Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO
cnn.com
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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.
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.
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.
If they themselves are then recruiting others "that fit in" there is an even greater risk that activists of a particular stripe will be overrepresented on teams like this, which imbalance (especially with regard to corporate culture) will inevitably lead to these sorts of clashes and overreaches.
After this has blown over, Google will do well to look deeply at the potential biases within recruitment in this particular area to ensure diversity of opinion is reflected; and further, that these teams are not siloed (as teams often are) to counter the echo chamber effect that appears possibly to have jumped straight from social media into the working environment here.
No immediately reaching for maximum impactful tools will leave you behind and those who are not so "shy" to use strong words will advance and get more exposure. It's a memetic race. You get more attention for more outrage. Rewards and incentives shape what we see.
America will learn hard way that diversity hiring of sociology idiots won't work.
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
This talk by him on AI ethics has a lot of maturity and insight on the topic:
Petro is "Twitter trash".
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?
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
It's just a PR stunt gone wrong...
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?
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."
My prediction is they will put new processes in place, perhaps put the team organizationally in a different place from under Kacholia, apologize louder and clearer, but probably not take Gebru back.
It's quite unpredictable though! The disagreement is too big, there will need to be some more explicit closure to the issue than what we have already seen.
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.
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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
"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.
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".
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.[..]
I have this crazy idea to build a pull requests system for HN comments. People could suggest edits that way without cluttering the threads. It's either a terrible idea or a great one.
In all the linked threads, sort comments by "controversial" for obvious reasons.
I also find it sad that apparently, freedom of speech and free actions end when it comes to criticizing your employer in public, showing worker solidarity in public and asking for others to show their criticism in words and actions.
These debates go nowhere because both sides see the other as toxic and a threat and don't agree on basic terms, the basic view of who is in power, who needs to fear for their jobs for dissent etc.
"but here Gebru was fired, so POC and activists have to fear" "but Damore was also fired for dissent" "but he was sexist and created a toxic work environment" "but Gebru uses the race card for minor reasons if she doesn't get it her way" "now you are just racist and consider her an angry black woman" "I don't care about race just individuals" "comfortable from your place of privilege to keep the status quo, isn't it?" "I just want to do my job in peace without drama" "silence is violence when the system is structurally racist!" etc etc.
For me realizing that I'm not actually living in a democracy was what gave me an entirely new perspective on how the world works. It took me almost 30 years to realize this, so I know it's not really obvious given how we've been taught to think.
That's why I try to spread this message when it fits with the topic. And I feel so many problems have this issue at their core, including this one.
As an employee you get money for using your skills in the way they ask you, like you ask the waiter to bring you the food you picked, not something he rather wants to bring you.
As an employee you are not part of a self-governed community. In a democratic state its the opposite. People pay taxes into a common pool and then (ideally) have a seat at the table to decide how to use it. See how the money goes in opposite direction? You get no salary for being in a democracy, you pay a membership fee!
That's not the point. I want to give the plumber the choice to decide in matters that regard him in the company he is part of. Like what fees to ask to customers, how to distribute and eventually reinvest the profit, etc. If the plumber is an independent contractor he already has these possibilities.
> You get no salary for being in a democracy, you pay a membership fee!
The membership fee you pay to your employer is the surplus value you generate.
In fact, I think you can argue both Timnit and Damore got fired for the same reasons:
- they pointed out that Google's efforts are hypocritical ethicswashing which gets discarded as soon as it actually affects the status quo
- they created bad PR
- they had no workers council or unions to back then up
An autocratic or authoritarian governance is great for getting results but not so good for consensus.
For most people in the country, they can change jobs to find a company that they like working for, it is much harder to change countries.
> a good chunk of HN seems to just go with the "she's a toxic person" narrative without ever relaying what she actually DID
I didn't feel the need to add a ton of details because it all seemed quite clear. I mean, in this case, all the information I got about what the ethical AI team demanded comes from the posted article. My previous comments about this were all taken from Gebru's public tweets and information in the primary posts. I didn't feel a need to rehash what she actually DID because it was all posted, multiple times, in public forums, and my assumption (perhaps incorrect) was that other people were similarly up-to-date on the controversy.
- leave open to the imagination of the reader what she did (which might be more negative to them than how they'd react to her actual auctions)
- attack her person, not her actions, which is a big difference even pg wrote about iirc
- make it impossible for the reader to rationally engage with your point, since all you share are emotions
> 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.
When it comes to Gebru, it was specifically these demands that Jeff Dean mentioned (and which appear to be uncontested) that I find toxic:
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date.
And, to the contrary, I find it dishonest how much of the "accepted" media narrative I've read in this case is that Google is "trying to silence marginalized voices", which I think is not supported by any reasonable reading of the evidence.
The leaving Google and working on an end date is unconstested.
To me, unless we get the full email trail, these are he said-she said. But Timnit has less power (and can't even release the email thread because she's been locked out of her accounts as far as I know) and no-one I know who has worked with her seems to think of her as a vindictive person so until Google releases the email thread, I'm gonna slightly go with her version of the events.
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.
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.