be used against them in the future.
Like many institutions, universities ignore all complaints through regular channels (and intentionally delay any consideration of action until after the troublemakers have graduated); the most effective leverage students seem to have is creating bad publicity, which affects the university's bottom line.
The lesson they are teaching their students is to be utterly cynical about going through the system, and to believe that creating a public scene or disturbance is the best way to convince organizations (or anyone else) to change their policies.
Students probably aren't being creative enough in this regard; there are lots of ways to achieve or threaten bad publicity, such as working with media.
I disagree that these activists constitute a tribe. They are really just spoiled kids who used to have power over their parents. Now they enter the big world and keep doing what they've been always doing: throwing tantrums and yelling silly demands at their parents. But other adults don't care, so the spoiled kids get ignored and then shown the door. Now they are stunned: they don't understand why the world doesn't work the way they thought it should work.
That idea that activists (in corp) don't constitute a tribe in an interesting opinion - one that I actually sorta-subscribe to.
I frame it in terms of acculturation vs. assimilation. You have to decide what your corp. policy is and make it explicit, something that I think did not happen here.
The conversation is something like 'if you join us, you do your thing BUT our way" or "if you join us, you do your thing YOUR way". Then folks coming in understand the ground rules.
I would say most corps will prefer option 1 but some (most?) folks coming in for roles like "Ethics" expect option 2 - which is NOT unreasonable. I don't know that this conversation happened (explicitly enough) here.
All of that aside, like I said in the parent comment, it is critical to consider that no one side gets to frame the position alone in situations like this where the job is literally, to come in and shake up status quo - everyone with a seat at the table has a say that should have equal-ish weight.
Also, note, corp in this specific case thought that that they are enough of a "tribe" to bring them inside the fence with a 'unique' label that makes that 'tribe' explicit. Witness what is going on here.
Labelling them as "spoiled kids" is "the missing part of the point" I was alluding to.
These folks have a different way of doing things. In bringing them in, you don't get to force them to align to your vision of how to do things (not what to do which you get to define as the employer). This is because you brought them in specifically and explicitly because they were different and bringing something different to the table that you did not have before.
If it was a set of skills, capabilities - whatever - that you could have grown in-house, you would have done so.
If you think that a 'tribe' can contribute value, you have to be able to deal with the pieces of their being 'different' from you that rub you the wrong way without labelling them if it is a key component of their identity.
More explicitly, don't blame ethicists for reacting in ways you don't expect to ethical issues.
The corporate's plan is simple: whitewash their ML business and score some diversity points (they're a federal contractor which imposes certain obligations). They tried to do both things at the same time. Whether the spoiled kids realise this is irrelevant: they don't become a tribe just because they are brought into the same kindergarten. Google will try to reshuffle the deck and if that doesn't work, they'll split the ethics and diversity components into separate orgs, where ethics will be given to more mature and competent people (perhaps unethical at the he same time - this is another dunder mifflin corp after all).
But Google's top executives are political activists themselves, spending over $20 million in 2018 on lobbying with demands that aren't any more prima facie silly than those of these employees. The main difference between them is that Google's top executives are far more politically active and with much deeper pockets.
It’s a pretty known fact that the majority of folks in ethics AI at Google come from sociology backgrounds who have been indoctrinated by marxists/leftist philosophies. So it’s no surprise you’re seeing the current blow up.
Most Googlers are liberal, but the level of leftism rampant in the AI ethics group is another level
> 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 is), only they have more power. Why is it reasonable for management to be political activists but not the workers?
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.
The only "social construct" involved here is "private property". If I hire someone to install carpet and pay them $X, we sign a contract about that and that only. They don't tell me how I should paint my walls; and I don't tell them how to spend their money. That's kind of the idea. If they start issuing ultimatums about painting my walls pink, or agitate with the painters that it's wrong to not do it, I'm going to fire them. Apparently, in the old days, by custom that was not like that, and you were expected to paint your walls pink if they insist; perhaps in other places it was even mandated by law.
Then Milton Friedman showed up and said "Hey, you just acceded to your walls being painted pink but, by the rules, you didn't have to do that!" If getting this notion across is activism, then I guess I'd stop thinking of activism as a dirty word. I thought it was more like education on a common-sense notion.
Come think of it, an alternative structure you seem to be advocating is also a solved problem in this scheme - it's called a co-op, and there are many successful ones around, from farms to clothing stores. Go found an internet search coop, and as a co-owner you'd be able to decide how it should be run.
Even in the US labour laws are not like that. The relationship between an employer and employees is complex and its legal aspects ever-changing. In Germany, the structure of companies is quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
The original question was "Why is it reasonable for management to be political activists but not the workers?"
The reasonable labor law is generally about what contracts are and are not permissible and enforceable. For example, minimum wage means I cannot generally hire someone and pay them less, even if both parties are willing.
Beyond that, well on a spectrum with that, there are numerous ways to circumvent private property - for example, government may mandate (or maintain an informal policy) that workplace theft is not prosecuted, like they do with regular theft in some US cities. That can swing the other way too, they could make wage theft ok, for example. Doesn't make it reasonable.
If I own a company and employ no-one, for someone I then hired for a specified purpose to try to wrest control of the company away from me is not much different from a corrupt government or mafia trying to do it without a contract. The magic attached to the contract that would give employers such powers would make contracts all but meaningless.
Even though private property is, indeed, a political construct, I don't see how everything follows just from it. Employment isn't fungible for the employee, it involves long-term personal relationships, possibly relocation, and it stands to reason that even if the company is the property of its shareholders in the sense that they enjoy its profits, because the risk is high for the employee they get a say in decisions; long-term employment is a kind of partnership. Not only is it more reasonable than the current weird situation, it is actually like that in other Western countries, and it even was like that -- though through a different mechanism -- in the US. It only stopped being like that after heavy political activism by corporations and shareholders.
Well, in that case there should be legislation for "minimum participation" akin to minimum wage, restricting property rights of the owners. There's no such legislation, which I think is a great thing, so that is the reason employees cannot expect to be activists at work. That answers the question in the present.
As for the changes; the co-op structure already exists, so if it actually resulted in better outcomes you'd expect more co-ops. As is, myself (and most people I expect) would rather have more money than more participation, in fact the poorer people would probably be the first to trade participation for money if they could. In the US, they can go either way at least in theory (the reason there are not that many co-ops is probably because few want more participation at the cost of money). In Europe, you are forced into a particular model. I view that as unfair.
The "political activism" was literally to remove restrictions to give people more options and/or to make people more aware of rules and less beholden to some unjustified ancient custom.
> There's no such legislation, which I think is a great thing, so that is the reason employees cannot expect to be activists at work.
Activism and ownership are two separate things. Activism is about changing existing laws, rules and customs. There isn't any law specifically allowing executives to engage in activism (meant to change or prevent the change of existing legislation), and yet they do, and on a much larger scale than employees. Google spends millions of dollars each year on lobbying.
> so if it actually resulted in better outcomes you'd expect more co-ops
This is not true, because a better outcome for a more co-determined company is not necessarily a higher stock price. Forming companies requires raising capital, and so investors have a lot of power in deciding the structure of companies we see, and what they care about is the stock price. For example, if traditional private companies and co-ops fail or succeed at the same rate but private companies are funded 100:1 compared to co-ops, you'd see 100x more private companies than co-ops.
There is generally no reason to believe that pure market forces direct us to a "good outcome" at the needed pace. You could have said that if the abolition of slavery leads to a better outcome, then the market would have quickly made it disappear; but in the US the market didn't.
The redistribution of wealth over the last few decades in the US, and the West in general, away from workers is certainly not a good outcome.
> In Europe, you are forced into a particular model. I view that as unfair.
In America it is the same, only the model is different. It doesn't matter if the limiting power originates in the state or in other institutions. Despite little central regulation, feudalism or America in the Gilded Age was more, not less, restrictive on more people than under the regulation of the modern welfare state.
Wow, Google's ethical AI group sounds like the most toxic group of individuals I've ever heard of.
I'm going to sidestep the debate about whether Gebru was "fired" or she "resigned", because that debate primarily centers on how one defines the words. But clearly she did do this: She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands, outrageous because it essentially attacked other people at the company, and said that if her demands were not met, that she would leave. In this case, the ethical AI group is doing the same thing: demanding a manager not have a role with them, demanding (again IMO) unwarranted apologies from other people, and worse, demanding the rehiring of someone has shown that she has no respect for others in her workplace.
A bunch of overpaid toxic babies from my opinion. I don't care who you are, going around demanding "my way or the highway" in a large company just makes you an asshole. If they don't like what happened they should simply resign with integrity and move on.
Google tried to prevent her from publishing a paper, which is outside of their normal practice, then dissembled about what happened (pretending internal reviewers are anonymous, for example)
Didn't they push back on the publication because the paper was lacking in certain regards? IIRC it failed to take into account relevant recent papers, for example. Which probably could have been fixed if they didn't submit as late as they did.
The paper was submitted on time, other papers at Google were submitted for review after they were released. By Jeff Dean's own admission the paper was approved for release.
The demand for retraction was initially given while refusing to state what the reason(s) for the demand were. Only after the meeting where they demanded she retract the paper did they belatedly agree to read her the feedback that they stated as the reason. They wouldn't even let her read it first hand.
Ultimately it seems like Google could have plainly stated their issues with the paper from the start, and that said issues were not so serious that they merited a demand for retraction.
There are a number of things that just don't add up. Even if you take it at face value that Gebru's ultimatum demands were unreasonable, there are several problems with how the situation got to that point in the first place.
> Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
I'm curious: why is ignoring too much relevant research not a good reason to demand retraction? Isn't this one of the most common embarrassing mistakes that inexperienced researchers tend to make? I can fully understand if Google does not want to associate itself with work that might be viewed by the wider research community as shoddy.
That claim by Jeff Dean has been more or less debunked. The real reason that Google demanded the paper not be published is that it is critical of models underlying the company’s fundamental business - the whole message from Jeff Dean is very misleading and states a bunch of other, unrelated things as the “real reason”.
It would be very helpful to point to sources for the claim that Jeff Dean's explanation is debunked, rather than just claiming it has been.
The timing of the submission for review, and the deadline for submission to publication seems like a simple factual statement that should be easily demonstrated as true or false.
AI is far more energy efficient than creating the incalcuable number of human programmers required to directly program the same solutions. Writing NLP code with non-ML methods, to the same level of quality, would be essentially impossible without an operation on the scale of warfare.
Even with the efficiency benefits that it already has, we all know ML still stands to be further optimized, and a lot of people are working on it.
Comparing the exponential increase of "intelligence" of computers versus our own, computers will be as smart as humans with similar energy efficiency in around 50 years, and they require no cars, food, etc. It will be hard to criticize the efficiency of ML when it is already moreso than our biological selves, but it will be done, and we will be wholly outsmarted.
> I'm curious: why is ignoring too much relevant research not a good reason to demand retraction? Isn't this one of the most common embarrassing mistakes that inexperienced researchers tend to make? I can fully understand if Google does not want to associate itself with work that might be viewed by the wider research community as shoddy.
For starters if the academic content of the paper were shoddy, that is what peer review is for. Secondly, if it was really about the paper lacking some new context, why did Google demand retraction while refusing to share why? That's what doesn't make sense.
It seems like there's some missing context in the situation because on the surface Google's actions don't line up with their stated reasoning.
Notice how in Jeff Dean's email he made no reference to the fact that they refused to share the reasons for the retraction with Gebru in that first meeting. He also skipped over where Gebru asked for the reasoning and a manager read it to her rather than letting her read for herself.
I just don't understand the secrecy and cageyness if the only problem with the paper was some academic omissions.
According to current and former Google employees on various machine learning forums, Google does not do an academic review on their employee’s papers. That is the job of the journal reviewers. Google usually just checks whether any proprietary IP has accidentally made it in. For them to claim anything different is comically dishonest.
I'm not sure what did or did happen in this case, but I've reviewed enough papers and seen enough of my own reviewed that I know "failed to take into account relevant recent papers" is one of many ways a reviewer who wants to shoot a paper down for BS reasons can use.
To be clear, reading that reason in a negative review can mean at least two things, and I'm not judging which of the two happened here:
1. The paper did fail to take into account the results in some highly relevant and widely cited papers. (I've rejected papers claiming new results myself before now with "this problem was in fact already solved by X, published in Y".)
2. The paper was fine, but it didn't cite every paper published recently on the topic ever, and someone used that to shoot it down for whatever BS reason. Matt Might calls these reviewers snipers: http://matt.might.net/articles/peer-fortress/
Even if the internal reviews aren't anonymous, if you send your manager a letter demanding something or you're leaving, they're probably not going to give you it regardless.
