Noted A.I. Ethicist Timnit Gebru Let Go from Google Following Email Exchange
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Yeah it seems foolhardy to threaten to leave if you're not ready to leave. That's the issue with playing hardball - you may get smacked in the face with the ball.
On the other hand, as an employer firing people this way is not very smart either. This brings a lot of attention and seems very vindictive.
Especially given the context, this reeks of fire her before she collects proof of <<insert whatever immoral thing google is doing now>> to me.
What's the point in keeping someone that disgruntled around? They can only make things worse.
Also important to the discussion is that her managers (and thus Google) appear to be framing this as "accepting her resignation" as opposed to firing her (tying into GP's point) which likely has consequences with regard to separation benefits and lets Google frame this as not being their decision (or at least would be if it weren't for Twitter/articles like this).
It seems like Gebru did things correctly with regard to reporting her unhappiness to her management team but made the mistake of mentioning possible resignation in response to a lack of change which Google jumped on as a method to protect themselves by immediately removing a possibly disgruntled employee in a way that allows them to avoid the downsides of firing her (that simple description alone not meant to imply any judgment).
Its a rather murky situation to untangle though when combined with Google's firing of employees participating in organization and other events over the last few years giving the general impression of Google "becoming evil" I does seem like the bad PR this will cause means Google's handling of the situation was a bad choice.
Like let's imagine tomorrow everyone she'd all of their sexist and racist and other ist tendencies both conscious and unconscious. Wouldn't these people be out of a job, and as we continue to be a more and more equal society won't these positions have less and less work Todo? Because if they are doing their job they should be solving the very problem they were brought in to counter.
Is it inevitable that these positions will end up continuing to try to justify greater and greater outrage over small and small incidents? What is the future for these positions and the cottage industry that has sprung up around inclusion and diversity?
An ethical review is like QA, you never really "finish" it unless you stop developing altogether.
"Something" and "It" here would be "full equality achieved".
(Not that I am expressing a view on whether "it" could be achieved, just a comment on human nature).
But this seems sort of like overengineering? I'm not sure we're at any substantial risk of the world suddenly becoming fair, so it seems odd to spend time worrying about what might happen if we run out problems to solve.
Thank you, I needed a laugh this morning. Humans are going to be humans, and will always find ways to treat each other in inventively bad ways.
If you are trying to say that these positions should not exist... I disagree. The study of ethics and the profession is not a new thing or a "cottage industry".
Of course people in these positions are sometimes going to attract outrage and cause conflict - if they didn't, I'd suspect they were just there to "rubber stamp" whatever the companies were doing - yep, all good here, sure, we're doing x, y and z thing that people criticize us for, but our ethics committee says we're all good, so you can all put down your pitchforks and go home now.
It's their job to be a thorn in the side of authority. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not, there's always room for interpretation and disagreement, some of these people are good at their jobs and some are not - but dismissing the entire thing as "fake outrage to promote their jobs" doesn't seem right.
What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved? What happens to a police employee when zero crime is achieved? What happens to a builder when all the buildings that ever need to be built are built?
Even if you get to the point where you can say "there are no problems at all!" (doubtful, except maybe in tiny startups or similar), adding "and there will never be any more and we never have to do anything ever again" is hopelessly naive.
For the former, then accept a threshold, "reasonable level of equality" such that differences are within the norms of individual diversity. Then equality is achieved.
Or focus on "equality of opportunity" which is much simpler to gauge, as it only requires that opportunity be similar e.g. a person covered by fire insurance, whose house burnt down; had the same insurance "opportunity" as someone covered by the same policy whose house didn't burn down - same opportunity, if different outcomes.
It's clear that some I&D initiatives exist because of pre-existing issues. At the very least, some of it depends on the notion of "race", and that isn't guaranteed to exist forever.
Both, to an extent. Avoiding problems in a large company is presumably a constant uphill struggle, and certainly society's view on it does evolve (often quite rapidly; I personally went from strictly speaking being outlawed before 1993 to having employment protections in 2000 to being allowed to marry in 2015, for instance).
> as it only requires that opportunity be similar
Even if you restrict it to that, it remains a huge problem for employers. To take the most basic example, there have been _endless_ studies showing that blinding resume review by removing names etc substantially changes outcomes in the very first stage of hiring (by impacting who gets called in for interview).
Try working in the games industry all the way to the end of the project and find out for yourself. Your work doesn't even need to be "bug free" but "good enough."
