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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google
- minimaxir 6y agoAs noted in her pinned tweet (https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1357819673455202304 https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1357819673455202304), she was locked out of Google's system after sending an email supporting Timnit Gebru. (EDIT: and allegations of systems abuse; see child comment) This new tweet makes the firing official.
- reaLg_move_in_3 6y agoIIRC she was leaking internal information to the outside press, it was not based on her position of supporting Timnit.
- gwern 6y agoNo. Her tweet does not say that sending the email got her fired, even if it's written to give you that impression.
- andyxor 6y agono, she was locked out after extracting thousands of files illegally, see Google response from January: https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-lead-margaret-mitchell-after-firing-timnit-gebru/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
- rirarobo 6y agoThat's only if you take Google's PR at face value. Also, no where in the article nor in Google's statement do they claim that Meg Mitchell did anything "illegal". I haven't seen any details about the allegedly extracted files, so I think there's more to the story.
- hobom 6y agoThere have been countless Googlers who came out to support Gebru. Did Google fire all of them? Or maybe Margaret's support was particularly outspoken, but I doubt it.
- katbyte 6y agoIts google says vs she says - honestly i take neither at face value, but i'd expect repercussions if i started download/sharing internal files en masse.
- LatteLazy 6y agoPerson who called their employer sexist and racist is fired (no a second person).
- Someone1234 6y agoWell I guess it is easier to sweep hard problems under the rug than have a dialog with unsatisfied employees. This is one of those times where people are going to intentionally conflate Google's legit right to terminate employment with what is best for the long term culture of the company.
- LatteLazy 6y agoI think if you have more that 3 employees you can't have a dialogue on every issue with all of them. You have to just decide and accept that X% of people won't like the decision and leave. So you minimise X while maximising profit.
- tantalor 6y ago& saying your SVP has "ideas that are obviously very dumb".
- eat_veggies 6y agoAre you quoting something they said?
- tantalor 6y agoIt's from this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uOUeLgdoLPfnx1JOErg2w/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO...
- g_sch 6y agoShe called the decision (presumably his) to fire Dr. Gebru "obviously very dumb"
- rmk 6y agoFor people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit. Many are tenured professors, so they also have the added guarantee of tenure, which makes them unfireable save for clear violations of policies such as sexual harassment. How do these things work at industrial labs, such as those of Google and Microsoft?
- driverdan 6y agoApparently the way it works at Google is they fire you when you don't rubber stamp everything.
- rmk 6y agoI hope you are using hyperbole here. Google employs hundreds of researchers who are free to publish their work as far as I can tell (plenty of seminal systems, AI, economics -- auction mechanisms and such, and other papers are testament to this fact). There appear to be some exceptions to this that are causing a furore.
- itronitron 6y agoAnyone interested in working in a research position should care a great deal that their management hierarchy is separate from their research hierarchy, and that the organization supports researchers working across teams. That will reduce the impact of personality conflicts and assholes. I know that some places feel that the people managers have to be the technical experts but I would strongly advise against working in such a place.
- freeone3000 6y agoMSR has a very free research culture. People there are technically fireable by normal means, but Microsoft chooses not to terminate employment for "outside-of-work" engagements, or for the subject of their research. Some very critical papers of Microsoft's AI approach were published under the MSR header. Not all of the findings were put into place, and Aether has the unenviable job of balancing ethical behavior with potential profits. But their ethicists are leaving because they're shouting themselves hoarse into the void, not because they're being asked to change their results.
- andyxor 6y agoGoogle response (from Jan): "Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today. We are actively investigating this matter as part of standard procedures to gather additional details.” https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-lead-margaret-mitchell-after-firing-timnit-gebru/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
- thewarrior 6y agoThat seems like a pretty serious accusation. Looks like relations between management and employees has seriously deteriorated.
- jariel 6y agoA company with 100 000 people will have to quite a number of staff, literally daily, for all sorts of things, it doesn't remotely imply anything about the overall relationship between staff and management. Even when CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider 'team up' to overrepresent an issue because 'some number of Google employees walked out for some reason' - it really doesn't help tell the story of 'relations' because it's hard to fathom what the rest of the 99% of Google staff think.
- thewarrior 6y agoI meant to say relations between management and staff in the AI ethics division.
- dmix 6y agoAlways seems to be from the same divisions. That said, anything that makes Google a less effective organization I support. Funny how they co-announced monetary incentives around "diversity and inclusion", I expect nothing less from a giant evil ad company. A bunch of handwavy idpol stuff with the giant elephants in the room seems to be the status quo.
- vicpara 6y agoSo what? Why is this important?
- rsj_hn 6y ago>Unfireable save for clear violations of policies such as sexual harassment I would take a look at (and consider donating to) FIRE to understand the current state of academic freedom in universities. https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/ https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/ Just to give two examples: Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day (and he was also subject to credible death threats, requiring police escorts when present on campus) Gordon Klein was suspended for refusing to promise to give higher grades to black students. https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-refusing-leniency-for-black-students/ https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-re... And then we have the epidemic of academic mobbing, where colleagues engage in herding behavior that focus their rage on one of their colleagues in a type of modern equivalent of Monsters on Maple Street. It is estimated that 12 percent of those mobbed end up committing suicide. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/academic-mobbing-become-campus-tormentors/ https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/acade... There are many, many things that will get you fired or subject to attack in the modern university, and I don't see any reason to view academia as a place that provides more intellectual freedom than private industry. Indeed, it is often the epicenter of cancel culture and petty utopian dictators.
