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I don't get why Google caves to pressure from internal activism. Only 2000 of 98000 employees signed the letter. And they are themselves a very skewed cohort, u

I don't get why Google caves to pressure from internal activism. Only 2000 of 98000 employees signed the letter. And they are themselves a very skewed cohort, unrepresentative of the general population of customers Google has.

swang 8y ago
eh you know that doesn't mean 96000 opposed this though? do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained?
- throwawaysea 8y ago
  Sure, but it doesn't mean 96000 are in agreement either. So why wouldn't leadership just trust their own judgment and stay their course? That seems not just spineless, but also irresponsible since it means they are willing to discard all prior careful deliberation and research at the drop of a hat. > do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained? Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum - that is, left, moderate, and conservative views rather than just the far-left. There are also a wide range of opinions out there on topics like the use of AI for military purposes or on the modern transgender movement (which is the subject of controversy relating to this council). Only 8% of America are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And all this is still without consideration of the worldviews that exist around the globe, which is important given Google has customers globally.
  - smsm42 8y ago
    > Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum You may want it, but a lot of googlers definitely won't. A lot of people on the far left define ideological disagreement as "violence" and would be very vocally attack anybody that holds view they disapprove. And Google management is not invested in this project enough to spend a lot of political capital on it - plus they themselves are probably on the left side, so why would they battle for including somebody who they don't even agree with?
  - narag 8y ago
    So why wouldn't leadership just trust their own judgment and stay their course? The ship had already sunk: https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031 https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031 It seems they included a couple of women as token disenters but the plan didn't work exactly as intended.
  - swang 8y ago
    what is kay cole james' expertise on ai ethics that she should be on the council? is there no other person in computer science, mathematics, privacy research or some professor that is a conservative that holds none of this baggage and says shitty things? and like one of staff at vox said, why bring someone who is entrenched in the political culture war in the first place? you want a set of diverse views. assuming she wasn't actually anti-trans, anti-lgbtq, do you think this woman knows enough about ai to represent the views of conservatives? let's say this ethics council actually had power and could dictate what google or alphabet as a company could do in regards to ai. do you trust her to understand the topic at hand to then also address conservative concerns? let's say they make a ruling and she was too ignorant to the issue at hand (maybe those sneaky leftists used language that hid their leftist agenda). what is the likelihood of outrage by the "far-right" that the council was setup to be some pro-left google cabal because they brought someone with zero knowledge of the situation to represent the conservative side?
    - jmcgough 8y ago
      They probably didn't bring her on for her expertise, they brought her on because she's a powerful conservative. Google wants politically powerful friends on both sides of the aisle in light of how much criticism there's been of them lately.
      - mike00632 8y ago
        Piling on against a minority of people who can't really fight back is not being "powerful." It's cowardly and weak. It's also unethical.
        jmcgough 8y ago
        I didn't say that what they were doing was a good thing. The AI ethics council wasn't intended to do much but provide some nice PR and political connections.
- rjf72 8y ago
  One issue with this view is that such petitions tend to be spread with near perfect coverage. So only 2,000 people out of 98,000 signing does generally mean that the other 96,000 are more likely to be opposed/neutral to the 2000. And the current culture of Google such that openly expressing support for a panel that includes genuinely diverse ideological views is something that could have consequences. As one interesting aside, this is the exact same reason that protests no longer have the effect or meaning that they used to. During things such as the social rights movement organizing and getting your message out was really hard. Imagine trying to organize people when your biggest form of advertising something would be either calling people on a phone manually entering those 7-10 digits each time, by doing things like stapling a sign to a utility poll. And on top of this travel was also quite expensive. What that means is that every protester would generally represent far more people than himself simply because those other people were either unaware or unable to attend. But today you can reach nearly every single interested individual, and organize with extreme efficiency due to the internet. And a domestic plane flight or bus is incredibly cheap. Because of this a million people protesting today don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. So it creates quite the spectacle but has lost the very meaning that protests used to bring.