Again, I'm not really trying to defend Google one way or the other. At the end of the day it seemed like Gebru published a paper that was quite critical of how Google intends to make a sizable portion of their revenue, and anyone should understand that when you do that in a large company, it's going to get extra scrutiny. And it could very well be that the whole purpose of Google's "ethical AI" team in the first place is to just provide a "veneer of morality" over what are some fairly unnerving practices and consequences of AI. But regardless, the honorable thing then for anyone on that team is to simply resign, say that "I don't agree with Google's values", and find someplace else to do your work (it's not like these people couldn't get highly paid jobs elsewhere). Instead they're throwing tantrums.
So do you honestly believe that if Gebru were to interview at another company and they performed a background check asking why her last position was terminated if she put "voluntary" it would come back with no problems?
Do you likewise honestly think that if she applied for unemployment services in the US should we be denied because of willful termination from her last job?
Everyone I know who has been fired, when it's reported to the company, the phrasing is always "Person X and the company have come to a mutual agreement", but in my experience it's never really mutual.
I've known many coworkers that threaten to quit over issues, but it still depends on them making that choice formally. Otherwise they are fired.
Her paper didn't make any reasonable points about real ethics, it was mostly wafer thin pseudo-intellectual moralising of the form "but what about the trees!" without any attempt at rigorous cost/benefit analysis. At its core ethics is about balances and tradeoffs: something creates some problems for one person, but creates some benefits for another person, is it moral? Is it right?
As a consequence her paper made a lot of points that came across as absurd like railing against models due to the electricity cost of training them, even though those costs are small relative to completely ordinary things everyone takes for granted, like driving to work and back.
Wouldn't the honourable thing be to first try to change how Google behaves and only if unsuccessful resign? Why is the assumption that employees shouldn't even try to influence the direction of their company? Why is doing so considered a tantrum?
I don't have all the facts here and neither, I believe, do you, and we don't know what recourses have been tried. My point is just that I find strange the view that the company is entitled to do anything as long as it's legal while employees aren't, and are expected to either leave or stay and shut up.
I think we're entirely in agreement on this. I would say that in all jobs, it's more honorable to first try to change the company rather than quit silently, but if your job description encompasses "ethics" or "compliance", it's pretty much a dereliction of duty to quit without even trying to change policies one finds wrong.
There is a huge difference between skillfully navigating the internal politics and procedures of a company vs issuing demands based on flimsy evidence/feelings and threatening to take your toys and go home if you don’t get your way (and then throwing a social media tantrum when they call your bluff and accept your resignation).
Sure, and maybe they misjudged their power and overplayed their hand, but why is it that the law is the only guidance for management while employees are held up to a higher standard? If management can do anything as long as it's legal, so can the workers.
A corporation is not obligated to keep you employed nor should they be outside of a legal contract. I’d prefer it stays that way because I don’t want to be compelled to work for anyone or have them be compelled to hire me. They’re two sides of the same coin.
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 easily get a new job. It becomes a problem when nobody wants to hire because they can never get rid of you or they have to deal with a crooked union. Having high barriers to firing people also makes the fact that you got fired a giant stain on your resume instead of a fairly normal occurrence that could be due to a no fault reason.
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.
Huh, last time it was contractor treatment issue. Make a show of protest and then get back to desk at work. I wish these world leading AI ethics researchers show some ethical spine and at least go on strike if not resign until management come to talking table and meet their partial and full demands.
Google claims to be a place where academics can do research. Censoring a critical paper goes against that. I’m not a fan of Timnit, but in this case she is right to make a stink. It’s not like her job was to write ad copy.
Is "having standards for what Google pursues for publications" really censorship? I think we'd need additional evidence to say so. If this isn't the first paper Google has stopped when an internal anonymous reviewer gives the red light, it sounds like they're just following their own process for quality control. Maybe the debate should be whether it is the best process for quality control.
I've noticed a trend where toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause, usually something related to social justice. It's effective and usually short circuits the public's willingness to see the nuance of the issue.
My term for this is "Karen's twin", i.e. generally you think of a "Karen" as some right wing, extremely disagreeable, potentially semi (or very) racist individual making outrageous demands. Here you just have some left wing, extremely disagreeable people making outrageous demands while wrapping themselves in the cloak of moral superiority.
The "right wing racist" bit is very new. It primarily represents the stereotype of an overly entitled, highly strung soccer mom insisting on talking to managers when she doesn't get her way with front-line employees at retail stores.
I think you're conflating "Karen" with "entitled asshole". There are tons of entitled assholes in this world and "Karens" are just one type. As another commenter mentioned, "Karen" is used for entitled, soccer-mom-types, especially for treating front-line workers like crap and attempting to get a manager for their demands. As for the right-wing association, I don't think being right-wing is inherent to being a "Karen". I think that association was borne from the current political climate and viral videos.
It's like how in elementary English class they teach that all words ending in -ly are adverbs, but not all adverbs end in -ly: All "Karens" are entitled assholes, but not all entitled assholes are "Karens".
"toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause"
Anyone who has grown up around religious fundamentalists like I did learns this at a very young age. Frustratingly, when you grow up around that, you recognize the behavioral pattern very quickly, but the upper-middle class, suburban raised people with two college educated parents that make up the bulk of software engineers at the FAANGs don't, and therefore think these people are ACTUALLY virtuous.
I committed the grave sin of asking a wealthy woman (who happened to be black and who has done incredibly well in tech but complains constantly on twitter about the horrendous obstacles she faced despite being in executive positions with zero coding experience) how we could measure improvements and evaluate progress in companies with numbers, and was told that "this is a moment where you need to shut up and #listenToBlackWomen". By relying entirely on anecdotes and disallowing interrogation of her theories against data without being attacked as immoral, she has prevented any quantifiable way of evaluating progress or even recognizing companies that have done well. This tactic of ignoring facts by simply engaging in ad hominem attacks on a questioners morality, she mimics the tactics that were used against me when I dared suggest in Sunday school that dinosaurs existed billions of years ago, and humans were long after.
The irony that you can't challenge these people while they're simultaneously insisting that you're the one with an unfair unearned advantage is always lost on them, too.
Sundar Pichai is a weak leader who has allowed this to fester. Likewise, this anger-mob is just going to continue cashing Google's paychecks anyway. So eventually, the only result will be all the sane people leaving, with Pichai and the Left Mob remaining to passively sneer at each other.
If Pichai would just man up, he'd send an all-hands to the company telling everyone to decide by EOD if they want to be on board at Google or standing in the parking lot chanting.
Reminds me of the recent post about how not to be high-maintenance, directed at wikipedia editors. The demands and fits seem to be a thing plaguing the over-educated. I get mad when I don't have anything to do at work either.
Secondarily, the level of management craft displayed by Google here has been awful. Both in hiring and creating such a situation, and in their inability to effectively defuse it.
I don't think anyone would claim corporations are democracies, but the view that the corporation is its CEO and/or its shareholders isn't so obvious, either. There are clearly cultural differences here (e.g. see the situation in Germany [1]), but I don't think that the American view of what a corporation is and who it serves is necessarily the only reasonable one.
I don't know any more details on this matter than those in the article, but I don't see why you assume that if employees -- well paid or otherwise -- make demands of management then it must be them who are toxic, or, indeed, that anyone is.
As a German who has tested the labor laws himself: behaviour such as that displayed would absolutely be grounds for getting fired without the notice period ("fristlose Kündigung") here. And it's actually pretty hard to legally fire people.
The reason is "Verlust des Vertrauensverhältnisses", i.e. loss of trust. You start making demands coupled with threats, and public ones at that, you are no longer an employee.
But if employees are well-represented on the board then such actions might not be necessary in the first place. In this case, they might have determined that they have no other recourse to change the company's behaviour.
Both firing them or dealing with them are expressions of management's political power, and making their demands public is an expression of the political power of those employees, and it's up to both sides to figure out what result is best for them, a result that will likely be determined by the relative political power of the sides. I see no moral prerogative that says that management's exertion of political power is good, but workers' is bad.
No, they are expression of the fact that employees are employed and paid by the company to work for the company.
You can agitate against companies all you want, it's a free country. But you can't expect to be paid by them while you do it.
Not sure what "morality" has to do with it.
EDIT (Since parent added the bit about boards): No, having employee representatives on the board changes nothing about this. The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.
> the fact that employees are employed and paid by the company to work for the company.
The view that the company is separate from the employees and they don't get a say in its direction is a construct of many years of political action. It's not some natural law; it's a political result reached through activism. Anyone is free to try and get a different result, and each side will judge how much power they have in this case, and try to use it to best achieve the outcome they want.
> The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.
But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means. Some person or persons must have decided that letting that manager go is better for the company than keeping her. If others were involved in the decision, they might have decided differently.
It is the way companies are currently constructed, pretty much everywhere. Even when you have strong employee representation, in which case that influence is via the employee representatives on the board, not via employees just doing whatever the hell they want.
Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.
> But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means.
Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders. But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X. As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily). And once again, you are free to not abide by that contract, but don't expect to be employed by that company.
Basically, what you are talking about are vastly hypothetical constructs that have little to do with how companies actually work.
> Even when you have strong employee representation, in which case that influence is via the employee representatives on the board, not via employees just doing whatever the hell they want.
But then you have a recourse that might not be available where this is not the case. Even in your telling of it, we have a company that does whatever the hell it wants and employees doing whatever the hell they want, and I see no reason to hold employees to a higher standard than we hold the company.
> Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.
Sure, but that is a question of power and tactics. The company could sack you, and it could also suffer negative PR as a result. Both sides use whichever power they have to their advantage. You could argue that what the employees are doing is not smart and that they might be overplaying their hand, but not that what they're doing is wrong.
> Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders.
Yes, but even the interests of shareholders are a result of political action.
> But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X.
But whether or not employees are on the board is itself a result of political action. In the US, they're not (as a result of political activism), but anyone is free to take any political action to change that.
> As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily).
But as long as you're not breaking the law, you're allowed to take whatever action you please, including one that risks termination. The company might well be within its rights to sack you, but that has a cost so they might not do it. Corporations do such things all the time, sometimes choosing to risk litigation, and I see no reason why workers couldn't or shouldn't. Each side uses whatever power they have to their advantage.
> we have a company that does whatever the hell it wants and employees doing whatever the hell they want,
False equivalence. The company is employing (and paying) the employee, not the other way around. This is not a symmetric relationship. This is the thing you seem to have a hard time with.
And no, the company can't do whatever the hell they want either, they are bound by the contract and the appropriate laws. Which at least one of my employers found out to their detriment (they tried to do something illegal and unethical to me and I didn't let them. Lawyers got involved, it ended very nicely for me)
However, had I done what these Googlers have done, I wouldn't have stood a chance, and my lawyer would have just thrown up his hands and exclaimed "you did WHAT??!?"
> any action you please, including one that risks termination.
Absolutely. But if you risk termination, don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.
> This is not a symmetric relationship. This is the thing you seem to have a hard time with.
Of course this isn't a symmetric relationship, but its nature, and even its legal nature, isn't ordained by nature, but is a result of political activism, and differs over time and place. Whatever that relationship is now in the US, it is clearly something that is as temporary as it's always been, and everyone constantly aims to change it. Google's executive and board are much bigger political activists than this group of employees, but they all seek to change the power balance.
> don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.
You might not be surprised but crying foul is legitimate. Google does it all the time when it doesn't like various laws and tries to put political pressure to have them changed.
Not by "nature", but the asymmetry is fundamental to the relationship: one entity provides a service the other pays for it.
Now the specific consequences of that fundamental asymmetry can be changed by political activism, but not the fundamental asymmetry itself. Unless you are going to start paying companies to employ you, whatever that actually means.
> Whatever that relationship is now in the US,
As I explained, the behaviour discussed would just as much get you fired in my native Germany, which is one of the most employee-friendly places around. So unlike what you are trying to imply, that this is a very specific point in the spectrum of possible relationships, it pretty much spans that entire spectrum.
> crying foul is legitimate
Nope, except for in the most legalistic sense: sure you can cry foul. Just don't be surprised if people aren't sympathetic and instead laugh at you. So basically crying foul will not be effective in those circumstances.
If you threaten to quit as a bluff in order to get your demands met, don't be surprised if the other party calls your bluff [and in many sense they have to call your bluff. If you don't understand that...well try to figure it out].
If it wasn't a bluff, then why are you complaining?
> Google does it all the time
How does Google doing something legitimise it?!? They deserve all the scorn they get when they do it.
Where did she make demand coupled with threats? In her own words, she announced that she'd like to discuss an end date for her employment if she wouldn't be given the chance to fix the paper up for publication. This would very much fly in Germany. Her other email to the public list telling people to stop doing what they are doing might not, but then in Germany you'd have the Betriebsrat and the union stepping in and giving validation to such a firing (or not).