- ggm 6y agoNot withstanding what you say, how do you counter this with related responses to your parent comment which note corporate research is legally bound and ownership vests strongly in IP law and not your research your brain.
- rsj_hn 6y agoMy counter is what foolinaround also said in reply to my post. Intellectual freedom is a question of culture, not of any legal or financial apparatus. There was enormous intellectual freedom at the for-profit Bell Labs. There was enormous intellectual freedom in the publicly owned Berkeley in the 70s-80s. The culture present in the organization will determine whether you need to always be on the guard from saying the wrong thing that might destroy your career or whether you are free to challenge incumbent ideas/viewpoints/theories. Personnel is policy. The legal charter of an organization is far down the list of factors that determine how much freedom you have -- the mindset of your peers and of the leadership in the organization matters much, much more.
- underseacables 6y agoShe was fired for violating company confidentiality, anything she says otherwise about her gender, race, culture, etc is just a deflection, but it’s probably coming.
- ggm 6y agoDo you think society at large really benefits from employers doing things this way? If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do? I am unsure I would be prepared to do what she and Timbru did but that's a long way from the implied cynicism and also frankly abject legalistic kow-towing implicitly in your statement. "Yea, that whistle blower had it coming, they signed the same contract i did" is pretty sad. Its not this case, sure, but its in the room, alongside sacking union organisers, refusing to approve talks, private illegal nonpoaching deals with Apple, paying your founder millions to cover up their sexualising the workforce,
- d1zzy 6y ago> If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do? Whatever you do, just don't try to engage in things that go against the rules of employment (and quite possibly are illegal) like downloading and send confidential documents to third-parties.
- ggm 6y agoSure, simply said its obvious. Now, idieate into the circumstance. Can you find no path to "i better make sure can prove my side of the story factually" as a thought process?
- madamelic 6y agoIf you fire your "Ethical AI" team lead for disagreeing with you... maybe you are only interested in the appearance of being ethical. Just a thought.
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoShe gave a talk at my school once, she was invited by my then advisor. This was in 2017 right after she left MSR. We had a brief change, and even back then you can tell she’s not into kowtowing to the patriarchy. It’s quite hard for ambitious women in compsci, they have to walk a tight edge between firm and “motherly”. Men have no such constraints. —————————————— Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in an academic setting in general. And hoping to lend a bit of detail on this researcher as a person.
- foolinaround 6y agowhat makes you assert that were she male, she would have gotten different treatment in this case? genuinely asking..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thundergolfer 6y agoReading their comment I don’t see that specific claim being made. The comment discussed different treatment with regards to personality, but doesn’t relate that to this firing directly.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI've worked with many women at FANG companies and I wouldn't describe any of them as even somewhat motherly (though I have noticed "firm"). I think Dr. Gebru was fired because she cast Google in a bad light with some rather dubious arguments in a paper she wanted to publish and when she was asked to not publish her research she she sent an unprofessional email to a wide audience. I don't know why this person was fired, but looking over the email/document she posted on her twitter it looks like she is asserting that her employers are racists and sexist on little evidence. Why would you, or she, expect to be permitted to slander the company this way and still keep her job? Although I don't know if she published this document before or after her termination, so it may, or may not have been a factor.
- ALittleLight 6y agoHere[1] is a document she wrote on the subject of Dr. Timnit Gebru's recent firing from Google. 1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uOUeLgdoLPfnx1JOErg2w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO...
- soheil 6y ago> Within the next year, let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system If you have this pinned to your Twitter (on 2/5) about your employer why are you still working there and not resigning? It took Google 14 days to fire her, which I suppose is the typical two weeks notice since that date.
- chronic3802 6y ago> why are you still working there and not resigning? Simple: she wants to still be paid by Google.
- johncena33 6y agoAdditionally, she can stage martyrdom in front of Twitter and vulture news media. If she quits and writes blog posts about her experience working at Google, she would no way get the same amount of attention she is getting now. This is called performative activism.
- schoolornot 6y agoNo qualms for Googlers getting a reality check. I don't get why people think they work at a liberal think-tank where no consequences exist for sharing opinions or confidential data about the company publicly. Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot. Shut your mouth and move on if your ideology conflicts with your employer's.
- freeone3000 6y agoHiring an ethics in AI research team presupposes you want to have ethics in your AI. It's disappointing, but not surprising, to find they want a bunch of syncopants. Perhaps they shouldn't have bothered creating the department if they didn't want people working there to speak out.
- kristianc 6y agoYou’d have to think there was some middle ground between investigating and adding ethical accountability to AI programs and exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files.
- saalweachter 6y agoTangential anecdote. I was reading a book about dry stone bridges, and one of the bridges featured was built across a stream in a protected watershed. The builder said he was surprised the permit for it was approved, he told the client to expect it to be rejected. Talking to the government bureaucrats & scientists, he found out that they had to approve a permit every now and then. Not just because of political reasons, but strategic ones -- if they denied every permit, people would start ignoring and circumventing their department. By approving one every once in a while, they kept themselves in the loop as gatekeepers and prevented more harm than they would have by denying everything. His own bridge project was minimally harmful, and was the token approval so they could keep denying the real problem applications. I feel like there's a lesson there for other gatekeepers trying to fight the good fight.
- Neputys 6y agoDon't know who's right but AI ethics AND harassment in one package feels like some sort of next level.
- superlate 6y agoAnd Jeff Dean doesn’t resign yet, no surprise.
