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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that AI and race now intersect in non trivial ways. It’s like having privacy as political discourse when you are scanning emails for marketing purposes. There’s a line at which not having the discussion is equivalent to taking a political stance.

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This. And since certain companies/industries pose a certain "systemic risk," failing to self-regulate might lead to external regulation later.

For example, legislation on AI, predictive models, and facial recognition in policing.

Who knows, we could see limits on the use of imperfect models in other areas.

After all, there is no "market solution" for ethics.

https://mathbabe.org/2013/11/12/there-is-no-market-solution-...

This.

It was literally her job to conduct such research. It's not politics, it's ethics (tethics)

Ethics is not not politics though. Everything is political. Claiming that ethical concerns should impact business decisions is certainly political. We can wish to “not discuss politics in the workplace”, but then it isn’t really possible to have any discussion.

I think you are confusing her previous work (which was on race) and the work this article is discussing.

This research paper in question was about AI and natural language processing and its carbon footprint and all that. Nothing to do with race or political agenda.

Google also has done a ton of work on creating renewable datacenters, so I think they are definitely onboard with making tech have less of a carbon footprint.

This is not true. She does discuss how some countries and regions of the world use the Internet less, or not at all, and thus Transformer/BERT are training on the linguistic habits of the most affluent of the world.

It was still an extremely scattergun approach. I'm moderately familiar with NLP but nothing in that paper really had traction overall, it was more of a list of mildly bad things than anything huge.

This is true. And the research raised an important point which was worth discussing. But it seems, based on the totality of the information, that Google received an ultimatum demanding that it take particular action with respect to the issue. That’s going beyond an ethics researcher’s role.

The ultimatum was about the review process and not the paper per se. I do think the ultimatum was a bad idea, but I don’t think I’d fire an employee over one. Id just tell them no, on their demand.

That said a blind internal review process that apparently blocked a paper for the first time in Googles history probably deserves more explanation than simply “we will take your resignation”.

They didn't fire her. She said "I will quit if you don't meet these demands" and they were unwilling to meet the demands.

If she didn't threaten to quit, I can't imagine they would've done anything other than tell her no. But she gave them an ultimatum and they chose which side they would be on.

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