Googles problem is that Timnit - who was hired to investigate the ethics of AI - refused to just retract a paper that might contain inconvenient statements about the ethics of AI and then refused to just roll over when fired. And they refuse to adress that, and can't just be open and transparent about it by e.g. sharing Timnits emails to prove she was making threats and being unreasonable, so some people are made and have opinions.
In Germany, this would start and end with the Betriebsrat either blocking the firing or approving it. This would provide due process, transparency and legitimacy in one go.
Q: >Where did she make demand coupled with threats?
A: >she announced that she'd like to discuss an end date for her employment [editor: threat] if she wouldn't be given the chance to fix the paper up for publication [editor: demand].
"I you don't do as I want, I will leave." "Fine, you can leave".
I can't imagine any company that would, or could, react in any other way in this situation.
The Betriebsrat would have absolutely nothing to do here, as the company is just complying with her request. And yeah, once you "discuss an end date for your employment", a "Freistellung" is a completely normal event.
Now in Germany that would result in payment continuing until the official end date. In the US things are different, but I don't have any information that this didn't happen (she just moaned about access to company systems, and that is normal in a "Freistellung").
That isn't a threat, that is announcing her terms. You can think they are in their own right to taker her up on it, but its not a threat.
Also, as far as I know for a "einseitige Freistellung" (one sided decision to no longer want her to work there) Google would have to show that she destroyed the relationship of trust with Google, by e.g. criminal acts or maybe using her position as a manager to undermine the companies overall direction, e.g. by her going to the public mailing list afterwards.
Announcing that she wants to leave if this can't be resolved would NOT qualify as this.
That's quite the statement considering that there's lots of PoC, women, queer people, sexual abuse victims, etc who have been suffering through toxic work environments for ages. What makes this group "the most toxic group" you've ever heard of?
Considering that she has started falsely calling her former coworkers including Jeff Dean a bunch of racists who fired her for being black, I’ll agree that she sounds extremely “toxic” and essentially impossible to have in your team. I don’t really understand where you get the idea that those minority groups have it any worse these days.
It appears that some people in her management hierarchy (notably NOT including her direct manager, who thought highly of her) found themselves in conflict with her. Her peers (which is more how I would generally define "coworker") appear to be backing her in this conflict, and blaming management as well.
A number of posters (mostly using throwaway accounts) are interpreting this as a group of fair and reasonable managers being beset by the most toxic team that ever toxied in the history of toxicity. I submit that the facts in evidence permit the opposite hypothesis: That it is Google that has difficulties living up to ethical standards of conduct, and that it is the management of the ethical AI team that is not living up to their professional responsibilities.
For all the posturing about Social Justice Warriors run amok, the idea that Google has some 'splaining to do about its conduct is not exactly confined to left wing circles, as evidenced e.g. by yesterday's lawsuit filed by Texas et al. And I suspect it's exactly this increased scrutiny that is leading to these ham-handed and probably counterproductive attempts to first hire "ethical AI" teams and then try to silence their output.
This is just how you behave: when faced with opposing pressure you roll over. That's fine, I do the same in some situations: I don't fight people who can cause me great damage like police or air stewards or immigration agents.
But rolling over all the time is not an optimal strategy. The more power you have, the rarer you should roll over.
And of course many without power will see those with power and say "In their place, I'd roll over". Yes, naturally. That's because you don't have any power. So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.
> So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.
Talk about damning with faint praise. While my mind is honestly saying "seriously, fuck off", I'll try to put this in a more constructive response.
It's not about "rolling over". It's about having the maturity to realize when you are dealing with management, if by your demands you put them in an absolute no-win situation, then you've only screwed over yourself. That no-win situation was the demands by Gebru and the ethical AI team that management throw their colleagues under the bus. Management simply can't accede to that demand without saying to a huge portion of their employees "We're going to trash the reputations of other employees based on who yells the loudest".
Gebru and the ethical AI team most probably could have gotten huge portions of what they wanted (perhaps not all, but most), and especially would have better actually implemented the organizational change they say they want, if they hadn't handled the situation so extremely unprofessionally.
Even reading just your own, clearly biased, summary, it sounds like you are describing "worker solidarity".
People just shrug when "leadership" at a company fires people randomly, places bad managers on good teams, demands unwarranted apologies from workers and makes everyone obey arbitrary demands.
But when a group of employees try to take any of these powers into their own hands they are immediately written off as toxic.
Tech workers have been fooled into thinking that they are a respected and privileged type of labor. Anyone who has been in the industry long enough has already seen this degrade over the years. A decade ago engineers made much more decisions at companies, had some say in the quality of code and technical direction companies were in. Software devs are still paid well but are increasingly told to keep their heads down and focus on code, and zero consideration will be given to any technical concerns if they remotely impact some PMs quarterly goals.
As boot camps ship out more and more "good enough" engineers, and a "just ship it" mentality dominants, quality technical skills become less and less of an advantage.
Technical workers squandered their advantage by thinking that some how they really were better than everyone else, and that they would forever enjoy easy employment, high salaries, respect at work and comfortable working condition. In a few years I think most technical workers will see that in the long run Amazon's engineers and Amazon's warehouse employees become more and more a like.
Sadly, comments like this show most engineers will still rabidly support management rather than risk rocking the boat, deluded into believing it will extend their privilege in the marketplace just a bit longer.
You're raising an ethics concern. Strangely, no self-styled 'ethicist' lavishly employed by BigTech appears to be interested in such a topic. It's almost as if the answer to why BigTech hires a certain brand of loudmouth 'ethicists' is to DDOS the public space and keep questions about economic inequality levels that surpass even the Gilded Era from gaining any traction.
I blame academia. Seems like most of these people spend years on degrees in critical theory, the whole time being coddled and told they are victims and never confronted or forced to argue with logic. Then when they leave the bubble of academia and get into the real world they expect the same treatment and the only thing they know how to do is play the victim card.
I find it interesting how, in the other current thread about an antitrust suit against Google (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718) that people there are criticizing Google's lack of ethics, and in this thread people are criticizing a team in Google whose goal is to try to get Google to act more ethically.
More seriously, it probably does indicate something about the political sentiment of users of HN who comment, which may indirectly indicate something about demographics. A direct link is tenuous.
It wasn't "strange" or a "jump". You explicitly state that focusing on business practices over (ethnic and/or gender) bias implies something about HN's demographics. My comment is literally (well, okay, it was exaggerated) what you wrote in your comment, but with different words.
I think the problem with this group is they don't understand what their function is, and Google can't really explain it to them.
Their job is to navigate, any way they can, a path that can be perceived as ethical for Google to exploit AI to further shareholder value without having to also deal with extreme pushback from media, watchdog groups, etc.
These people probably think Human Resources exists to help them.
I think the best case scenario for AI ethics is that those researchers work to develop processing & metrics to ensure AI systems are fair. The current model seems overwhelmingly adversarial where AI researches do X and then the ethics researches come in an indicate problems P, Q, R. I'm curious how much internal communication there is between the ethics department and the AI departments. Instead of doing research on how the datasets are biased or something of that sort, it seems more fruitful to help researches develop balanced and fair datasets. AI is going to develop yes or yes. The best case scenario is that AI ethics is a first class concern for those researchers and is factored into their development rather than being a case of "look at this gross, unethical behavior in this model!"
This is why you don't feed the activist beast, which Google had been doing for years. They're utterly detached from reality and make progressively more insane demands and use wilder and wilder language.
"Data violence" is their new slogan. If an algorithm isn't utterly flawless out the gate, that's a "literal act of violence" against [insert group here]. I'm not even making up the "literal" part.
I wonder what is the primary intended role of Google's "Ethical AI" efforts in the first place.
You could hire a bunch of leading AI researchers and task them to do R&D to identify the pitfalls of latest-gen AI with a focus on prospective dangers, biases, unintended side-effects. You could ask them to create new methods to quantify the degree / severity of these effects. You could ask them to invent new methodologies to specifically protect against these effects.
Separate from all of this, they may or may not be tasked with a governance function to review or score internal models according to their metrics and produce impact reports. Perhaps they work side-by-side with AI developers to ensure their newly developed techniques are applied throughout the processing pipeline, etc.
The (non-expert) impression I get from ethical AI research is that it hasn't moved much past the obviousness phase. The revelation that the source material for your training set determines the behavior of your model. That models are not neutral or granted some higher perspective just because they're some sort of magic algorithm because ultimately they are statistical engines driven by their datasets. That models can be misused and misapplied if the end-user treats them so. And that models cost a lot of resources to train, which like anything can be translated into tons of CO2 emissions.
A more nuanced analysis would look at the cost/benefit of what the model achieves versus the energy cost or potential bias that would be present in any alternative method. For example, it's a strict win/win situation if GPT-3 takes 10 million tons of CO2 to train, but displaces work that otherwise would have taken 11 million tons of CO2. All models will have bias -- "bias engine" is actually a good way to describe the fundamental nature and purpose of the algorithm! But at least models can have strictly measureable and totally consistent levels of bias that perhaps can even be controlled for as desired, unlike manual human labor which will demonstrate wildly variable and much harder to control levels of bias. See, for example, the controversial use of AI models to set bail. [1]
As I side note, I hate the opening paragraph of TFA;
> Tension between Google's Ethical AI group and executives at the company rose on Wednesday, as employees sent a list of demands regarding the recent departure of one of the team's leaders — a prominent Black woman in a field that's largely White and male.
That level of race baiting in an Op Ed would deem it unpublishable. The effect (if not the intent) of that opening is to essentially shut off the reader's critical thinking skills before they even get going.
>I wonder what is the primary intended role of Google's "Ethical AI" efforts in the first place.
I as well. Is their role to bring up adversarial viewpoints or to actually be adversarial? If it is the former, did her behavior cross over into the latter, and that is what upper management had a problem with?
459 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] thread> 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. It also calls for the company to offer Gebru a new, higher-level position, to commit publicly to the integrity of research conducted at Google, and to guarantee it won't harm any workers who advocated for Gebru.
I sincerely hope Google’s leaders don’t cave in and instead hold firm on their prior decision. Employee activism is highly toxic and distracting, especially when activists organize like a mob to prop up someone as toxic as Timnit Gebru. Anonymous forums like Reddit ML and Blind are full of stories from victims of her aggression/toxicity and yet the alliance of employee activists and tech journalists continue to make her out to be a victim of injustice.
It emphasises blackness as an identity, i.e. it is a proper noun, the name of an ethnic group, and not just an adjective describing their skin colour.
I can't say I agree that society should be fracturing into more identities instead of fewer, or that people should strongly identify with their race, but that's the trend and that's we're at with the terminology.
It's not particularly new; labels used as names of racial identity groups have been capitalized for a long time; “Black” as a proper noun or proper adjective in that context has been capitalized for a long time (used as a common adjective describing skin color it isn't, and the usages can be hard to differentiate otherwise.)
> Both words denote a racial or ethnic identity and therefore should be upper case when referring to a person, community, culture, etc., in the same way CNN capitalizes other descriptors of race, ethnicity and shared identity, including African American, Native American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Asian American, African, and other terms
[1] https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-capitalize-black-white-race/
It’s remarkable that journalists can claim, as the AP does, that white peoples don’t have a shared culture when they also write articles ascribing a culture to white people and blaming it for all of society’s problems. The obvious inconsistency just seems like racism against white people.
I read the NYT comments somewhat regularly and cannot recall ever seeing such a high proportion of the highlighted comments criticizing the NYT's position.
I give the NYT credit for highlighting these many critical comments, which appear to reflect the sentiment of the 'Reader Picks' comments as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Being black is mostly an empirical fact. But being Black is about your experience and culture. Calling a random black person "Black" is making the same mistake as calling a random black person "African American".
https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1339330010684002304
> In some contexts, the meaning of the words ('racist' and 'sexist') has shifted from “assigning lower value to a person because of their race or gender” to “infidel” and “heretic”. If you question virgin birth, you don’t correct important facts. You state that you are a heretic, and you’ll be ostracized.
> Every religious movement asks its adherents for a public commitment to a sacred creed to show allegiance. The creed cannot be literally true, or random people would profess it. If you deny it, you will invoke ire of all adherents. If you go down defending it, you are a martyr.
> This leads to some unpleasant effects on the margins, but many young people see a genuine need for a new, atheist religious movement, since both the theist religions and the rationalist liberalism of previous generations are failing to adress their social and existential issues.
The truth the inventors and promoters of "Latinx" don't want to face is that Latinos, African-Americans, and almost every other minority is far far more intolerant of everything LGBTQQIA2etc. than liberal elites are.
Pew polls in 2019 showed that 49% of Black Americans did not believe gay people should be allowed to be married. And the more liberal elites try to change people's day-to-day lives in intrusive ways to force them to accept LGBTetc. (like with awkward forced language) the more and more such groups will repel from accepting that.
I've seen it myself in my own community.
The saddest part are the glowing reviews in Vice Motherboard and The Verge.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/mx-gender-neut...