- ALittleLight 6y agoWhy would Jeff Dean resign?
- xmprt 6y agoBecause superlate wanted him to
- snendroid-ai 6y agoWut!? please tell me you followed the whole story and knows all facts. Jeff manages whole department, whereas this person was working in one team, "ethical ai". There are literally more than 20+ teams that answers Jeff. Each team got anywhere from 4-50 people.
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoStop with cancel culture please.
- benlumen 6y agoI'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).
- minimaxir 6y agoIt's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.
- Udik 6y agoI think it's perfectly possible. The issue here is that we've been confusing activists for ethicists for some time.
- benlumen 6y agoWell, maybe. But it's not like this sort of drama is unusual. Maybe you have to be outside looking in to see the absurdity (I'm not in Silicon Valley, or the US for that matter).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- refenestrator 6y agoMaybe it doesn't need to be quite so married to one particular set of politics.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cobraetor 6y ago> It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics. Wouldn't that conflict with Google's no-politics policy? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-no-politics-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-...
- digitist 6y agohmm, maybe google discovered whatever brilliance she had was exceeded by her SJW status
- thewarrior 6y agoI’ve been wondering how sincere the Silicon Valley corporate mantra of Be yourself, Be authentic, be open to management really was. There was so much idealism even on Hacker news. Nowadays I witness the strange contradiction of people bashing giant tech companies while mostly discussing how to found the next giant tech company. A lot of us did genuinely believe it. However as the companies grew and became mega corps the realities of life in normal companies have slowly made themsleves felt. It’s a bit like the Adam Curtis documentary hyper normalization. Where we all pretend that everything is still the same as before, but beneath the still free sushi ,massages and high compensation a lot has changed.
- throwawayhaxx99 6y agoNobody intelligent ever thought it was sincere
- ineedasername 6y agoI'm probably not intelligent then. In the early 00's, I did think Google mostly believed in its mission to organize and act as a gateway for the world's information.
- cambalache 6y agoYou were naive, not dumb, usual thing with young people
- ineedasername 6y agoYep, though I knew even at the time that most companies' mission statements were BS. Google seemed different. I think at some point they still actually were different, but also were themselves naive about what being successful and transforming into a large corporation would do to them.
- davesque 6y agoHonestly, I think this attitude makes much more sense in the present era than it did before about ten years ago. There was a time when IMHO you weren't just naive for believing that Google was sincere about its "don't be evil" mantra. The current age really is one of cynicism. Of course, in my mind that's a completely separate question from whether or not Google is being evil in this case. As far as that goes, I honestly really don't know the answer.
- xnx 6y agoSeems like this might relate to the reshuffling of AI organization at Google: https://blog.google/technology/ai/marian-croak-responsible-ai/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/marian-croak-responsible-a... From a complete outsider, this seems like a smart shift toward more mature leadership.
- bitcharmer 6y agoYes, less drama/political activism and more professionalism is probably going to work out better than hiring people like Gebru or Mitchell.
- cauthon 6y agoExisting discussion of Dr. Mitchell’s tweet announcing her firing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26198789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26198789
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anothernewdude 6y agoThey'll find a yes-man eventually
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoOr they'll just conclude the whole thing was a waste and only caused negative publicity and hard feelings and have legal and PR and relevant stakeholders from any given project manage ethics going forward like normal BigCos do.
- mtgx 6y agoLet's be real. The whole idea of this "Ethics Board" was only ever done for PR. Period. Google never actually intended to follow through with any of their recommendations if it meant going against its financial interests.
- Udik 6y ago> The whole idea of this "Ethics Board" was only ever done for PR Probably, but this also means that they didn't hire the best people for the job, just the people who would have looked better in the position.
- holografix 6y agoI don’t think it’s just for PR, I think any organisation that invests heavily into the development and use of ML/AI needs wants to keep a close eye on whether the outcomes are in line with positive humanistic values. I don’t know how these ethics professionals added value to Google. I _do_ know that repeatedly belittling your CEO and employer on a public forum might win you lots of virtue signalling points but not be constructive for the company paying you a salary.
- bitcharmer 6y agoNo, they just hired the wrong people. They employed political activists instead of real professionals which was initially great for PR. Not the best long term decision they've made.
- bpodgursky 6y ago> Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gebru's claim of discrimination and harassment It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIt seems to me like there is no possible situation where searching (dredged is a weirdly loaded word) through ones own email is a fire able offense. In fact, the idea that one can be fired for reading ones own work email strikes me as kind of absurd and unworkable. Perhaps there are things one can do with the emails you found that are fireable, that’s beyond my (lack of) legal expertise, but searching? That doesn’t seem right.
- ineedasername 6y agoIt seems like she was passing stuff on outside of Google, but then we don't really know the details of those activities to know if it was an inappropriate action.
- bpodgursky 6y agoPassing documents outside of Google is going to get you fired. There are no exceptions, unless you are talking to federal investigators or regulators.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI assume that there are exceptions. Off the top of my head I believe whistleblowing would be a legally protected use of corporate emails. Maybe there are others, I’m not a lawyer. But I definitely accept that in general sharing work emails without authorization is a fireable offense. Honestly this whole thing strikes me as something more legally complex than engineers can analyze. I for one want to hear an actual expert weigh in on this, once enough facts are known. Anything else has too high a risk of foolish things being said.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoIt's pretty important to get this story straight: She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. This seems like a pretty standard firing. People are already claiming on twitter that Google is assaulting ethical AI, and I just don't see it. Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.” Yeah, uh, don't do this.
