Ousted Black Google Researcher: 'They Wanted to Have My Presence, but Not Me'
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And given that, her behaviour is likely just trying to introduce spin in order to land her next job easier. By making it about race and gender, it's not something behavioural and so clears the situation for future employers.
What's the point of this cynical and baseless speculation? They hired an ethicist who they wanted to toe the line. If you are truly an ethicist, it is your job to speak up about unethical and immoral behavior. I am glad that at least 1 person in SV is willing to bang a drum about big tech companies making superficial moves to look good on paper, but then keep everyone quiet inside the castle walls.
Personally, I'm no fan of Google either, and I accept this cynical view of them. But there's plenty of space for cynicism on both sides in this situation. She was pressing the nuclear option by threatening to resign, so I assume that the relationship was already strained. And I severely doubt that it was entirely over the one cited instance. Therefore, I doubt she's going public to try to win her job back.
She could solely be trying to give Google a black eye on her way out, whether out of disgust or altruism. But doing so requires her to paint Google as "the bad guy", and that in turn requires her to paint herself as "the good guy". So net effect is the same, regardless of motivation.
There’s a social contract to these roles...
You accept insane money and insane stock options at insane growth.
In exchange, all you have to do is pretend the company you are working for is a warrior of “don’t be evil”. Somehow different than any other company.
Stir the pot a little, make some noise, be loud enough to let others in the world know you exist, and then simply ignore all the real problems of big tech.
Literally “Mob” money. But the contract was broken here. Too much noise in wrong direction.
The crazy thing is these employees sell out by taking jobs at Google and Facebook in first place (who wouldn’t) but then act surprised their role is simply a social tax strategy to keep heads turned.
I hope she brings the whole thing down. It’s pure evil
1. Google profits (massively) from AI.
2. Google founds a research team for ethics in AI.
How on earth could 2. be independent research? It's like a tobacco company funding research into the health effects of tobacco. I can't see it as anything other than a PR move and maybe also trying to steer the ethics research into directions that don't hurt 1.
Do they? Genuine question.
They have some impressive achivements, like AlphaGo, but they seem to be making money mostly from the regular old keywords and search.
edit: Even search uses state of the art language models right now but I assume the gains are incremental. Advertising on the other hand is based on predicting the CTR and the gains from doing that versus naive bid approaches are 40%+.
"Former Googler Leslie Miley said he does not believe Google would have handled it the same way if Gebru were a white man. "
James Damore was also fired from Google, also in a controversy about ethics. I think this is really about freedom of expression, and debate. It's impossible to have this within (and outside) a corporation, because employees are not protected enough.
This could be solved by having stronger unions. Unfortunately, the minority card is now used to divide the employees. I suggest listening to something of what Adolph Reed says about this.
The idea of someone being independent while directly on payroll (and reporting to Google management or even the Alphabet board) is ridiculous.
I think the "one-drop rule" has cast a long, long legacy on racial identification.
So apparently this woman is black in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashida_Jones
People still use this one-drop rule, like, in the 21st century?? What the hell?!
I'm sure it isn't "just you", but this is wrong.
Gebru was born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, a West African nation whose inhabitants are often much lighter skinned than the "African" stereotype.
Wikipedia seems to confirm that: "approximately 40% of their autosomal ancestry to be derived from an ancient non-African back-migration from the near East, and about 60% to be of local native African origin "...
Not to mention there's no single black race... Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined... Calling them all simply "black" is even worse than calling everyone else (Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, Australians, Polynesians) by a single term (brown/white/yellow people, oh man, that' terrible)... just doesn't make any sense.
Imagine a group of people who discriminate all red headed people. Makes as much sense as discriminating all people of a certain skin colour.
To answer your question: in this hypothetical world where red heads have a hard time: imagine someone being fired for fighting for the rights of redheads while actually looking blonde with a tiny amount of red in their hair colour! That's the situation we seem to be in.
Personally, I think that Gebru is absolutely correct to categorize herself as a Black Woman for purposes of fighting against the discrimination she experiences.
A whole lot of immigrants have gone through this. None of them are represented by the usual minority voices. The only minorities that ever get attention are women and blacks.
And the reason for that is that these minorities have disproportionate influence and visibility in the public sphere.
"Ousted". Unceremoniously so, apparently.
I didn't see the phrase "going quietly" anywhere though.
Well gosh, who could have predicted this?!
It's almost as though diversity hiring, more often than not, tends toward reducing people to their immutable attributes.
I mean isn't that the social dynamic of wokeness anyway?
A bunch of upper-class guilty whites that want a religious code and creed to say to absolve them of their original sin?
I don’t agree, there’s tons of diversity. The US has tons of it. What’s miraculous and wonderful is the capacity for acculturation and assimilation where there’s an exchange of cultural knowledge and character.
Obviously forcing social ideas (as academic, theoretical and blatantly activist political as CRT) is bound to be met with anger. But rightly so - diversity training and corporate HR types are insufferable and making them agents of social change is a disaster in the making if you’re trying to be persuasive to people about diversity.
Google is pretty woke already so while she might be right, she used and benefitted from that too.
This sounds like a non-event to me.
Maybe that makes me too "woke" or whatever from the libertarian segment of HN.
I dont care if people are woke its up to them, i do care if they have an activist agenda.
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