  - kevingadd 8y ago
    This is a pretty weird take. The sort of petitions you're talking about are not widely spread with remotely perfect coverage at companies like Google or Microsoft, there's no allowed way to distribute these via company-wide email or something and people are distributed globally across campuses and timezones. Personally at both workplaces I have never seen any of these petitions or open letters that make the news cross my desk or even heard about them before reading about them in the press. Maybe perfect coverage at smaller companies, but even then I kinda doubt it.
    - rjf72 8y ago
      This is inaccurate in a very ironic way. Not only are individuals specifically guaranteed the right to organize and discuss conditions/etc of work via company email [1], but this is a right that Google has been actively lobbying to rescind following the recent walkout that was organized largely by company email. [2] This right was specifically clarified/ensured by the NLRB in 2014. [1] - https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-mail-organize-and-complain-about-work-ten-key-implications https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m... [2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt-want-employees-organizing-over-email.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt...
anbop 8y ago
I wouldn’t sign any political petition in my company. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion, or that I wouldn’t act on that opinion, such as by leaving my company if I didn’t like it and had another alternative.
rjf72 8y ago
I think the answer becomes clear if you just ask yourself a simple question: was Google aware that having an ideologically diverse panel would spark some sort of protest among at least a healthy handful of their employees? I find it extremely difficult to imagine the answer to that question is no. So why would they cave to something they knew they would provoke? Ah. Google is increasingly clearly driven primarily, if not exclusively, by money + influence. An increasingly large number of voices have been calling for something like an ethics panel. And this was an appeasement to them and to those that feel Google puts its self interest ahead of ethics. And this panel would have been nothing but a self inflicted thorn for Google. They're not going to tell them how to make more money or gain more influence. Instead they would be more like to proposed Google temper their actions or even outright avoid certain potentially very profitable endeavors. And this would have been coming from a relatively authoritative group operating from within Google itself, making it quite difficult to ignore. And by the time they started making these recommendations it would have been difficult to torpedo the panel since it would appear that they were being torpedoed for what they said (which would be true), and that'd be some horrifically bad press for an already beleaguered company. Now Google gets to not only pull the plug, but to also claim that claim they've tried to form an independent ethics panel of experts before but 'unfortunately' their employees were opposed to it. And at Google since we deeply care about the voices and opinions of our employees, we've decided that instituting such a panel is clearly not a productive idea. And they can now reference this incident anytime outside forces propose instituting third party panels. On top of this all they also get to gain some goodwill back from their employees. Those 2,000 (who undoubtedly have been part of every single one of the recent walkouts/etc) are going to think they had a real and genuine impact. But I'd expect they miscalculated two issues. The first is only having 2,000 people show up on the outrage wagon. "Caving" to that many people does look quite peculiar. And I think the bigger mistake they're making is in miscalculating what they just did to those 2,000. This isn't going to appease them - it's going to give them a sense of entitlement and empowerment leading them to even more actively and aggressively protest against future actions.
fixermark 8y ago
Google hires people they intend never to fire. Losing 2,000 employees would be pretty damaging to the company. Another concern is the impact that losing 2,000 activist employees would have on their growth plans, because they hire from colleges and colleges tend to generate candidates that believe such activism is a good thing. They're not a traditional company in a couple of ways.