- elefanten 6y agoNot just exfiltration but sharing outside the organization, as per news articles about it. There's no story here, this is an obvious outcome. Edit: to add that the more interesting question is whether they should sue her. If they don't, that may be the contextually-appropriate version of letting her off the hook easy (to live up to their culture or for morale or for optics or whatever reason).
- yellow_postit 6y agoWonder if there will be some big leak or bus throwing article from the exfiltrated data the reporting references.
- guardiangod 6y ago>She moved files when she wasn't supposed to If that's true, that's not very ethical is it?
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoYou always have to be careful with people who do bad things for "good" reasons (ie the difference between Sci-Hub and reselling pirated papers for a profit). You want a gulf of difference between the punishment for nefarious activity and the punishment for well-intended-but-unlawful activity.
- 2-tpg 6y agoShe is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee: > Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference. Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?
- chronic3802 6y ago- 135,000 Google employees - 2,000 signed a petition to support Timnit [1] - 2 employees resigned to support Timnit [2] When it comes to voting with your feet, no one actually gives a shit. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-for-answers-on-timnit-gebru-departure.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-fo... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/in...
- fossuser 6y agoI think it’s possible to care about AI ethics and not like Timnit.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoThis is something I feel like few people learn in life in the US. You may be morally right, but nobody ever has your back. The few that do you can probably call friends, but the many that don't will never lift a finger to help you legitimately when it matters.
- lrossi 6y agoI don’t see why you say US, it’s the same in any country. Nobody in their right mind is going to quit their job over this during a pandemic, when it’s already so hard to find a job. I imagine ethics jobs are not in high demand.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- maximente 6y agoyou been out on these streets lately? lemme tell ya, you falling on your sword at this time in history without a rock-solid plan in place to keep that bread coming is going to leave you with a lot of regrets, i'll wager. there ain't a lot of companies in the world looking for "quit bc i thought the bosses gave a coworker a bad shake" on a resume, and they sure as hell ain't paying what google is.
- 6y ago
- duckfang 6y agoAt the same time, Google unveiled a "Black owned businesses near me" on Google Maps. How has that been received? We need look no further than Twitter: (the Tl;Dr. racists are using this to lower all ratings of these Black owned businesses) https://twitter.com/dmetaxak/status/1362856231212212224 https://twitter.com/dmetaxak/status/1362856231212212224 Google recently added a feature allowing users to search for "Black-owned businesses near you". They're advertising it all over the place (see below). I've also already started hearing from Black-owned businesses I follow that they're seeing an influx of racist fake reviews... BLK MKT Vintage, for instance, got over 30 new, clearly fake reviews in 24 hours (e.g., calling them "a store that promotes segregation", saying their items were "broken" and "covered in dead cockroaches"). And if you look at the users writing those reviews... The users leaving those fraudulent 1-star reviews for this business are also leaving 1-star reviews on dozens of other Black-owned businesses. All this while Google pays for PR lauding this new feature. We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit? Have such companies thought through the consequences for those they're "helping"? Was this done at the direction of those groups or paternalistically on behalf of? This is yet another example of why app features cannot and should not replace community networks and mutual aid. Technosolutionism, the white savior complex, and paternalism towards marginalized groups lead to selfish PR efforts that actively harm those they ostensibly "help".
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoIn what will be an entirely self-serving, "everything is evidence for my existing worldview" claim... ...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this. The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become. People confuse cultural power with economic power...just because many powerful people/businesses support black enterprise right now, doesn't mean the wider society will just blindly follow with fists full of cash. Racism is terrible. "Antiracism", with no regard to the actual outcomes, is hardly better. These businesses were not being harassed by awful people until Google tried to leverage them over their non-black-owned competitors.
- 6y ago
- christophilus 6y agoI hate Google, but I have to say this article is garbage. It sounds like she was fired for perfectly legitimate reasons. Trying to make it about racism or sexism is a disservice to those who actually care about those issues.
- legostormtroopr 6y agoOut of curiousity I checked out Dr. Mitchells Twitter feed. On her feed for the past several months, shes been posting and reposting articles that are heavily critical of her employer. Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio. So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer on a quasi-professional network - what did she expect?
- uoaei 6y agoA right to free speech, and freedom from employer discrimination due to political beliefs.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago“My employer is doing something wrong” is not a political belief
- thundergolfer 6y agoCan you elaborate?
- mc32 6y agoNot the OP but I’d say reporting a company for breaking the law isn’t political even though laws stem from the political process.
- thundergolfer 6y agoThanks for reply. I can see where you're coming from I think, but reporting or not reporting the law being broken is political exactly because, as you say, laws stem from the political process, but also because law enforcement is a socio-political activity. I do see what though, as it's supposed to be accepted as a basic premise of society that we set laws and follow them, and all accept the responsibility of ensuring that those laws are followed.
- contemporary343 6y agoThey also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either. All of this increases my respect for Microsoft Research immensely. They've been more hands off and had researchers publish work critical of MS technologies. It's quite telling that supposedly more open Google is incapable of creating as open a research org as MSR, which remains in my view an excellent example of what an industrial research org can be.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Cacti 6y agoI haven’t seen any of the “smear campaign”, just what these two employees have written publicly and, honestly, they both seem like entitled self-absorbed pains in the ass who crap on everything around them just because they didn’t get their way, who view anyone who disagrees with them as an idiot (or worse, evil), and as completely unprofessional and poorly prepared to be dealing with something of such significance at a $50B company. These are people who should have never made it past individual contributer. There is a difference between pushing your company towards a better place and dropping bombs every time someone disagrees with you, a distinction neither of these two seem to realize.