As far as I can tell, the new coinage of "Latinx" has no purpose except for signaling that you're one of the cool club. The vast majority of Latinos have never heard of it, and most of those who have don't like it.
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.
I would think Latino/a applied more to Europe than in the Americas. When I first came to the States, I was surprised that Mexican-Americans were called Latino/a. Hispanic seemed more apt/correct than Latin. I had always associated it with Rome, not Spain.
The Latins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latins [..] The Latins were originally an Italic tribe in ancient central Italy from Latium. As Roman power and colonization spread Latin culture, during the Roman Empire, Latins came to mean mostly unified Italic Latin-speaking people and the Latin-speaking people of Dacia, Iberia, Illyria, and Gaul whose land was settled by Roman colonists (see Latin peoples). Today, Latin people are those whose languages are derived from Latin; Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanians, etc.
In the late 15th–16th centuries, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Portugal and Spain began to create world empires. In consequence, by the mid-19th century, the former American colonies of these nations became known as Latin America and this region's inhabitants as Latin Americans.[..]
here's a conjecture: maybe racism is not real, maybe it's something that seems real but isn't, like "evil". it just seems so easy to find counterexamples to racist ideas. hate black people? surely i can introduce you to one who is pretty cool. hate whites? they aren't all bad. like seriously, how does it continue to exist? is it just an excuse? how can you look at a whole population and just hate em? is it something like an emotion? and if so, how do we solve it? it can't be corrected with education if it's a feeling. people can't help their feelings. drugs?
In South Africa they teach young schoolchildren about the country's apartheid history (and knowing this history is a good thing, because it provides context for the country's modern day inequality).
Sadly there are some older generations who have oppposing (and often contradictory) views of exactly how and why said history played out the way it did.
This disagreement of history often leads to modern day racism.
Sadly it's here to stay - at least for a while still - but I do hope that one day it becomes a thing the past.
EDIT: I see you removed your opening line. Leaving it here for context to my comment.
Hacker culture was born at the zenith of American liberalism, just after its ideals had triumphed over Soviet Union's self-destructing spiral. Those times may never come back, and liberalism itself is on life support :(
The problem here is the presentation of a counterexample in this way is casting it as an exception, and implicitly confirming the validity of the negative stereotype as the default assumption:
This is also the underlying problem with certain compliments, eg. "Wow, you're a really good developer (unlike most women)!", "You're so well spoken (unlike most Black people)!", and so on.
Given the human ability to rationalize, even a never-ending flood of in-your-face counterexamples is more likely to provoke reactions like "Well, women are just less talented developers on average, of course there are exceptions", and so on.
Also interesting how they bring up diversity figures when talking about Timnit leaving, but not that these employees are trying to get Megan Kacholia fired or demoted...yes that's right - a Woman in a field composed mostly of Men(to borrow the article's rhetoric). Not only that, but a Woman with Children of Color.
Go to any university in the US right after a prof is denied tenure. His students will inevitably protest this decision the loudest.
Also, what were they supposed to do after she sent an email to a huge listserv at the company telling all her subordinates that they should not participate in the company's D&I initiatives and should essentially quit working there? You can't pay people to tell your own employees to stop working for you...
If someone is actively bad at their job or is sabotaging others in the workplace, it's quite reasonable to demand their resignation regardless of their sex, age, or family situation, even if it's unpleasant.
I don't know if the charge is correct or not. I'm guessing it is, but I'm really just saying appearances look pretty damning here and there isn't likely to be a convenient means to successfully white-wash the story.
So to speak
> A Black woman can't survive around here doing any type of research let alone research thats designed to make those in the majority uncomfortable. And guess who can apparently unilaterally order you to do things without even thinking you're someone they should converse with. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824)
> [The VPs in her org] are very useful for gaslighting and marginalizing Black women to eternity. They're very useful for blocking any upstream work that needs to be done to change the status quo. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331772727615602690)
https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1278571537776271360
The whole interaction is so cringey and screams toxicity.
You can surely say that the overlap in a Ghanan and a Sami person's ancestry is quite small regarding recent millennia. But I don't see well defined groups at all. The reason it seems so in the US is because of the huge Western European (German/British) immigration early on and the large population of descendants of West African slaves. These two are sharply distinguishable (discounting for intermixing effects) but there are no "well defined groups" such as "black" and "white" when looking at it globally, not just in America. They are linked continuously via North/East Africans/Arabs/Turks and Mediterraneans.
Advice to not interpret any genetic data in a divisive manner here: http://www.ask-force.org/web/Golden-Rice/Yudell-Taking-Race-...
It's kind of like asking if Obama is really African American/Black. Races aren't sharply divided, it's a social grouping thing based on history, culture, etc.
Obama has clear facial features of a black person. This woman does not have them. She even looks like she got a perm just to look more black.
Let’s agree to disagree ;)
Race isn't straightforward.
It wasn't necessarily meant as an insult. Perhaps in America it's clear she's black, in countries with more North African and Middle Eastern immigration, it may not be.
The geographic distance from Eritrea to West Africa is the same as to Denmark (like 5000 km) and the terrain isn't easy to traverse. If someone imagines all black people "must" look the typical West African way (Ghana, Ivory Coast etc), they may be legit confused when seeing someone from the other side of the continent. The reason that both are considered black is social.
Edit: for example, when seeing her photo she reminded me of the Syrian-Hungarian reporter Hesna Al Ghaoui: https://hesna.hu/gallery#media So precisely what skin tone qualifies you as black is hard to say. Somewhere between Al Ghaoui and Gebru I guess: https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/B817/production/_115872174_gettyi...
She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”. The first is a common adjective that never really applies to humans except very loosely, the second is a racial identity group formed by and defined largely through oppression by European and (in US usage; usage and identity elsewhere has evolved through different local forces and experiences) later European-descended American bigots, that has only loose correlation to complexion, ultimately starting with the division of humanity (by people in the last of these groups) fairly arbitrarily into the three broad racial groups of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which later evolved into White, Black, and the last split into Asian and Native American.
You must be deep inside some cultural bubble not to see how hilarious this sounds.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_chromatic_scal...
FTA: In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, she said Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because it felt that her email reflected "behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."
Google cut off her access and paid her through her notice period.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947719354/ousted-black-google...
When companies like Google or IBM employee researchers, they're positioning themselves as supporting that model of inquiry, and the benefit for them is the credibility that comes from participation in scientific inquiry. Gebru attacking Google's AI practices actually lends Google credibility for disinterestedly supporting basic research and taking its results seriously.
A company that employs an ethicist and takes that ethicist's output seriously even when it challenges the company is a company that genuinely cares about the academic standard in that field. A company that hires an ethicist and then fires them when they point out the company's wrongdoing is sounding an alarm about their own unethical conduct.
The part I struggle to understand here is how Google could be so stupid. Who cares, from a commercial perspective, if an academic they employ drags them? Keeping Gebru on payroll was straightforwardly purchased ethical credibility; firing her is a PR disaster and an open statement that their ethics AI group is a propaganda unit rather than a genuine research entity. It would have been trivial, even beneficial, to air the academic dispute. They gained nothing by retracting her paper and then firing her.
Had a white male done this, it's hard not to think he'd be praised as a hero on here.
Maybe the reason it isn't praised in this case isn't due to her being a woman of color but due to other differences in this case and those that are praised?
Perhaps we shouldn't just sweep it under the rug. It seems there is very real merit, this was not just a disgruntled employee. The subject matter is directly related to diversity - to remove race is to, again, cover up the systemic race issues we face as a society.
And I don't think anyone's disputing her desire to promote and encourage ethical implementations of AI technology. The crux of this issue is how you handle yourself, and it seems the more I read about how she handled these things, the more it seems like how children act.
"If I don't get my way, I'm quitting!"
Yeah, you get to sit atop your high horse and lord your morality over the rest of the mortals beneath you. You don't actually get to do shit, though, and you've actively lost the ability to control how this unfolds, at least at Google.
They're clearly unhappy, and so are many google employees. This clearly isn't just one person, this clearly is bigger than that.
> You'd be hard-pressed to find an ethical issue with how Edward Snowden handled the revelation of mass illegal spying on the American people.
What ethical issue is there with the revelation of problems in the ethical AI division of google? You just "don't like how they act." I've heard many people say the same of individuals on street corners...not a great look.
Their job is to build a bulwark for the company to guard it against negative press, and that will allow Google to create an AI that leverages all its data and currently existing infrastructure to increase shareholder value. They actually think their job is to prevent bad things from happening. Its not, and that's where the confusion is occurring. That confusion is turning into frustration, which in turn becomes anger.
You'll probably say something like, "Well that's a cynical viewpoint..."
Any company's "Ethics" committee/board is there to do that. Just like Human Resources is there to protect the company from you, not you from the company.
The only problem is that entirely too many Googlers think they're actually employed to make the world a better place. They're employed to create shareholder value. Sometimes making the world a better place will align with increasing shareholder value. Sometimes it won't.
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.
You can't do illegal things. Difference.
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.
Did he contact any of the number of Congressmen or Senators who are sympathetic to his concerns to see what could be done before committing treason?
HN has a large audience with a broad range of opinions. In my opinion, Snowden and Manning are traitors and the latter should have been left in prison.
> Had a white male done this, it's hard not to think he'd be praised as a hero on here.
I'd be equally dismissive of any person who committed the following actions.
1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter.
2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity.
3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided.
Just like any large audience a hive mind exists. There are more posts in favor of Snowden/Assange on here than in favor of this google employee. In general, more come to their defense, than hers, despite doing similar things.
Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
These cases are completely different.
Snowden and Assange exposed a global surveillance network that many are opposed to. I think of Snowden as the Kim Philby of the 21st century but that's a different discussion.
Dr. Gebu disagreed with the peer reviews of a paper, threatened to resign, and Google accepted her resignation.
> Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
She may feel that her paper was rejected because the reviewers are racist; I think it's more likely that they disagreed with the quality of the work. There was probably an administrative screw-up with its submission, though.
Neither of us can prove anything. It's unlikely that all the facts will come out in any event; Google would settle the case if it went to court.
> I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
Have you read the email (https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) that she sent? Would you expect to keep your job if you sent a similar email at work? Diversity is the third rail of modern companies - criticize or discourage it and you're gone.
> If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
Anonymous peer reviews are a standard practice in industry and academia. If you demand the names of reviewers and threaten to resign if they aren't provided then don't be surprised if your employment ends.
Critical to that credibility is actually having the same standards as Harvard with respect to allowing the researchers to publish what they will, whether or not they're the target. By appearing to fire Gebru because her paper was insufficiently pro-Google, they damaged their whole purpose of having an ethical AI group.
The demands of the group may seem childish or absurdly far-reaching, but if Google wants to rebuild their credibility here, this is the standard they have to hit. Otherwise, their own researchers have less credibility because their output will be viewed as "approved by Google management", not real research. This is critical if they need to say "our own AI ethicists say this is ok."
That's not toxic, that's anger. One angry incident, justified or not, does not make the case for firing a "toxic" employee.
What about the paper trail she left on Twitter?
That's not being professionally assertive.
1. Absolutely refusing to update her paper with feedback from a colleague - the whole purpose of the internal review
2. Demanding that Google reveal who gave her critical feedback - presumably to attack them in some way
3. Sending an e-mail to her superiors/colleagues, making ultimatums and threatening to leave if her demands were not met
4. Sending a message to a group at Google, telling them to abandon any attempts to help Google with diversity initiatives and instead start attacking their co-workers
5. Publicly blaming Google and saying that she was "fired" for an e-mail. She was relying on information assymetry, knowing that Google would be hesitant to respond fully to all allegations
When you append, "Or I will leave" to a request and the company isn't interested in your request, you're resigning. You can dress it up in fancy language, but that's the bottom line.
Or did I miss something about this story?
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392
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 expected she would have to leave after her ultimatum. She was fired for a different email.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55281862
It's good to be critical and reflect on the company you're working for. There are bad cultures and attitudes in any big company, not just tech.
But if you're going to sprout your opinions publically about your (ex)-employer like that, sorry, but I wouldn't want her in my team. She sounds like too much of a headache to deal with. Her work must be truly extraordinary to warrent having that headache.
I'm pretty sure her work as an ethicist can be summarized as "Any application of AI/ML must be stopped until it is absolutely GUARANTEED that there won't be anything that could be deemed discriminatory by proponents of critical race/gender theory." Which is obviously an untenable position for a tech company.
I think she will be happy when we develop natural language understanding to the degree where we could implement an automatic critical theory censor, that would check for undesirable biases.
That sounds like more of a nightmare scenario than having to deal with this person... Its hard to even know where to begin with how something like this could go off the rails easily.
Actual racism is very rare in America. Prejudice is commonplace and has a lot more to do with the inherent tribalism of humanity than it does actual malice for someone's "race". And to take it even further, I think if people were honest, what they really dislike is cultural differences that vary dramatically from theirs.
