I don't get why Google caves to pressure from internal activism. Only 2000 of 98000 employees signed the letter. And they are themselves a very skewed cohort, unrepresentative of the general population of customers Google has.
> do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained?
Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum - that is, left, moderate, and conservative views rather than just the far-left. There are also a wide range of opinions out there on topics like the use of AI for military purposes or on the modern transgender movement (which is the subject of controversy relating to this council). Only 8% of America are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And all this is still without consideration of the worldviews that exist around the globe, which is important given Google has customers globally.
You may want it, but a lot of googlers definitely won't. A lot of people on the far left define ideological disagreement as "violence" and would be very vocally attack anybody that holds view they disapprove. And Google management is not invested in this project enough to spend a lot of political capital on it - plus they themselves are probably on the left side, so why would they battle for including somebody who they don't even agree with?
The ship had already sunk:
https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031
It seems they included a couple of women as token disenters but the plan didn't work exactly as intended.
is there no other person in computer science, mathematics, privacy research or some professor that is a conservative that holds none of this baggage and says shitty things? and like one of staff at vox said, why bring someone who is entrenched in the political culture war in the first place?
you want a set of diverse views. assuming she wasn't actually anti-trans, anti-lgbtq, do you think this woman knows enough about ai to represent the views of conservatives?
let's say this ethics council actually had power and could dictate what google or alphabet as a company could do in regards to ai. do you trust her to understand the topic at hand to then also address conservative concerns? let's say they make a ruling and she was too ignorant to the issue at hand (maybe those sneaky leftists used language that hid their leftist agenda). what is the likelihood of outrage by the "far-right" that the council was setup to be some pro-left google cabal because they brought someone with zero knowledge of the situation to represent the conservative side?
As one interesting aside, this is the exact same reason that protests no longer have the effect or meaning that they used to. During things such as the social rights movement organizing and getting your message out was really hard. Imagine trying to organize people when your biggest form of advertising something would be either calling people on a phone manually entering those 7-10 digits each time, by doing things like stapling a sign to a utility poll. And on top of this travel was also quite expensive. What that means is that every protester would generally represent far more people than himself simply because those other people were either unaware or unable to attend.
But today you can reach nearly every single interested individual, and organize with extreme efficiency due to the internet. And a domestic plane flight or bus is incredibly cheap. Because of this a million people protesting today don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. So it creates quite the spectacle but has lost the very meaning that protests used to bring.
Maybe perfect coverage at smaller companies, but even then I kinda doubt it.
[1] - https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m...
[2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt...
They're not a traditional company in a couple of ways.
Google is increasingly clearly driven primarily, if not exclusively, by money + influence. An increasingly large number of voices have been calling for something like an ethics panel. And this was an appeasement to them and to those that feel Google puts its self interest ahead of ethics. And this panel would have been nothing but a self inflicted thorn for Google. They're not going to tell them how to make more money or gain more influence. Instead they would be more like to proposed Google temper their actions or even outright avoid certain potentially very profitable endeavors. And this would have been coming from a relatively authoritative group operating from within Google itself, making it quite difficult to ignore. And by the time they started making these recommendations it would have been difficult to torpedo the panel since it would appear that they were being torpedoed for what they said (which would be true), and that'd be some horrifically bad press for an already beleaguered company.
Now Google gets to not only pull the plug, but to also claim that claim they've tried to form an independent ethics panel of experts before but 'unfortunately' their employees were opposed to it. And at Google since we deeply care about the voices and opinions of our employees, we've decided that instituting such a panel is clearly not a productive idea. And they can now reference this incident anytime outside forces propose instituting third party panels. On top of this all they also get to gain some goodwill back from their employees. Those 2,000 (who undoubtedly have been part of every single one of the recent walkouts/etc) are going to think they had a real and genuine impact.
But I'd expect they miscalculated two issues. The first is only having 2,000 people show up on the outrage wagon. "Caving" to that many people does look quite peculiar. And I think the bigger mistake they're making is in miscalculating what they just did to those 2,000. This isn't going to appease them - it's going to give them a sense of entitlement and empowerment leading them to even more actively and aggressively protest against future actions.