- 2-tpg 6y agoThe political activist collective is slowly falling apart. If you get blamed for racism when firing an employee for telling colleagues not to pursue KPIs, there is not much you can do to continue placating these professional victims. They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person. It is low-brow ugly neo-racism, but then again, I don't really want Google AI in charge of AI ethics, with or without Gebru, so may the mess and reputation damage linger for a long time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoI accept I will be looked at negatively for this, but I simply don't believe Google has any obligation to keep paying giant salaries to people who are actively - by their own words - working to show how harmful Google and/or its underlying technologies are to the designated victims of the age. She was moving files and "private data on other employees" (?) off the Google internal network into her personal possession, in order to contravene their policies and share their work against their wishes. You may be able to claim this is hypocritical as they claim to support openness, but I really think the very clear and states goal of undermining Google's alleged negative impact on non-whites negates any mutual goodwill that should be assumed. TL;dr this is a completely legit firing, even if her intentions are good. Tech companies will increasingly find themselves wrestling with a fifth column if this sort of thing persists. Just wait until the Woke stuff really gets tied up with unionism, and you'll see an explosion of allegations of "union-busting-to-protect-white-supremacy", some of which has already been alleged of Bezos and Musk. None of this is good for anyone, in my opinion.
- cleandreams 6y agoPossibly she violated policy by sending internal emails to an ex-employee. That is fireable offense, yes. But this whole avalanche of incidents at google is still ugly and appears to be out of control. A bad look for google. Has anyone over there heard of damage control? Did it need to get this bad? At some level this situation must have been enabled by really clueless management. Or, it could just be the reality that google's use of user data is basically unethical and cannot coexist with a real AI Ethics team. It kinda looks like that.
- Ice_cream_suit 6y ago"exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees" If true, that is not just a fireable offence, it is a criminal offence.
- ineedasername 6y agoSo they fired an ethics leader because she thought something unethical might be going on and was taking steps to investigate it by automating a review of her email, or something like that. It seems she may have been passing on some of that information to persons outside of Google, which isn't great, but I also don't see much in the way of details on what that actually entailed, so it's hard to judge how inappropriate those actions might have been. Either way, still a bad look for Google. Remembering the mid 00's, it's always jarring to juxtapose "Don't be Evil" with how they currently operate.
- refulgentis 6y agoanother way to frame it is she got fired for transferring a bulk dump of her corporate email to someone outside the company. I'm extremely sympathetic to the cause but I don't think it does any good to have such a blinkered approach to what happened
- ahepp 6y agoWhat kind of internal documents could she have sent to external parties that wouldn't fully justify her firing?
- ineedasername 6y agoI don't know. I agree it's probably a job-ending move in most cases, but until the details are available I'll withhold full judgement. Also has she confirmed this, or is it just what Google is claiming? If they simply want her gone, they're probably not above making a mountain out of a molehill.
- yk 6y agoIt seems the tobacco industry had more luck with their scientific advisors.
- ineedasername 6y agoWell, the problem with hiring an Ethics specialist will tend to be that they already have a strong ethical compass.
- radford-neal 6y agoPerhaps not: https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/16/are-ethicists-ethical/ https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/16/are-ethicists-ethical/
- asabjorn 6y agoThe firing seem related to a conflict between CRT morals and normative western moral systems. The ethics researcher in question seem to subscribe to the Critical Race Theory way of looking at the problem, "it's not a question if X is present, but how it manifest", which is in direct opposition with normative western morals.
- whoooooo123 6y agoThen we should celebrate her firing, because the future of civilization depends on keeping CRT out of our institutions, Google included.
- chronic3802 6y ago- 135,000 Google employees - 2,000 signed a petition to support Timnit [1] - 2 employees resigned to support Timnit [2] When it comes to voting with your feet, no one actually gives a shit. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-for-answers-on-timnit-gebru-departure.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-fo... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/in...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 6y agoOf course. Few people are willing to actually put their money where their mouth is.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post duplicate comments to HN. It strictly lowers signal/noise ratio and makes merging threads a pain.
- disposekinetics 6y agoOr the vast majority supported Google's actions but the social climate is such they worried about the mob coming after them.
- buildbot 6y agoIt’s a really common refrain here that if you are employee critical of your employer you should expect to get fired… Well perhaps, but you’d think that specifically someone in AI ethics needs to be empowered to speak up against both internal external issues. Or did google just want an research ethics hit team against other companies technologies? Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible with googles own products. Clearly it’s impossible to be an independent team at google.
- ineedasername 6y agoI agree that employees should be allowed to criticize their employers, but there's nothing inherent to an Ethics specialist that would weight things even more in that direction. Ostensibly, she was hired to report internally on ethics considerations. Unless part of her job description was to liaise with the public on those ethical issues, public exposure would come as a bit of a surprise to her employer.
- leetcrew 6y agowhy would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? in the case of google, there's already plenty of people willing to do that for free.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Booktrope 6y agoYeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe key word is "publicly." You can oppose without doing it by proxy on Twitter.
- leetcrew 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- uuvvww 6y agoWhat exactly did they contributing to their major field of research? I saw too many fake Dr.s
- strangeloops85 6y agoSomehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.
- newsclues 6y agoGoogle didn’t have time to establish and solidify corporate culture before the current trends began. Microsoft was more entrenched and stable.
