It's generally difficult and requires a strong spine to stand up for causes that you believe are important, particularly when doing so involves personal costs i

It's generally difficult and requires a strong spine to stand up for causes that you believe are important, particularly when doing so involves personal costs in terms of opportunity. Suffragettes battled hard to allow women to vote, for example. While reading your comment I wondered whether you would have considered their movement to be "woke" at the time. For their part, Google likely truly does try hard to behave ethically because it tends to be good for their image and business. But it may also be true that there are dangers and risks involved in AI research that Timnit (as an expert in the field) believes have the capacity to perpetuate inequality on a long timescale. You state that a sense of urgency around that indicates an ideology. I'd suggest that almost everyone who participates actively in the kind of liberal democracy you defend requires some kind of ideology to guide their decision-making. The most trustworthy people may adjust and refine their ideology when faced with contradicting facts and evidence, and to do so they may need to understand and reason about those counter-arguments. There seems to be an underlying sense in some of these threads that the financial and technological setbacks that the tech industry might suffer as a result of adopting more ethical policies and listening to employee concerns wouldn't be worth the cost. There is less discussion and optimism, for some reason, about what the benefits of a happier and more transparently equitable work environment would be. Speaking of ideologies, I think this hints at a sense of company loyalty and perhaps national loyalty, with a possible fear that criticisms may be a form of subversion, accidental or malign. Those loyalties and suspicions may help the participating groups succeed, or could equally lead to their failure if the surrounding environment changes. That is, perhaps, the market at work.