3 ms·
When you purposefully hire a whole group activists, be not surprised when they actually do activism.
by ur-whale 6y ago
When you purposefully hire a whole group activists, be not surprised when they actually do activism.
- tdfx 6y agoYeah, it's hard to have sympathy for Google on this one. It's literally corporate virtue signaling that's blowing up in their faces.
- helen___keller 6y ago> corporate virtue signaling Or, its more common name, PR
- helen___keller 6y agoThis, basically. Ethics is, at times, incompatible with capitalism, so conflicts like these are essentially inevitable. Would anybody expect it to end well if Google hired Richard Stallman to the Free Software Ethics team? Of course not, he would be appalled by the decisions Google has made in the name of earning money, and every single publication coming from him would be a PR nightmare. In all honesty, the most reasonable way to do corporate ethics is to give funding to external nonprofit organizations whose mission is the actual ethics, and then separately turn that organization's work into actionable KPIs for your engineers - if ethics org says "we need racial parity in facial detection", then you make that a KPI for your team of non-ethicist engineers and hopefully your organization becomes more ethical in the process without an endless deluge of PR nightmares.