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Comment by lookingdesk | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.

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This is overstating it by a lot. Jeff was the AI lead at the time, and there was a big conflict between management and the ethics team

And I actually think Google needs to pay more attention to AI ethics ... but it's a publically traded company and the incentives are all wrong -- i.e. it's going to do whatever it needs to do keep up with the competition, similar to what happened with Google+ (perceived competition from Facebook)

You mean he fired one person who threatened to quit if the changes to the paper weren't to their liking? Or am I misremembering?

you are not misremembering.

As far as I can tell, no one seems to think much of value was lost.

It turns out when you usher the dissenters out of the room, you hear a lot less dissent.

It’s not like they were summarily executed. They are much freer now outside of corporate control to speak their minds as they please.

The only real question is if anyone deems them worth listening to.

I mean, I follow them.

Their problem domain is pretty niche and they're pretty technical on it so I don't doubt their traction is mostly academics.

even at the time that was the verdict

ai ethics was/is useless. it felt a lot like the movie industry of the 1930s saying they will police themselves just to keep any bigger regulator away

... And then they didn't!

for good reasons.

To say "AI ethics is useless" is itself useless.

Morality is not there to be useful, right or wrong in moral sense are normative categories not utilitarian ones.

But what you possibly may mean is really AI ethics self-regulation by large tech corporation does not work. (If that was your intended statement, I'd agree.)

That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.

Isn't it crazy how the media can do that? It really doesn't matter how much good you do in the world if your enemies speak louder. At least in the public's perception.

Not sure if he was told to stop the paper and fire the team, or whether he decided that himself.

But in any case, it's a stain on an overwise exceptionally brilliant career with wonderful software engineering achievements.

I wonder if they ever wondered if they'd do it again?

I'm having trouble following what exactly this means.

So Jeff wanted the team to modify an existing publication to fit the PR spin on AI, the ethics team refused, and Jeff dissolved the team?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

reading about this incident years later, i gotta say, dang Gebru was right on a lot of things

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

Just another Jeff Dean optimizing out unneeded code story.

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