- fmajid 6y agoIIRC MSR was started by Rick Rashid (the inventor of the Mach microkernel that NeXTstep and Mac OS X are based on), and it was always very independent of the rest of Microsoft and its business priorities.
- Zanni 6y agoMSR was started by Nathan Myhrvold who recruited Rashid. Well, "started" may be ambiguous here. Nathan proposed it. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/nathan-myhrvold/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/nathan-myhrv...
- ashtonkem 6y agoI have no insider knowledge, but from the outside it sure as heck looks like Microsoft has rebuilt its internal culture since the founding of Google. It certainly doesn’t feel like the MS of Bill Gates or the MS of Steve Ballmer anymore. If that is true, wouldn’t this imply that the difference between the two isn’t time since these unspecified “trends” began, but instead quality of management?
- yortpyperty 6y agonot surprising. please read 'the age of surveillance capitalism' nearly every move by google (and friends) post-publication (of course, any move pre too) can be captured by the thesis of the book.
- mikece 6y agoThey fired another person whose LITERAL job is to help them not be evil. Before long people won't believe it if you tell them Google's initial motto was "Don't Be Evil."
- exporectomy 6y agoYou're implying that nobody with her job should ever be fired for any reason. That's probably not what you were trying to communicate.
- AdrianB1 6y ago" tying executive pay companywide to diversity and inclusion efforts." - how does this work? I cannot imagine the CTO doing recruiting of minorities to meet diversity targets instead of doing the work one was hired for. I saw this happening in other companies and that had devastating effects on hiring quality, employee morale and productivity.
- mellosouls 6y ago"Google fires another AI ethics leader." Somewhat loaded title, as it implies a previous one was fired, which was not at all established as the case.
- pseudalopex 6y agoFiring someone who gave notice is still firing in California.[1] And Gebru didn't even give notice. She proposed discussing a resignation date. [1] https://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_135.htm https://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_135.htm
- mellosouls 6y agoShe proposed discussing a resignation date. She threatened them with resignation; they called her bluff and accepted. Like I said - loaded title.
- pseudalopex 6y agoThey rejected her proposal to discuss an end date and imposed immediate termination. You can argue it was justified. You can argue California law should be different. But the title states a legal fact.
- mellosouls 6y agoYou linked to a very long legalistic webpage which I don't have time to read; please link to a concise neutral reference that specifically points out she was fired because I've googled and can't find anything other than biased opinions either way. The fact remains she threatened them with resignation; using words like "proposing for discussion" runs the risk of portraying her as an innocent victim in this for anybody who hasn't read about the original case. For those people also, the title remains opinionated without a clear reference to a formal description of the exit that is generally accepted.
- 6y ago
- choppaface 6y agoDr. Gebru was fired for having consulted a lawyer. (Jeff Dean and others were aware that Dr. Gebru was consulting a lawyer long before her termination). Employers can do stupid things, but not illegal things, and it's beyond stupid to fire somebody for talking to an attorney. Google felt threatened and so they acted, fair and simple. While it's OK to feel threatened, it's not OK to retaliate, which is what Google, legally, did. Dr. Mitchell was likely talking with the same legal team-- it sounds like Google cited cause for Dr. Mitchell sending documents (non-IP) outside of Google's network. So Dr. Mitchell is almost certainly also a victim of retaliation. The bottom line: Sundar Pichai has again and again admitted to Google's struggles with retaining or regaining trust, and here he has again failed to act effectively. Google's behavior here is, legally, maximally adversarial and strictly for Google's benefit. Sundar Pichai has failed yet again to show Google can be trustworthy.
- KhitanMaps 6y ago> Dr. Gebru was fired for having consulted a lawyer. How do you know this?
- 2-tpg 6y agoGebru was fired for unprofessional conduct and disturbing the work place. She tried to sneak a Google authored paper through internal peer review, by submitting it on the day of the deadline, and having the paper approved without incorporating any feedback of the internal review. Then she wrote an angry unhinged email to her colleagues and subordinates, where she said that Google was marginalizing Black women for speaking out about diversity and that KPI diversity metrics do no matter, they can be ignored. Then she threatened resignation, if Jeff Dean would not de-anonymize all the internal reviewers. Since that is a demand that no scientific chair can possibly in good conscience satisfy, her bluff was called and she was "resignated". Then, of course, she asked on Twitter for a good employee lawyer, said that Jeff Dean was white privilege, and that Google fired her for advocating for diversity, essentially dissing all her Black colleagues at Google advocating for diversity without any problems relating to their skin color. Gebru is an absolutely toxic person, who can't keep her politics and racial justice activism outside of her profession or academic work (her work is cited so much, because she actively mails other scientists when they don't cite her work, threatening to call them marginalizing and ignorers of Black women in science -- pity cites). She is bubbled in a network which supports her with tags suchs as "BelieveBlackWomen" when she publicly smears Google for being racists. No rationality, but stirred up angry feelings. Trust should not be assigned due to skin color or gender. Stop that racism and sexism, it has no place in business or academia.
- threevox 6y agoAs with Covid, yet another instance of "ethicists" being actually highly unethical people
- fmajid 6y agoGoogle only built the Ethical AI team to placate internal criticism of its attempts to sell AI tech to the Department of Defense and building a search engine for China with censorship built-in. They were supposed to be window-dressing, not actually rock the boat, so when they did they were culled. Since they are not contributing to the bottom line, directly or indirectly, the disaffection in the team couldn't matter less to management. They cleverly appointed a black woman VP to neuter the group without the bad optics of the initial firing of Ms. Gebru, and I expect the remainder of the team will in the not-so-distant future be reassigned or let go, and replaced by a new cast of ethnically diverse yes-people who will produce lots of impressive-sounding papers but not any criticism of substance.