It is, or isn't solved depending on how the problem is stated.
The problem of food policing is solved, not the problem of food needing to be policed. In reality, places are constantly shut down for violations. The deterrent only deters people serving food unsafely, it doesn't kill the motivation - people motivated to serve unsafe food still exist, they just choose not to (or are prevented from doing so).
When police arrest a criminal, we say they did their job - we don't say they failed their job b/c the criminal existed in the first place. Sure, good policing deters criminality, but it's not really the only goal. the true eradication of motivation to commit crime are usually totally different social factor that has nothing to do with the police. In a similar vein, it's not really the fire departments job to prevent fires.
The real question is: is bias the same kind of thing. On that basis I'd ask "what kind of bias" - that is, does D&I coverany kind of human bias, or is it more specific. If you are talking about historical generation biases, for example, that might vary based on societal attitudes in general.
The bubonic plague still kills a few people every year in the United States. Worldwide, cases number in the thousands. Granted, biases and discrimination aren't proper diseases, but they come close given they spread with misinformation.
Isn't an expectation that we can 100% eliminate all that ills us irrational? Doesn't that make this question you ask a leading one?
A panacea for the human condition is not a thing. Suffering exists because of impermanence and will continue to do so through at least next week. That's not to say it's not worth fighting for, but I think any expectation that it can be "eliminated" puts us on the wrong footing for improving things over time.
At the least, it blind us to other truths which may be more evident, such as corporate greed and misuse of the technology we all carry around in our pockets now.
Crime free can happen without laws.
This is true in a very literal sense.
You and your family probably have rules.
Very small communities don't even have police.
The larger the group the more need for laws to protect each other against ourselves.
No it's not inevitable. To think it is implies everyone doing these jobs is acting in bad faith or will be corrupted by something unspecified and act in bad faith.
For Gebru individually, she has a PhD from Stanford's AI Lab and is accomplished in the field outside of ethics. If the utopia you're describing some how occurred in her lifetime she'd have no trouble finding another job.
If that was my job, I'd be over the moon that I was successfully making myself redundant. I'd happily find myself a different career, proud that I made a dent in a worthwhile and difficult problem, and fulfillment is much harder to come by than money.
Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to.
And making it clear that it’s about Google: “Where I'm currently working.”
Surprised she wasn’t fired then.
That’s not the title I would expect for someone hired as an ethicist. Not that I would expect them to have an ethicist for any reason other that sand a few rough edges down and to whitewash their efforts.
Oil companies can and do hire environmentalists and ecologists. That doesn’t stop them from getting huge, well-deserved fines for their fuckery. It just slows the rate down a bit. In fact a cynic would say that it’s just cover to delay having to stop what they’re doing (eg, legislation and policing makes them stop).
At some point you either become one of them or you quit, like Sandra B in Two Weeks Notice, but without the creepy stalker romcom elements.
For fields like AI research that are largely industry focused these corporate labs become the major location continuing research that has a large impact is possible for academics post-PhD.
Those facts combined with Google's tendency to try to hire the best of the best means they very often end up hiring people with strong personalities, opinions, and industry influence that don't lend well to being subsumed by the machine resulting in situations like this.
The internet and social media making it possible for knowledge about events like this to penetrate beyond just those inside the specific industry has also made it much more possible for individuals to point out bad behaviour and stand up to corporations to some degree.
All that to say I think the historical example of environmentalists and ecologists working inside oil companies cannot be directly applied to this situation or other modern ones like it.
You get what you measure, and discretion is the better part of valor. Knowing when a problem is too big for you to fix and choosing to be somewhere else would self-select out a lot of people they need most, and now you have a Market For Lemons, but with greater fools instead of lesser cars.
In the middle of the spectrum you have people like Gebru, who take huge risks, burning political capital for a cause or trying to bluff people you have no power over into changing things that are under their control, not yours. So they chopped her head off for tilting at a windmill, and now they've sent a message to the rest of the team. As farcical as it may have been before, it'll be twice as bad now. I expect some other people on that team have started putting out feelers, and we'll see a... brain-drain is not the right word here, but I don't know what to substitute. Hopefully you get my meaning.
Shady.
I wonder why is this considered a bad thing.
I mean, if you oppose video surveillance, you should be happy if the leading spying systems are bad at identifying you.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60nLTtjdiFc&feature=emb_logo
Consider for instance the exit of Walter Shaub from the Trump Administration.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/06/535781749/ethics-office-direc...