swang 8y ago

eh you know that doesn't mean 96000 opposed this though? do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained?

throwawaysea 8y ago
Sure, but it doesn't mean 96000 are in agreement either. So why wouldn't leadership just trust their own judgment and stay their course? That seems not just spineless, but also irresponsible since it means they are willing to discard all prior careful deliberation and research at the drop of a hat. > do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained? Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum - that is, left, moderate, and conservative views rather than just the far-left. There are also a wide range of opinions out there on topics like the use of AI for military purposes or on the modern transgender movement (which is the subject of controversy relating to this council). Only 8% of America are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And all this is still without consideration of the worldviews that exist around the globe, which is important given Google has customers globally.
- smsm42 8y ago
  > Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum You may want it, but a lot of googlers definitely won't. A lot of people on the far left define ideological disagreement as "violence" and would be very vocally attack anybody that holds view they disapprove. And Google management is not invested in this project enough to spend a lot of political capital on it - plus they themselves are probably on the left side, so why would they battle for including somebody who they don't even agree with?
- narag 8y ago
  So why wouldn't leadership just trust their own judgment and stay their course? The ship had already sunk: https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031 https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031 It seems they included a couple of women as token disenters but the plan didn't work exactly as intended.
- swang 8y ago
  what is kay cole james' expertise on ai ethics that she should be on the council? is there no other person in computer science, mathematics, privacy research or some professor that is a conservative that holds none of this baggage and says shitty things? and like one of staff at vox said, why bring someone who is entrenched in the political culture war in the first place? you want a set of diverse views. assuming she wasn't actually anti-trans, anti-lgbtq, do you think this woman knows enough about ai to represent the views of conservatives? let's say this ethics council actually had power and could dictate what google or alphabet as a company could do in regards to ai. do you trust her to understand the topic at hand to then also address conservative concerns? let's say they make a ruling and she was too ignorant to the issue at hand (maybe those sneaky leftists used language that hid their leftist agenda). what is the likelihood of outrage by the "far-right" that the council was setup to be some pro-left google cabal because they brought someone with zero knowledge of the situation to represent the conservative side?
  - jmcgough 8y ago
    They probably didn't bring her on for her expertise, they brought her on because she's a powerful conservative. Google wants politically powerful friends on both sides of the aisle in light of how much criticism there's been of them lately.
    - mike00632 8y ago
      Piling on against a minority of people who can't really fight back is not being "powerful." It's cowardly and weak. It's also unethical.
      - jmcgough 8y ago
        I didn't say that what they were doing was a good thing. The AI ethics council wasn't intended to do much but provide some nice PR and political connections.
rjf72 8y ago
One issue with this view is that such petitions tend to be spread with near perfect coverage. So only 2,000 people out of 98,000 signing does generally mean that the other 96,000 are more likely to be opposed/neutral to the 2000. And the current culture of Google such that openly expressing support for a panel that includes genuinely diverse ideological views is something that could have consequences. As one interesting aside, this is the exact same reason that protests no longer have the effect or meaning that they used to. During things such as the social rights movement organizing and getting your message out was really hard. Imagine trying to organize people when your biggest form of advertising something would be either calling people on a phone manually entering those 7-10 digits each time, by doing things like stapling a sign to a utility poll. And on top of this travel was also quite expensive. What that means is that every protester would generally represent far more people than himself simply because those other people were either unaware or unable to attend. But today you can reach nearly every single interested individual, and organize with extreme efficiency due to the internet. And a domestic plane flight or bus is incredibly cheap. Because of this a million people protesting today don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. So it creates quite the spectacle but has lost the very meaning that protests used to bring.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  This is a pretty weird take. The sort of petitions you're talking about are not widely spread with remotely perfect coverage at companies like Google or Microsoft, there's no allowed way to distribute these via company-wide email or something and people are distributed globally across campuses and timezones. Personally at both workplaces I have never seen any of these petitions or open letters that make the news cross my desk or even heard about them before reading about them in the press. Maybe perfect coverage at smaller companies, but even then I kinda doubt it.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    This is inaccurate in a very ironic way. Not only are individuals specifically guaranteed the right to organize and discuss conditions/etc of work via company email [1], but this is a right that Google has been actively lobbying to rescind following the recent walkout that was organized largely by company email. [2] This right was specifically clarified/ensured by the NLRB in 2014. [1] - https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-mail-organize-and-complain-about-work-ten-key-implications https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m... [2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt-want-employees-organizing-over-email.html https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt...

anbop 8y ago

I wouldn’t sign any political petition in my company. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion, or that I wouldn’t act on that opinion, such as by leaving my company if I didn’t like it and had another alternative.

rjf72 8y ago

I think the answer becomes clear if you just ask yourself a simple question: was Google aware that having an ideologically diverse panel would spark some sort of protest among at least a healthy handful of their employees? I find it extremely difficult to imagine the answer to that question is no. So why would they cave to something they knew they would provoke? Ah. Google is increasingly clearly driven primarily, if not exclusively, by money + influence. An increasingly large number of voices have been calling for something like an ethics panel. And this was an appeasement to them and to those that feel Google puts its self interest ahead of ethics. And this panel would have been nothing but a self inflicted thorn for Google. They're not going to tell them how to make more money or gain more influence. Instead they would be more like to proposed Google temper their actions or even outright avoid certain potentially very profitable endeavors. And this would have been coming from a relatively authoritative group operating from within Google itself, making it quite difficult to ignore. And by the time they started making these recommendations it would have been difficult to torpedo the panel since it would appear that they were being torpedoed for what they said (which would be true), and that'd be some horrifically bad press for an already beleaguered company. Now Google gets to not only pull the plug, but to also claim that claim they've tried to form an independent ethics panel of experts before but 'unfortunately' their employees were opposed to it. And at Google since we deeply care about the voices and opinions of our employees, we've decided that instituting such a panel is clearly not a productive idea. And they can now reference this incident anytime outside forces propose instituting third party panels. On top of this all they also get to gain some goodwill back from their employees. Those 2,000 (who undoubtedly have been part of every single one of the recent walkouts/etc) are going to think they had a real and genuine impact. But I'd expect they miscalculated two issues. The first is only having 2,000 people show up on the outrage wagon. "Caving" to that many people does look quite peculiar. And I think the bigger mistake they're making is in miscalculating what they just did to those 2,000. This isn't going to appease them - it's going to give them a sense of entitlement and empowerment leading them to even more actively and aggressively protest against future actions.

fixermark 8y ago

Google hires people they intend never to fire. Losing 2,000 employees would be pretty damaging to the company. Another concern is the impact that losing 2,000 activist employees would have on their growth plans, because they hire from colleges and colleges tend to generate candidates that believe such activism is a good thing. They're not a traditional company in a couple of ways.