To me this is just like trans issues... we'll never get anywhere significant with this stuff, because in order to come up with meaningful answers, you have to ask meaningful, hard questions. No one wants to ask these kinds of questions, because no one wants to have to deal with the answers that may come up, because that will also invite further study and further difficult, unpleasant conversations.
Yeah and your average software engineer is roses.
Difference is engineers positively impact the bottom line and society is less tolerant (empirically researched fact) of pushback from women or people of color.
For sure there may be complications on both sides of this issue but let’s not pretend that this shit isn’t real.
However, the paper trail that has been published publicly does not suggest she has been fired because of these messages.
Having someone that is known to speak their mind in such a team does lend it more credibility. But you also can't complain if they then speak their mind about things you would like them to shut up about.
It's the same things everyone else has been saying for years (global warming bad, also don't build a racist speech reproducer), and Google wanted her to reference their efforts to mitigate those things in addition to repeating yet again that they can happen. Self-serving? Sure, but not really censorship and honestly would make the paper better to include analysis of mitigations.
You have a really funny world-view where compelled speech doesn't fall in the censorship bucket.
What Google wants to say to the world is "hey, you should totally trust us, we have the best ethical AI people in the field looking over our shoulder!" But now Google can't say that, because the world knows that their experts aren't completely free to exercise judgement or state their opinions. That may only be true to a limited extent, but the damage to Google is larger: mostly because we don't know how limited it is.
Insofar as your employer feels free to add marketing fluff to your presentations, that's because your value to the company is not predicated on your being an independent voice who provides a check on management.
Although it’s fun to assume bad faith when it comes to every action by every company, she was not supposed to be an independent critic to launder evil. She was supposed to work in cooperation with them to make a high quality product. They don’t want to create something that causes suffering. Even if you don’t buy that their motivation was pure, doing so would obviously be bad for business. What good is a product that only works for white people?
Instead of adding perspective and cooperatively furthering a unified goal, she was divisive and created dysfunction.
She was in an incredibly privileged position to do good and shape the future of some civilization-changing technologies. Instead of shaping a better future, she threw hand grenades and stuck wrenches in gears. Now not only does the future of their tech lack her perspective, but they are unlikely to engage with anyone who even smells like they could be a bad-faith activist.
I didn't mean to imply that the ethical AI team is empty PR. What I'm saying is that the obvious corporate justification for an (expensive!) AI ethics team is to reassure regulators and customers that Google's AI techniques will follow best ethical practices. Obviously the best way for Google to achieve that goal is to hire a bunch of really strong researchers, and then incorporate their recommendations into Google's products. And of course, to have those researchers publish their findings so that the world can see that a standard is being followed.
But the flipside can also be true, and damaging the credibility of your ethical AI team comes at a cost. It would not surprise me if some observers have come to negative conclusions about the independence of Google's researchers, which means those people are more likely to mistrust Google's products in the future. The irony is that even if Google has the very best intentions, they might now find it harder to convince people of this. This does meaningful harm to Google, and nothing Google's gotten out of this mess has been worth that cost.
If those references to recent developments were the real issue, it seems very odd that Google responded that way.
From the type of things people are saying on r/machinelearning about what she was like to work with, it's not hard to imagine what those reasons might have been.
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.
As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467
Looks like Timnit Gebru made an ultimatum and offered her resignation if the terms of the ultimatum were not met. Google accepted her resignation and chose to have it effective immediately (as is often the case when you resign and a company feels like it would not be beneficial to have a longer departure period).
It's not like I'm taking only the words of others. I'm reading what Gebru herself chose to put out there.
That is the language used when firing someone for their behavior.
However, we have context. We know that an ultimatum including a resignation threat was given.
Accepting that resignation and making the termination of their employment relationship immediate with some extra "Yeah, this is for the best" language doesn't mean that she was fired.
If you only want to consider the limited context of ignoring that she submitted a resignation ultimatum, aren't you just cherry picking?
[1] https://cuiab.ca.gov/board/precedentdecisions/docs/pb39.pdf
You literally hired this person to the e-brake on your AI program and then fire them when they tell you it's time to stop.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this particular firing, but there's a very good reason for the company to employ someone who publicly disagrees with the way a particular department is being run or a decision they've made.
Candidly: this would be another example of why unions exist. Just because you publicly disagree with the company doesn't mean they should have carte blanche to fire you.
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 you as citizen if you criticize their dirty laundry in public.
I (partially) own the government (in theory, if it's a democracy). I don't own the company that I work for.
I can easily choose which company I want to work for, switching countries is something much harder.
A government that does not like what I say can do all sorts of horrible things, jail me, confiscate property and event kill me. Companies generally do not have that power.
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.
> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
I find her totally out of line and disagree with her politics but I have to give her that in some sense she is quite brave. Most people would never consider tweeting out something like this because they'd be afraid of getting fired immediately and also suffering a reputational damage that would make applying for future jobs difficult. But she doesn't seem to be fazed by this.
IMHO she's an unethical ethicist, rude, and presumptuous at best. She has no idea what kind of depredations may have gone on in the lives of people she calls "privileged". I look like a typical fat white bald businessguy. I have been thrown into jail unjustly, raped, beaten, kicked out of schools and shunned from my social group for things I didn't do and would never do, rejected by multiple girlfriends' families because I was not in the right minority group, and more.
She has no idea what's gone on in their lives. They on the other hand appear to be treating her with as much public kindness as she is dishing out hatred (publicly).
Identity politics means individuality-less politics, where individuals are seen as mere parts of a group, or symbols for the common suffering of the group, and not by themselves. You hurt one you hurt the whole group, is the way they are thinking.
We have seen this recently in the Timnit vs Yann LeCun and Pedro vs Anima scandals, even the allies of wokes would be accused of being racist the moment they dared express a slightly more nuanced opinion. You have to approve the lead woke and not add anything or you're instantly the enemy.
When I hear someone talking about "gaslighting" it significantly lowers my inclination to take them seriously.
I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence.
It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it. Conversely, it may be difficult to remain employed and continue drawing that paycheck if you publish research that does not portray your employer in a good light, especially if the underlying reason for your role is public relations.
Here's a fun experiment: open up Alphabet's annual report from last year [goog10-k2019], search for the keyword "ethic", and there are two hits, both under item 1A, risk factors. The latter keyword match for "ethic" in the 10-K is regarding supply chain risks, and the potential for unethical behaviour by alphabet's suppliers. But the former keyword match is far more interesting:
> Our ongoing investment in new businesses, products, services, and technologies is inherently risky, and could disrupt our current operations and harm our financial condition and operating results.
[...]
> In addition, new and evolving products and services, including those that use artificial intelligence and machine learning, raise ethical, technological, legal, regulatory, and other challenges, which may negatively affect our brands and demand for our products and services. Because all of these new ventures are inherently risky, no assurance can be given that such strategies and offerings will be successful and will not harm our reputation, financial condition, and operating results.
[goog10-k2019] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204420...
Exactly. The secondary motivation is the possibility of benefiting from some basic research. It's ultimately a credibility play, which makes their handling of the whole affair so mind-bogglingly dumb. There would have been no problem at all for Gebru to have presented her supposedly anti-Google paper; zero practical consequence for Google.
Knowingly committing ethical violations with AI seems likely pretty low on their list of concerns.
The movie I, Robot explores what happens when "logic" is taken to its logical outcome by an AI. It posits a robot with feelings as the antidote to this issue.
We tend to overlook the fact that humans themselves come in varying flavors with regards to degree of emotional affect, empathy, compassion, etc and how ethical they are. We haven't gotten this sorted for humanity yet and when tech goes sideways and hurts many people, we like to blame it on the tech itself fundamentally lacking "a heart" or ethics instead of blaming it on the character defects of the architects of the tech.
We still haven't really figured out how to do human intelligence well and that's scary and not something we want to admit, so we project our deficiencies onto the tech and this incident is uncomfortably casting light on the fact that it's not really clear cut like that. It's really not the case that you can readily separate the people from the tech when it comes to things we label "ethics."
/Hot take
I'd be willing to bet some money on it being simply the result of some employees saying, "AI ethics is super important. We feel strongly there should be people working on AI ethics to make sure it's not racist or sexist". And anyone who objected was yelled at with words to the effect of, "are you saying ethics isn't important? do you not care about ethics?" until opposition was silenced and management felt it was a small sop to quiet the ranks.
The right approach to this would have been to say to those advocating for it the following:
"Ethics is of course tremendously important. That's why we carefully select our workforce and insist on the highest ethical standards from everyone, in their work. Ethics is not something that can be compartmentalised or delegated to a separate team. Ethics underlies all we do. If you see something you believe might be unethical, please raise it with your manager so it can be resolved company wide. Until then, return to work."
Creating a dedicated ethics team was a dumb idea because it can only possibly end like this: you hire people and tell them "your job is to ensure we are ethical" and they're not going to sit back and say, you know boss, I sniffed around and everything seemed above board. Nothing for me to do here right now. I'll check back in a month. Of course they're going to see unethical stuff everywhere they look, regardless of merit. Their salary literally depends on it.
Oh, no doubt. But that scenario would be rooted in this larger context of how we generally relate to this topic.
Creating a dedicated ethics team was a dumb idea because it can only possibly end like this
I agree, which is why I say "it's probably stupidly conceived."
I find social stuff fascinating and I've had the following college classes: Intro to Psychology; Social Psychology; Negotiation and Conflict Management. I also raised two fairly Aspie-ish sons and I've had to explain social things to them in very exacting terms, which forced me to really up my game on being precise in order for it to be useful to them. My sons and I still look for things that meet our rigorous standards for "How do you know that's actually accurate?" because social phenomenon are inherently hard to test: People behave differently when they know "This is a test. This is only a test." than they do in real life (which is why I think UBI experiments are useless: These people know the study will end and the money will stop rolling in, so it doesn't tell you how people would really behave if we really instituted a UBI).
Anyway, I find social stuff fascinating and people routinely interpret my social observations as being ethical or moral judgements and I get this reputation for being a real judgy bitch, basically, even though I"m a lot less judgy than most people. But when push comes to shove, "ethics" is generally about determining which behaviors protect one or both of two things: individuals from group abuse or groups from individual abuse ("tragedy of the commons" type stuff et al).
So when I talk about what works or what doesn't, in some sense I am talking about ethics, but I'm usually not trying to be some kind of moralizing priss, which is how that gets interpreted. I'm usually trying to say something like "Objectively speaking, you can't be both heavy and light at the same time. That fundamentally doesn't parse." and then someone is all up in arms about "Don't talk about my momma!!!! grrrrr!" type stuff.
So I feel strongly that what they really were probably wanting to study is "How do we do AI well in ways that interact with this social stuff like racism?" and out popped the word ethics because that's how people think of that. And it was a terrible idea on the face of it because of the inherent assumption of judgment rather than a more objective framing about studying AI and social phenomenon and how does that work? When you start using AI to do things like parse faces, what are the practical pain points there that we need to be aware of and try to address?
But I think most people can't readily separate that out in that way, which is part of why I am so often in hot water for saying "Well, actually, I think that simply doesn't work because...." And when I say that about social phenomenon, I am often de facto talking about "human ethics" whether I want to be or not and it's very often a giant pile of manure that I've just stepped into.
A subtle AI risk is simply the centralization of the decision making process. This leads to the reinforcement of some subset of biases, until they completely overshadow alternative options. The system becomes rigid, having lost its day-to-day individual level feedback, thus its capacity to adapt to new circumstances. Sooner or later, it will fail.
See also 'too big to fail' and 'central planning'.
The department probably exists in the first place as a result of an internal political struggle and compromise - with some decision-makers wanting Google to be genuinely more ethical, and others wanting to avoid any genuine oversight.
As a result, you have this bodge solution where the department gets to exist (helped by the PR benefit as mentioned elsewhere), but not to act independently. Anyone in the department offering genuine oversight is at risk of being forced out.
I certainly hope you are right. And with some foresight, the ethics department is a "Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B" now fully loaded and ready for departure. Bon Voyage!
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
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 join google, look themselves in the mirror every day, and know their employer is trying to do things right.
I don't know what the reality is of an Ethical AI group. But having a good one that works might make the difference hiring exceptional people.
(and of course I don't know reality - for all I know enron had an ethics group too)
All else equal, being a reasonable and ethical company IS good business. Problems arise with ethics and business collide.
so irritating that it has to be twisted into being about racism. is it really? wouldn't we know that more explicitly? besides what if she identifies as a White man? has anyone asked?
Or, its more common name, PR
In all honesty, the most reasonable way to do corporate ethics is to give funding to external nonprofit organizations whose mission is the actual ethics, and then separately turn that organization's work into actionable KPIs for your engineers - if ethics org says "we need racial parity in facial detection", then you make that a KPI for your team of non-ethicist engineers and hopefully your organization becomes more ethical in the process without an endless deluge of PR nightmares.
