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From the perspective of the people at the top of Google that team almost certainly exists for whitewashing purposes. However corporations are made up of people
by pr0zac 6y ago
From the perspective of the people at the top of Google that team almost certainly exists for whitewashing purposes. However corporations are made up of people and that perspective may not be shared by the folks that actually work for and with the team.
For fields like AI research that are largely industry focused these corporate labs become the major location continuing research that has a large impact is possible for academics post-PhD.
Those facts combined with Google's tendency to try to hire the best of the best means they very often end up hiring people with strong personalities, opinions, and industry influence that don't lend well to being subsumed by the machine resulting in situations like this.
The internet and social media making it possible for knowledge about events like this to penetrate beyond just those inside the specific industry has also made it much more possible for individuals to point out bad behaviour and stand up to corporations to some degree.
All that to say I think the historical example of environmentalists and ecologists working inside oil companies cannot be directly applied to this situation or other modern ones like it.
- hinkley 6y agoGoogle hires for intelligence. I haven't seen anything in my own experiences or self-reporting from others about selecting for wisdom. You get what you measure, and discretion is the better part of valor. Knowing when a problem is too big for you to fix and choosing to be somewhere else would self-select out a lot of people they need most, and now you have a Market For Lemons, but with greater fools instead of lesser cars. In the middle of the spectrum you have people like Gebru, who take huge risks, burning political capital for a cause or trying to bluff people you have no power over into changing things that are under their control, not yours. So they chopped her head off for tilting at a windmill, and now they've sent a message to the rest of the team. As farcical as it may have been before, it'll be twice as bad now. I expect some other people on that team have started putting out feelers, and we'll see a... brain-drain is not the right word here, but I don't know what to substitute. Hopefully you get my meaning.