- aerosmile 6y agoYou will learn a lot about Margaret Mitchell's firing by simply reading this piece she shared publicly on Twitter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uOUeLgdoLPfnx1JOErg2w/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO... A few punchlines: "Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Gebru deserves to be treated this way." "Dr. Gebru refused to subjugate herself to a system requiring her to belittle her integrity as a researcher and degrade herself below her fellow researchers. Within the next year, let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system that devalued one of the world’s leading scientists, and keep something like this from ever happening again." In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt. I have nothing but respect for people willing to fall on their sword for the sake of making the world a better place. But if she thought even for a second that she could possibly be a martyr and also keep her job, she's delusional. I have a hard time aligning myself with people who are fighting for the right cause, but have completely lost their touch with reality. Perhaps she expected to get fired and knew that moving the files was only going to accelerate the inevitable? In that case, she deserved to be celebrated. But if she thought that she was untouchable, and in addition to being a major PITA for her employer also ended up so easily getting caught red-handed for a fireable offense - then I start questioning her judgement and have to wonder if her arguments against Google are equally skewed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aliyfarah 6y agoDeleted
- xboxnolifes 6y agoI'm confused, you seem to say that the parent's opinion is delusional, but then you share their same opinion in the next sentence.
- sjg007 6y agoIt seems AI ethics are on the decline. But in 10-20 years weapons of math destruction which includes AI will be the subject of Congressional and Senate hearings. I would go into public policy in the government/think tank, maybe with an academic gig as well. The Ethics on the medical and criminal justice side seem more pressing than search itself.
- flippinburgers 6y agoDr. Gebru originally asked, as part of her complaint, that the names of the people reviewing her work be revealed. Does that sound particularly ethical to you? At best she wanted to talk to them face to face about their criticisms. At worst (and this is more likely if you ask me) she just wanted to throw -isms in their faces. Just to make sure people don't forget that aspect of what appears to be the root of this situation.
- geofft 6y agoYes, because they were not peer reviewers, and they had no business reviewing the paper in the first place. She went through the process for internal publication review (which does not involve anonymous reviewers, any more than a code review or a preparing-to-open-source-something review or a branding-guidelines review involves anonymous reviewers), and the paper was approved, and then management told her there was a secret extra process and she couldn't know who was involved in the process. The paper was eventually anonymously peer reviewed by other scientists at other institutions in a process run by the journal (not by anyone's manager) without incident.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- just_steve_h 6y agoI came here to read a bunch of shitty takes by men angrily defending one of the world's most powerful entities from the vicious attack of... a formerly-employed ethical AI researcher. Thanks to so many of you for not disappointing me! Seriously, bros... invest in a reflective surface & gaze into it from time to time!
- just_steve_h 6y agoThe white bro tone-deaf circle jerk continues apace! Stunning!
- bitcharmer 6y agoHN crowd doesn't typically promote racist and sexist remarks like yours. That - among other things - is why most of us are here instead of any other social network. With this kind of input you will find your comments much more appreciated on Twitter.
- trestenhortz 6y agoI’ve learned that if your colleagues don’t like you, you’re more likely to get fired. To minimize chance of getting fired, avoid making people dislike you, try to make people like you.
- jzer0cool 6y agoEthical. Anyone experienced the following? Working on product, features, etc., may potentially be unethical to end-users. May introduce unknown biases, pose privacy issue, gray areas, to end-users, security and other related similar topics. Speak out of such issue to only find an adverse reaction. Timely delivery of the product is more important.
- beckman466 6y ago“We all live in the digital poorhouse. We have always lived in the world we built for the poor. We create a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and then are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth based only on the ability to earn a wage, and suffer in a world that undervalues care and community. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, and watch lasting inequities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways we cooperate and lift each other up. But only the poor lived in the common dorms of the county poorhouse. Only the poor were put under the diagnostic microscope of scientific clarity. Today, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.“ - Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
- Crash0v3rid3 6y ago“After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. This feels pretty cut and dry to me. Meg exported business material from the company. That a fire-able offense at any company. I feel bad for her but I honestly don’t understand why she is even surprised she got fired.
- monocasa 6y agoThe rumor going around is that she thought she was going to be retaliated against, and the documents were her backing up some of her emails in case she was fired illegally to discuss with her lawyer.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoSince she's an at will worker, it'll be difficult to prove she was fired illegally
- monocasa 6y agoAll the more reason for her to have a copy of her emails.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago"I know, since I'm worried I'm going to get fired for vague non-specific reasons, I'm going to directly violate company policy and get terminated for cause" is an odd game plan.
- monocasa 6y agoI assume there was something extremely incriminating in the emails if she backed them up.
- spicyramen 6y agoGood riddance, work is work, political agendas outside the office space please.
- gscott 6y agoThe real solution is if your company isn't really completely ethical, don't hire ethics researchers. Can the whole division. Simple business choice.
- digitist 6y agoAgreed fren. SJW stuff should be swiftly rejected in the workplace and relegated to the personal time hobbies of the leftists.
- sp332 6y agoYou figure the whole department should quit?