In saying "resignation", CNN is presenting the management framing -- as many people have pointed out, she was fired.
Bloomberg states both sides of that: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/google-ai...
As does The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/7/22158501/timnit-gebru-tea...
This is like I go to my boss and ask for a $1 billion dollars. Otherwise, I'll leave. Then, my boss decides that I should leave since the boss can't give me $1b. Then, I keep telling my friends that "well, I'm actually fired.". huh?
Not sure if constructive dismissal is a thing in the US but it is in the UK.
If someone says, do this or I'll jump, and the other person pushes them, that's not the same thing as the person taking the leap on their own. The result might be the same, but the way the result was reached was different.
If you offer to resign if new conditions of employment aren't met and the company accepts your resignation without honoring your exact terms of schedule, it sounds like you largely were responsible for terminating your own employment. Claiming that you were "immediately fired" as she tweeted just sounds dishonest to me.
This isn't just a framing. She was fired. Now you may say "she was asking for it" but that doesn't change the fact that she was fired.
There's no accepted relationship if you push someone threatening to jump. You're just an a-hole committing assault and possibly murder.
Is there a link to the letter that she sent? That could help to clarify.
The demand is something around exposing the identities of the peers who reviewed and rejected her paper. If Google doesn't give her the identities of those peers, she say she will leave the company.
Comparing to suicide is a bit much though. When considering death, everything else becomes secondary, so we can't use that analogy for comparison.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll quit my job" - then, I'll probably tell person that they can quit their job. I'm not gonna skip my dinner for that.
I hope this illustrates that, when death is involved, everything else becomes secondary, and we prioritize not death over everything.
So, it's a bad analogy to use in Timnit's situation where she will quit if she doesn't get to see the identities of peer reviewers. This situation is not life and death.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll quit my job" - then, you fire them and get on with dinner.
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?
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...?
But that doesn't seem right. That looks more like a different type of letter, sent to a wider audience than just Timnit to her manager(s).
I've seen referenced that there was a timeframe for when she was going to quit that she mentioned. I see no such reference in that letter.
Maybe there's a real copy of the letter floating around. My guess is that people pretend that they've seen "the letter" but only read this other one I referenced above.
I'm happy to be proved wrong, though. I have no dog in this fight except to understand the truth of the situation. If you've seen a different letter than shows her ultimatum and time frame, please share.
She said if these conditions are not met, I will work with you on an end date. That's not what happened, she was terminated immediately with the rationalization being that they didn't like the tone of the email she sent to the Google Brain Women and Allies listserv. That alone points to it being a termination.
Is she largely responsible for her employment ending at Google. You could say yes, but fact is that Google is the one who cut things off.
Either party can choose an earlier date, but not a later date.
I don't really care if she left or Google fired her. But framing it as Google is evil for firing her seems dishonest when she was the one who gave the ultimatum.
Google is evil, but not for this activity.
They made the decision they did not want to work for you as had been previously agreed. You only changed the timetable.
To put this another way, if I tell my company that I will be quitting in 2 weeks and they tell me not to bother coming back to the office, did they fire me? I would not say they did.
If you give your company a date for the cessation of your employment, that is giving notice. If you say I "will resign if", is saying that you will do something in the unspecified future.
So if you give your two weeks notice you have formally turned in your resignation. In your example I would agree that they just changed the timetable. If you haven't given your notice, and they terminate your employment citing an email you sent, you have been fired.
By all accounts she didn't submit her resignation, she simply said that she would. Sometimes situations like that result in the person getting cold feet, or the two parties working out a compromise. Maybe things would've always ended up the same way, but either way Google didn't wait for her to actually resign.
Saying she resigned sounds better I guess and is at least plausible to enough people that maybe they thought it better to characterize it that way.
But like you said, it's not really the crux of the whole situation. At least not IMO.
It's also unreasonable that she will get to choose her leaving date at her own liking.
When wanting to part way, either side has the full right to choose an earlier date.
> If someone says, do this or I'll jump
This is not a great analogy. I actually would go as far as saying people who use this analogy have malicious intent.
When death is involved, everything else becomes secondary.
Let's look at a small example. Say I'll commit suicide if you go and see your kids today. Now it's only one day, and you (as a decent person) will probably skip seeing your kids for one day to save one life.
Now if I say I'll quit my job if you go to see your kids today. You would probably say "Then, please quit."
People choose their end date all the time. That's just standard. Sometimes the company moves a date up, sometimes the two parties negotiate a different date for some reason, sometimes people are fired.
If it's an at-will employment state, both parties can choose whatever date they like. But if the employer terminates employment early, that's generally a firing. If an employment does so, we call it quitting.
> Let's look at a small example. Say I'll commit suicide if you go and see your kids today. Now it's only one day, and you (as a decent person) will probably skip seeing your kids for one day to save one life.
> Now if I say I'll quit my job if you go to see your kids today. You would probably say "Then, please quit."
Use whatever analogy works for you, ultimately the point is the same. Someone can threaten to do something, but if you do it for them it's different than if they do it themselves.
If someone says "I'll quit" and the company disables their badge and security escorts them out, they've been fired.
That is absolutely false.
Either side has the full right to choose an earlier date.
You can choose an earlier date to leave. Company can also choose an earlier date for you to leave.
> If someone says "I'll quit" and the company disables their badge and security escorts them out, they've been fired
Do you expect to choose your exit date at your own liking at any date at your comfort?
We can agree to disagree.
Saying you're fired when you actually give the ultimatum seems dishonest. I thought Timnit was supposed to be a role model of high ethics.
How about if you go to your boss and demand that the racial discrimination you're experiencing stops?
Since we don't have the original email, we can't tell. But I bet it's closer to my example than yours.
Employee: "If you don't fire my manager and give me a $1M bonus, I'm resigning, date to be confirmed."
Company: "Ummmm, no. Thanks for resigning, let's make that date today."
"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
This talk by him on AI ethics has a lot of maturity and insight on the topic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRL4xtmXE4
Petro is "Twitter trash".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
People are usually much better outside Twitter.
I would like to know which role played Kacholia in this. Just a scapegoat for management or was she directly involved?
It's just a PR stunt gone wrong...
A real paper she was listed as an author on.
Write papers on why capitalism is evil and socialism is the answer
For fun reading, here are the companies that the Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns (they recently removed Raytheon from this list when they exited the business of cluster bombs): https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/exclu...
Hardly. It's all part of the negotations. Leaving is just the resort. There's no reason not to protest before it gets to that point.
Honest question - which part has gone too far?
Feel like there are currently a lot of parts.
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't accept it.
It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values.
Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees.
Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them.
Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.
More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners.
> Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere.
You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.
I gave multiple points in my post as to why governments are different than companies (it was in fact the main point of my post). Please read it again.
If you are for tolerance and the coexistance of different values in society, you will understand that values come into conflict constantly. And you will respect the prerogative of employees and customers to push back when their values conflict with corporation management (who represent stockholders).
When you insist that employees must unilaterally disarm by walking away at the first sign of conflict with their employers, you are essentially expressing a class preference. You are asserting that the working class must submit to the stockholding upper class. A corporation requires capital to compete in our economy. And when the top 10% own 80% of the wealth, workers cannot simply walk away.
Stockholders can't walk away either. They need workers, just as workers need capital. So they will need to find a way to coexist, but that doesn't mean there won't be conflict. There will always be conflict. The virtue of our democracy is that the conflict is manifested as demand letters and PR statements instead of clubs and bullets.
Try being a member of the Democrat (or Republican) party and openly criticize the leaders of the party. You would be immediately ostracized and none of your legislation or ideas would make it through again.
At the core, we are a social species that relies on cooperation. It is critical to have people constantly questioning the herd mentality so we don't run off the cliff. But the whistle-blowing can still be done in a respectful way (unless, of course, it is egregious like breaking laws, moral issues, etc).
In this case, even if you take a critical eye towards Google, they didn't want a paper that they paid for published externally. Tough. If you want free reign, you can't be part of an organization that pays your paycheck every two weeks.
Also note that this does not mean that the paper was not read and reviewed within Google and might have effected some change there. And it could have been published externally if she had taken the review comments into consideration and included some of the ways Google was trying to mitigate the problems - something that would actually be interesting and relevant to the paper
The idea that we can’t criticize companies in a thread full of criticism of Google is just plain silly. Of course you can criticize companies. But if you’re criticizing your employer, you do have to accept the risk of there being private consequences. This has always been the case.
Heck, it’s not just limited to employers. If I was to walk into my local Starbucks and make a nuisance of myself by screaming, I’ll be banned. That’s not a violation of my free speech rights, nobody is prosecuting me, but it’s an obvious consequence of my speech.
If you want to be an activist, go join a non-profit.
Imagine hiring a plumber at twice the market rate, and instead of fixing your toilet, they start cashing your checks while making demands and telling the world on twitter that you’re abusive and racist. Who would tolerate such nonsense? Nobody.
This isn’t about criticizing an employer anyway. She could have discussed her concerns with them in a civil way. But that was not her goal. She is a narcissist, and there’s no winning with those people. They need an enemy in order to prop themselves up as righteous, and anyone will do. Working in good faith is a fool’s errand.
Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or lawsuits to force companies to change.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we did. At least "My god, people need to calm down." isn't really an argument.
It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.
It's not ethical concerns. It's competition concerns veiled as ethical ones.
Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome.
If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
Maybe some folks prefer it that way, but they seem all too happy to compartmentalize the reality of the situation and let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account, make them gourmet meals, babysit their kids, and do their laundry.
Google screwed up by creating an environment that fosters perpetual children. They’re fools to put up with this behavior. Walkouts should be a one way door. Call their bluff. They will not quit in any significant numbers. Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
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 wealth on slave labour, so does that mean slave labour is a good thing?
> let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account
As a reminder, just in case the principles of capitalism, quite ironically, elude you, the company hires employees it expects will pad its own bank account more than it pads theirs.
> Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
It is certainly true that the conditions of most Google employees are much better than those of the rest of the world, but they are so because the company's employees created that wealth.
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.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...
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.
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.
Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization!
Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."
That accepted conditional resignation (as someone mellifluously put it in an earlier HN discussion) is being interpreted by some as a firing. Having read the original letter, it sure sounded like a conditional resignation to me and, as a manager, I would've done my best to get the writer of the letter out the door ASAP.
Keep in mind that as an IC, I once worked for a company that imposed a 10% across the board pay cut without consulting me. I resigned the day it was announced, because my compensation is a term of employment mutually agreed to by my employer and myself, not something imposed upon me. So I've been on both sides of this.
As a general life rule, I go nuclear on people who play hardball with me, whether I am the manager or the managed.
... and then other employees raising a stink, perhaps in the hope, misguided or not, that the company will reverse its decision or change its behaviour to help its PR. The employer can use whatever power they think they have, but so can the employees. It's one thing to say that what the employees did wasn't a wise way to achieve their goal, but it's a whole other thing to say that what they did is wrong.
According to the movie the shells were all non-functional, so I'm not really sure why you brought that up.
"the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations..."
As a laborer, the greatest value you bring to the company is your labor. That's the only real thing that gives you leverage to negotiate the terms of your employment. At least, that's what I do when I'm looking for a new job, I'm not sure if you're just morally opposed to negotiating or something. It sounds like what happened here is this person spent a lot of time having these DEI discussions in which they did not feel heard, and that combined with an (allegedly) unprecedented change in the publication review process led to them concluding that these discussions weren't actually doing anything, so they tried to use their full leverage: the withdrawal of their labor.
It's neat that your discussions were always fruitful and you felt heard, but that isn't always the case.
1. Speak up internally.
2. Speak up externally.
3. Speak to the media.
Do you think the Uber sexual harassment whistleblower should have kept quiet?
eg. Disabling safety equipment so that a job can be completed faster - illegal
Locating toys and candy to low shelves at registers so that children see them and nag their parents to buy them, increasing sales. - unethical in my view but called good marketing by many others.
The irony of Google hiring so many smart people is that they get a cluster people who were institutionalized by academia, and now they have a CEO who has to act like an institutional dean.
Hackers hold your products to their standards, and ideally that adds value to your customers. Ethical AI people seem to do the same. 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.
That the company is dealing with factions of what are essentially student activists issuing demands seems like an inflection point where any further growth is going to be a function of market domination and not their ability to align to make things.
It gave me multiple upsights about how to clean up my approach thinking about the issues here:
+ framing an analogy using technology governance functions - whose functions and values can be clearly quantified and measured by many independently - with a ethical (moral) functions - whose values and results are much more nebulous
+ drawing a parallel between hackers - whom many technologists 'understand'- and value activists - whom many technologists don't 'understand
+ pointing out the now-self-evident axioms that i) activists, like hackers, hold you to 'their' standard, not yours and ii) will fight you 'their' way when you fail to meet those standards
+ the point about academia and corporate leaders needing to act as deans and dealing with navigating conflict resolution in a new 'tribe' they don't understand. Not forgetting they currently deal with multiple other tribes - investors, media, government etc.
I would like to add a couple of small points:
+ Personal risk to executives is the change in the mix with highest impact. This becomes more important as this risk is transferred up the corporate ladder.
So, leaders examining issues, from this 'new' perspective, in a balanced nuanced way while still considering profits, politics, strategy, foresight, ability to manage change ( et al, ad nauseam ) increasingly becomes a key career soft skill. Especially if decisions are delivered in communication styles that are still clearly understood by all relevant other tribes they deal with in situations like this.
+. I would like to suggest that some folks are missing PART of the point (not all of it, just an important small nuance) No single party gets to frame this debate. Ethics is now inside the corp. fence so it has to be heard.
Just consider that every side of the debate has their perspective and the other side is "crazy" from this viewpoint. E.g a key tool for academics with leadership is demanding the removal of leaders with a "or we go " chaser - this is normal in that world and it would be crazy not to use the tool as part of a "normal" negotiation. But it is not normal in the corporate world.
Point being everyone's normal is some version of some other person's crazy.
Well, these folks are from another 'tribe". The way things are done in their world is different'. Corp is the one behaving in a way that "does not make sense" from their perspective.
Just considering that the view from someone else's vantage point could be different would go a long way here.
Do you believe this is a viable trend? This debacle seems to point to the death of 'Ethics research' inside of corporations. What do companies stand to gain from hiring ethics researchers who are a liability to the shareholders? My guess is that the model will go back to using CSR budget to invest in 'social good' non-profits and think tanks that stay at a safe distance while still mentioning you as a 'Platinum Sponsor' and bringing you in for fireside chats.
(this is not me advocating against ethics research, or against bringing ethics into AI research; I'm just trying to be as cynically realist as possible)
The same thing media companies’ gain from controlling content rating systems plus the same thing any company gains from dominating research relevant to it's product area; if they do a good enough job at pretending to care, they forestall state regulation, and even if they don't succeed at that, the more influence they have over the research field, the more any outside regulation will be dependent on information that they have the ability to at least subtly spin before it is even published.
Trying to tackle both questions at once: this is a viable trend and companies do stand to gain.
If the market is saying that you have to consider other motivations and goals aside from profits and growth, and you have built this machine that is super-efficient and effective at delivering on growth and profits irrespective of all else, you need outside skills to change.
To give a specific example, take the Norway Sovereign Fund which is one of the biggest investors in the world: it has indicated that it is incorporating environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues into their decision-making,
So, if you want to get their investment, you have to have these goals in the your corp. leadership and performance management mandate.
To enable this, you need folks with these skills, who currently are not management, in the fold ( meaning folks like social scientists, ethicists etc. having really significant corp leadership roles and authority ).
This seems to be playing out here. I can't really see how Google could acquiesce to their demands without setting themselves up for this tactic to be used against them in the future.
The lesson they are teaching their students is to be utterly cynical about going through the system, and to believe that creating a public scene or disturbance is the best way to convince organizations (or anyone else) to change their policies.
Students probably aren't being creative enough in this regard; there are lots of ways to achieve or threaten bad publicity, such as working with media.
I frame it in terms of acculturation vs. assimilation. You have to decide what your corp. policy is and make it explicit, something that I think did not happen here.
The conversation is something like 'if you join us, you do your thing BUT our way" or "if you join us, you do your thing YOUR way". Then folks coming in understand the ground rules.
I would say most corps will prefer option 1 but some (most?) folks coming in for roles like "Ethics" expect option 2 - which is NOT unreasonable. I don't know that this conversation happened (explicitly enough) here.
All of that aside, like I said in the parent comment, it is critical to consider that no one side gets to frame the position alone in situations like this where the job is literally, to come in and shake up status quo - everyone with a seat at the table has a say that should have equal-ish weight.
Also, note, corp in this specific case thought that that they are enough of a "tribe" to bring them inside the fence with a 'unique' label that makes that 'tribe' explicit. Witness what is going on here.
Labelling them as "spoiled kids" is "the missing part of the point" I was alluding to.
These folks have a different way of doing things. In bringing them in, you don't get to force them to align to your vision of how to do things (not what to do which you get to define as the employer). This is because you brought them in specifically and explicitly because they were different and bringing something different to the table that you did not have before.
If it was a set of skills, capabilities - whatever - that you could have grown in-house, you would have done so.
If you think that a 'tribe' can contribute value, you have to be able to deal with the pieces of their being 'different' from you that rub you the wrong way without labelling them if it is a key component of their identity.
More explicitly, don't blame ethicists for reacting in ways you don't expect to ethical issues.
Citation needed.
It’s a pretty known fact that the majority of folks in ethics AI at Google come from sociology backgrounds who have been indoctrinated by marxists/leftist philosophies. So it’s no surprise you’re seeing the current blow up.
Most Googlers are liberal, but the level of leftism rampant in the AI ethics group is another level
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 is), only they have more power. Why is it reasonable for management to be political activists but not the workers?
Then Milton Friedman showed up and said "Hey, you just acceded to your walls being painted pink but, by the rules, you didn't have to do that!" If getting this notion across is activism, then I guess I'd stop thinking of activism as a dirty word. I thought it was more like education on a common-sense notion.
Come think of it, an alternative structure you seem to be advocating is also a solved problem in this scheme - it's called a co-op, and there are many successful ones around, from farms to clothing stores. Go found an internet search coop, and as a co-owner you'd be able to decide how it should be run.
Beyond that, well on a spectrum with that, there are numerous ways to circumvent private property - for example, government may mandate (or maintain an informal policy) that workplace theft is not prosecuted, like they do with regular theft in some US cities. That can swing the other way too, they could make wage theft ok, for example. Doesn't make it reasonable.
If I own a company and employ no-one, for someone I then hired for a specified purpose to try to wrest control of the company away from me is not much different from a corrupt government or mafia trying to do it without a contract. The magic attached to the contract that would give employers such powers would make contracts all but meaningless.
As for the changes; the co-op structure already exists, so if it actually resulted in better outcomes you'd expect more co-ops. As is, myself (and most people I expect) would rather have more money than more participation, in fact the poorer people would probably be the first to trade participation for money if they could. In the US, they can go either way at least in theory (the reason there are not that many co-ops is probably because few want more participation at the cost of money). In Europe, you are forced into a particular model. I view that as unfair.
The "political activism" was literally to remove restrictions to give people more options and/or to make people more aware of rules and less beholden to some unjustified ancient custom.
Activism and ownership are two separate things. Activism is about changing existing laws, rules and customs. There isn't any law specifically allowing executives to engage in activism (meant to change or prevent the change of existing legislation), and yet they do, and on a much larger scale than employees. Google spends millions of dollars each year on lobbying.
> so if it actually resulted in better outcomes you'd expect more co-ops
This is not true, because a better outcome for a more co-determined company is not necessarily a higher stock price. Forming companies requires raising capital, and so investors have a lot of power in deciding the structure of companies we see, and what they care about is the stock price. For example, if traditional private companies and co-ops fail or succeed at the same rate but private companies are funded 100:1 compared to co-ops, you'd see 100x more private companies than co-ops.
There is generally no reason to believe that pure market forces direct us to a "good outcome" at the needed pace. You could have said that if the abolition of slavery leads to a better outcome, then the market would have quickly made it disappear; but in the US the market didn't.
The redistribution of wealth over the last few decades in the US, and the West in general, away from workers is certainly not a good outcome.
> In Europe, you are forced into a particular model. I view that as unfair.
In America it is the same, only the model is different. It doesn't matter if the limiting power originates in the state or in other institutions. Despite little central regulation, feudalism or America in the Gilded Age was more, not less, restrictive on more people than under the regulation of the modern welfare state.
Google deserves to reap the ideology it sows.
I'm going to sidestep the debate about whether Gebru was "fired" or she "resigned", because that debate primarily centers on how one defines the words. But clearly she did do this: She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands, outrageous because it essentially attacked other people at the company, and said that if her demands were not met, that she would leave. In this case, the ethical AI group is doing the same thing: demanding a manager not have a role with them, demanding (again IMO) unwarranted apologies from other people, and worse, demanding the rehiring of someone has shown that she has no respect for others in her workplace.
A bunch of overpaid toxic babies from my opinion. I don't care who you are, going around demanding "my way or the highway" in a large company just makes you an asshole. If they don't like what happened they should simply resign with integrity and move on.
The demand for retraction was initially given while refusing to state what the reason(s) for the demand were. Only after the meeting where they demanded she retract the paper did they belatedly agree to read her the feedback that they stated as the reason. They wouldn't even let her read it first hand.
Ultimately it seems like Google could have plainly stated their issues with the paper from the start, and that said issues were not so serious that they merited a demand for retraction.
There are a number of things that just don't add up. Even if you take it at face value that Gebru's ultimatum demands were unreasonable, there are several problems with how the situation got to that point in the first place.
> Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
I'm curious: why is ignoring too much relevant research not a good reason to demand retraction? Isn't this one of the most common embarrassing mistakes that inexperienced researchers tend to make? I can fully understand if Google does not want to associate itself with work that might be viewed by the wider research community as shoddy.
The timing of the submission for review, and the deadline for submission to publication seems like a simple factual statement that should be easily demonstrated as true or false.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309488
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309379
Even with the efficiency benefits that it already has, we all know ML still stands to be further optimized, and a lot of people are working on it.
Comparing the exponential increase of "intelligence" of computers versus our own, computers will be as smart as humans with similar energy efficiency in around 50 years, and they require no cars, food, etc. It will be hard to criticize the efficiency of ML when it is already moreso than our biological selves, but it will be done, and we will be wholly outsmarted.
For starters if the academic content of the paper were shoddy, that is what peer review is for. Secondly, if it was really about the paper lacking some new context, why did Google demand retraction while refusing to share why? That's what doesn't make sense.
It seems like there's some missing context in the situation because on the surface Google's actions don't line up with their stated reasoning.
Notice how in Jeff Dean's email he made no reference to the fact that they refused to share the reasons for the retraction with Gebru in that first meeting. He also skipped over where Gebru asked for the reasoning and a manager read it to her rather than letting her read for herself.
I just don't understand the secrecy and cageyness if the only problem with the paper was some academic omissions.
To be clear, reading that reason in a negative review can mean at least two things, and I'm not judging which of the two happened here:
1. The paper did fail to take into account the results in some highly relevant and widely cited papers. (I've rejected papers claiming new results myself before now with "this problem was in fact already solved by X, published in Y".)
2. The paper was fine, but it didn't cite every paper published recently on the topic ever, and someone used that to shoot it down for whatever BS reason. Matt Might calls these reviewers snipers: http://matt.might.net/articles/peer-fortress/
She threatened to resign if her demands were met, so Google pre-empted it by accepting her resignation.
The narrative around her being “fired” is completely false and is a lie that needs to be stopped in its track.
Do you likewise honestly think that if she applied for unemployment services in the US should we be denied because of willful termination from her last job?
Everyone I know who has been fired, when it's reported to the company, the phrasing is always "Person X and the company have come to a mutual agreement", but in my experience it's never really mutual.
I've known many coworkers that threaten to quit over issues, but it still depends on them making that choice formally. Otherwise they are fired.
As a consequence her paper made a lot of points that came across as absurd like railing against models due to the electricity cost of training them, even though those costs are small relative to completely ordinary things everyone takes for granted, like driving to work and back.
The paper's out there! You can read it!
By, say, attempting to publish papers and have internal discussions about it?
If the truth damages the company, then that is the company’s fault, not the academic’s fault.
The reality is that Timnit thrives on drama and attention. That’s how she remains relevant.
Look at the way she treated LeCunn, it’s no wonder that we’re in this current situation.
It's like how in elementary English class they teach that all words ending in -ly are adverbs, but not all adverbs end in -ly: All "Karens" are entitled assholes, but not all entitled assholes are "Karens".
Anyone who has grown up around religious fundamentalists like I did learns this at a very young age. Frustratingly, when you grow up around that, you recognize the behavioral pattern very quickly, but the upper-middle class, suburban raised people with two college educated parents that make up the bulk of software engineers at the FAANGs don't, and therefore think these people are ACTUALLY virtuous.
I committed the grave sin of asking a wealthy woman (who happened to be black and who has done incredibly well in tech but complains constantly on twitter about the horrendous obstacles she faced despite being in executive positions with zero coding experience) how we could measure improvements and evaluate progress in companies with numbers, and was told that "this is a moment where you need to shut up and #listenToBlackWomen". By relying entirely on anecdotes and disallowing interrogation of her theories against data without being attacked as immoral, she has prevented any quantifiable way of evaluating progress or even recognizing companies that have done well. This tactic of ignoring facts by simply engaging in ad hominem attacks on a questioners morality, she mimics the tactics that were used against me when I dared suggest in Sunday school that dinosaurs existed billions of years ago, and humans were long after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...
Motte and Bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
If Pichai would just man up, he'd send an all-hands to the company telling everyone to decide by EOD if they want to be on board at Google or standing in the parking lot chanting.
Probably not a primary cause, but contributory.
I don't know any more details on this matter than those in the article, but I don't see why you assume that if employees -- well paid or otherwise -- make demands of management then it must be them who are toxic, or, indeed, that anyone is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
The reason is "Verlust des Vertrauensverhältnisses", i.e. loss of trust. You start making demands coupled with threats, and public ones at that, you are no longer an employee.
Both firing them or dealing with them are expressions of management's political power, and making their demands public is an expression of the political power of those employees, and it's up to both sides to figure out what result is best for them, a result that will likely be determined by the relative political power of the sides. I see no moral prerogative that says that management's exertion of political power is good, but workers' is bad.
You can agitate against companies all you want, it's a free country. But you can't expect to be paid by them while you do it.
Not sure what "morality" has to do with it.
EDIT (Since parent added the bit about boards): No, having employee representatives on the board changes nothing about this. The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.
The view that the company is separate from the employees and they don't get a say in its direction is a construct of many years of political action. It's not some natural law; it's a political result reached through activism. Anyone is free to try and get a different result, and each side will judge how much power they have in this case, and try to use it to best achieve the outcome they want.
> The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.
But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means. Some person or persons must have decided that letting that manager go is better for the company than keeping her. If others were involved in the decision, they might have decided differently.
It is the way companies are currently constructed, pretty much everywhere. Even when you have strong employee representation, in which case that influence is via the employee representatives on the board, not via employees just doing whatever the hell they want.
Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.
> But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means.
Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders. But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X. As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily). And once again, you are free to not abide by that contract, but don't expect to be employed by that company.
Basically, what you are talking about are vastly hypothetical constructs that have little to do with how companies actually work.
But then you have a recourse that might not be available where this is not the case. Even in your telling of it, we have a company that does whatever the hell it wants and employees doing whatever the hell they want, and I see no reason to hold employees to a higher standard than we hold the company.
> Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.
Sure, but that is a question of power and tactics. The company could sack you, and it could also suffer negative PR as a result. Both sides use whichever power they have to their advantage. You could argue that what the employees are doing is not smart and that they might be overplaying their hand, but not that what they're doing is wrong.
> Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders.
Yes, but even the interests of shareholders are a result of political action.
> But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X.
But whether or not employees are on the board is itself a result of political action. In the US, they're not (as a result of political activism), but anyone is free to take any political action to change that.
> As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily).
But as long as you're not breaking the law, you're allowed to take whatever action you please, including one that risks termination. The company might well be within its rights to sack you, but that has a cost so they might not do it. Corporations do such things all the time, sometimes choosing to risk litigation, and I see no reason why workers couldn't or shouldn't. Each side uses whatever power they have to their advantage.
False equivalence. The company is employing (and paying) the employee, not the other way around. This is not a symmetric relationship. This is the thing you seem to have a hard time with.
And no, the company can't do whatever the hell they want either, they are bound by the contract and the appropriate laws. Which at least one of my employers found out to their detriment (they tried to do something illegal and unethical to me and I didn't let them. Lawyers got involved, it ended very nicely for me)
However, had I done what these Googlers have done, I wouldn't have stood a chance, and my lawyer would have just thrown up his hands and exclaimed "you did WHAT??!?"
> any action you please, including one that risks termination.
Absolutely. But if you risk termination, don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.
This really isn't that hard.
Of course this isn't a symmetric relationship, but its nature, and even its legal nature, isn't ordained by nature, but is a result of political activism, and differs over time and place. Whatever that relationship is now in the US, it is clearly something that is as temporary as it's always been, and everyone constantly aims to change it. Google's executive and board are much bigger political activists than this group of employees, but they all seek to change the power balance.
> don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.
You might not be surprised but crying foul is legitimate. Google does it all the time when it doesn't like various laws and tries to put political pressure to have them changed.
Not by "nature", but the asymmetry is fundamental to the relationship: one entity provides a service the other pays for it.
Now the specific consequences of that fundamental asymmetry can be changed by political activism, but not the fundamental asymmetry itself. Unless you are going to start paying companies to employ you, whatever that actually means.
> Whatever that relationship is now in the US,
As I explained, the behaviour discussed would just as much get you fired in my native Germany, which is one of the most employee-friendly places around. So unlike what you are trying to imply, that this is a very specific point in the spectrum of possible relationships, it pretty much spans that entire spectrum.
> crying foul is legitimate
Nope, except for in the most legalistic sense: sure you can cry foul. Just don't be surprised if people aren't sympathetic and instead laugh at you. So basically crying foul will not be effective in those circumstances.
If you threaten to quit as a bluff in order to get your demands met, don't be surprised if the other party calls your bluff [and in many sense they have to call your bluff. If you don't understand that...well try to figure it out].
If it wasn't a bluff, then why are you complaining?
> Google does it all the time
How does Google doing something legitimise it?!? They deserve all the scorn they get when they do it.
Googles problem is that Timnit - who was hired to investigate the ethics of AI - refused to just retract a paper that might contain inconvenient statements about the ethics of AI and then refused to just roll over when fired. And they refuse to adress that, and can't just be open and transparent about it by e.g. sharing Timnits emails to prove she was making threats and being unreasonable, so some people are made and have opinions.
In Germany, this would start and end with the Betriebsrat either blocking the firing or approving it. This would provide due process, transparency and legitimacy in one go.
A: >she announced that she'd like to discuss an end date for her employment [editor: threat] if she wouldn't be given the chance to fix the paper up for publication [editor: demand].
"I you don't do as I want, I will leave." "Fine, you can leave".
I can't imagine any company that would, or could, react in any other way in this situation.
The Betriebsrat would have absolutely nothing to do here, as the company is just complying with her request. And yeah, once you "discuss an end date for your employment", a "Freistellung" is a completely normal event.
Now in Germany that would result in payment continuing until the official end date. In the US things are different, but I don't have any information that this didn't happen (she just moaned about access to company systems, and that is normal in a "Freistellung").
Also, as far as I know for a "einseitige Freistellung" (one sided decision to no longer want her to work there) Google would have to show that she destroyed the relationship of trust with Google, by e.g. criminal acts or maybe using her position as a manager to undermine the companies overall direction, e.g. by her going to the public mailing list afterwards.
Announcing that she wants to leave if this can't be resolved would NOT qualify as this.
A number of posters (mostly using throwaway accounts) are interpreting this as a group of fair and reasonable managers being beset by the most toxic team that ever toxied in the history of toxicity. I submit that the facts in evidence permit the opposite hypothesis: That it is Google that has difficulties living up to ethical standards of conduct, and that it is the management of the ethical AI team that is not living up to their professional responsibilities.
For all the posturing about Social Justice Warriors run amok, the idea that Google has some 'splaining to do about its conduct is not exactly confined to left wing circles, as evidenced e.g. by yesterday's lawsuit filed by Texas et al. And I suspect it's exactly this increased scrutiny that is leading to these ham-handed and probably counterproductive attempts to first hire "ethical AI" teams and then try to silence their output.
But rolling over all the time is not an optimal strategy. The more power you have, the rarer you should roll over.
And of course many without power will see those with power and say "In their place, I'd roll over". Yes, naturally. That's because you don't have any power. So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.
Talk about damning with faint praise. While my mind is honestly saying "seriously, fuck off", I'll try to put this in a more constructive response.
It's not about "rolling over". It's about having the maturity to realize when you are dealing with management, if by your demands you put them in an absolute no-win situation, then you've only screwed over yourself. That no-win situation was the demands by Gebru and the ethical AI team that management throw their colleagues under the bus. Management simply can't accede to that demand without saying to a huge portion of their employees "We're going to trash the reputations of other employees based on who yells the loudest".
Gebru and the ethical AI team most probably could have gotten huge portions of what they wanted (perhaps not all, but most), and especially would have better actually implemented the organizational change they say they want, if they hadn't handled the situation so extremely unprofessionally.
Is this letter public? Is there anyway we can see what those demands were?
Alternatively, anything that shows that you have indeed read the letter?
People just shrug when "leadership" at a company fires people randomly, places bad managers on good teams, demands unwarranted apologies from workers and makes everyone obey arbitrary demands.
But when a group of employees try to take any of these powers into their own hands they are immediately written off as toxic.
Tech workers have been fooled into thinking that they are a respected and privileged type of labor. Anyone who has been in the industry long enough has already seen this degrade over the years. A decade ago engineers made much more decisions at companies, had some say in the quality of code and technical direction companies were in. Software devs are still paid well but are increasingly told to keep their heads down and focus on code, and zero consideration will be given to any technical concerns if they remotely impact some PMs quarterly goals.
As boot camps ship out more and more "good enough" engineers, and a "just ship it" mentality dominants, quality technical skills become less and less of an advantage.
Technical workers squandered their advantage by thinking that some how they really were better than everyone else, and that they would forever enjoy easy employment, high salaries, respect at work and comfortable working condition. In a few years I think most technical workers will see that in the long run Amazon's engineers and Amazon's warehouse employees become more and more a like.
Sadly, comments like this show most engineers will still rabidly support management rather than risk rocking the boat, deluded into believing it will extend their privilege in the marketplace just a bit longer.
https://inequality.org/great-divide/america-2018-more-gilded...
I guess the 'bias and inequality in AI' is less striking a cord for the HN crowd than 'fair business practices'
That is interesting. I wonder if it indicates something about the demographics of HN.
More seriously, it probably does indicate something about the political sentiment of users of HN who comment, which may indirectly indicate something about demographics. A direct link is tenuous.
Hmm. That was a strange, but interesting jump indeed.
> A direct link is tenuous
That could be.
1. Google has a lack of ethics.
2. Google's ethics team is not doing a good job.
I'm not saying either of these are true. But if they are, there's no contraction here. In fact, 2 would support 1.
Their job is to navigate, any way they can, a path that can be perceived as ethical for Google to exploit AI to further shareholder value without having to also deal with extreme pushback from media, watchdog groups, etc.
These people probably think Human Resources exists to help them.
"Data violence" is their new slogan. If an algorithm isn't utterly flawless out the gate, that's a "literal act of violence" against [insert group here]. I'm not even making up the "literal" part.
In all the linked threads, sort comments by "controversial" for obvious reasons.
You could hire a bunch of leading AI researchers and task them to do R&D to identify the pitfalls of latest-gen AI with a focus on prospective dangers, biases, unintended side-effects. You could ask them to create new methods to quantify the degree / severity of these effects. You could ask them to invent new methodologies to specifically protect against these effects.
Separate from all of this, they may or may not be tasked with a governance function to review or score internal models according to their metrics and produce impact reports. Perhaps they work side-by-side with AI developers to ensure their newly developed techniques are applied throughout the processing pipeline, etc.
The (non-expert) impression I get from ethical AI research is that it hasn't moved much past the obviousness phase. The revelation that the source material for your training set determines the behavior of your model. That models are not neutral or granted some higher perspective just because they're some sort of magic algorithm because ultimately they are statistical engines driven by their datasets. That models can be misused and misapplied if the end-user treats them so. And that models cost a lot of resources to train, which like anything can be translated into tons of CO2 emissions.
A more nuanced analysis would look at the cost/benefit of what the model achieves versus the energy cost or potential bias that would be present in any alternative method. For example, it's a strict win/win situation if GPT-3 takes 10 million tons of CO2 to train, but displaces work that otherwise would have taken 11 million tons of CO2. All models will have bias -- "bias engine" is actually a good way to describe the fundamental nature and purpose of the algorithm! But at least models can have strictly measureable and totally consistent levels of bias that perhaps can even be controlled for as desired, unlike manual human labor which will demonstrate wildly variable and much harder to control levels of bias. See, for example, the controversial use of AI models to set bail. [1]
As I side note, I hate the opening paragraph of TFA;
> Tension between Google's Ethical AI group and executives at the company rose on Wednesday, as employees sent a list of demands regarding the recent departure of one of the team's leaders — a prominent Black woman in a field that's largely White and male.
That level of race baiting in an Op Ed would deem it unpublishable. The effect (if not the intent) of that opening is to essentially shut off the reader's critical thinking skills before they even get going.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/upshot/algorithms-bail-cr...
[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/algorithms-supposed-fix-bail-sys...
I as well. Is their role to bring up adversarial viewpoints or to actually be adversarial? If it is the former, did her behavior cross over into the latter, and that is what upper management had a problem with?