- sn41 6y agoThe mandate of the department is ethics. Ethics is not agnostic to one's personal convictions, unlike code. People assume that because someone got fired, they "lost". Another viewpoint is that they retained their ethical integrity at great personal cost - doing so is precisely their actual job.
- KODeKarnage 6y agoYes, ethics is agnostic to one's personal convictions when it is your job. Same as how defense lawyers leave their personal sense of justice out of their jobs. Same as how sports referees don't let their childhood fandom of a particular team affect their calls. Same as how actors will be physically intimate with people the opposite of the sexual preference.
- KODeKarnage 6y agoImagine if the person in charge of AI Ethics converted to a fundamentalist Christian sect. Their ethics changed and now they think LGBT people should be discriminated against explicitly. Nobody supporting Margaret Mitchell would be defending this new convert's application of the personal ethics in their job. That proves this is merely a convenient argument on their part, not a principled one.
- doe88 6y agoOn friday PM. Classy.
- bitcharmer 6y agoOn what day would you do it? If anything, I'd rather be fired on a Friday than any other day.
- doe88 6y agohttps://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/ https://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/
- gweinberg 6y agoA company whose motto is "Don't worry, be evil" probably shouldn't have an ethics department.
- Aunche 6y ago"Firing @timnitGebru created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are being increasingly punished for that trauma." Wow. These activists are truly living in an alternate reality.
- anonygler 6y agoEverything is a "literal act of violence" to these people. Google is run by naive idealists who hire activists in droves and are then surprised to realize that those people are a bunch of unemployables.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoGoogle, by virtue of its sheer influence in the industry, is primarily responsible for the activist-driven grief that has shat itself all over the tech industry in recent years. So fuck them. Watching the toxic crops they've planted and tended to go for their own creator's throats is nothing short of delightful.
- logicchains 6y ago"Go woke, go broke"
- Aunche 6y agoAll the world's trillion-dollar companies have gone woke, so I'd wager it's quite profitable. It may not seem like it to you because you're not the intended audience.
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoHopefully it's just a temporary fad that will not be profitable very soon. The "woke" crowd needs a heavy dose of reality.
- pclmulqdq 6y ago
- Proven 6y agoThey should have never hired those socialist activists. As for the people who got fired, if they are any good they will do great after their outstanding achievements at Google. It's a win-win situation.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoMy general impression of this entire thing, starting with Gebru being fired, is that the department should have never been named "ethical AI" anything. It's research into social stuff. How AI interacts with things like faces and how that gets biased by a lot of social issues, like racism and existing class stratification related to race (among other things). These are things that can have "ethical" implications but when you start talking about "Ethical AI," you inadvertently convince people "We are the Good Guys. We will treat everyone in some extremely above board fashion. Our little department is going to single-handedly right all historical racial and gendered wrongs ever in the history of the universe and all the baggage all of society is living with as a consequence." Good luck with that. It isn't happening and the implied contract there suggesting it will is just going to piss people off and give them unrealistic expectations. No, I am absolutely not justifying shitty behavior of any sort, not in this case nor in the general case. Don't come at me with ridiculous accusations of that sort. It's hard to make progress. It's actively counterproductive to inadvertently set expectations that this one department will meet some crazy strict set of ethics at all times every minute of every day in contrast with the entire rest of the world where we duke it out for small gains on a regular basis.
- taurath 6y agoI feel as though people looking joining such a group would have at the very first question “what is the scope of what we will be studying” or something similar. I don’t think people take jobs like that without having a decent answer to that question and I haven’t seen any accusations of bait and switch, only of poor treatment over a disagreeing researcher ballooning into this.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI'm pretty confident the crux of the issue is "We expected to be treated better in this department than what we have had to tolerate elsewhere due to sexism, racism, etc." And I think they expected that based on "This is the Ethical AI department. We are trying to make the world a better place. You do that by walking the walk first, not just researching how AI works." That's what I think. It's not something I can prove. For various reasons, I'm not really wanting to debate it. I tossed it out there because some folks know I post as openly female here (and HN skews rather strongly male) and some folks know I have studied social stuff and sometimes people find my take on certain subjects of value or at least food for thought.
- calylex 6y agoThis sounds like a poem she wrote https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_mitchell_how_we_can_build_ai_to_help_humans_not_hurt_us https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_mitchell_how_we_can_build... How does one get to lead such a high caliber team at Google AI with background in Linguistics of all things? What are some of accomplishments this person has achieved, beyond being from one or many oppressed victim group(s) that Google needed to hire to fend off lack of diversity claims?
- Maursault 6y ago> How does one get to lead such a high caliber team at Google AI with background in Linguistics of all things? Wow. I believe you should begin by assuming ignorance, and not assume the opposite. This [1] will get you started. Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Computer Science, independently, are all valid and highly valued, highly sought after backgrounds for careers in AI. Have all those in a multidisciplinary background, it is likely your career is in AI. [1] https://www.cio.com/article/3193777/why-ai-careers-can-start-with-a-degree-in-linguistics.html https://www.cio.com/article/3193777/why-ai-careers-can-start...
- chris11 6y agoThat's an easy question to answer. She has a cs related masters and Phd. And she has done research at Johns Hopkins and Microsoft.
- tolbish 6y agoYou might think you're making fun of Linguistics, but your quip merely demonstrates your gap in knowledge. Linguistics and AI are heavily related.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gerash 6y agoI'm going to sound insensitive to some but this is too much soap opera
- guender 6y agoLooks like good riddance. Good for Google.
- guender 6y agoIf she wrote a script to run on google-owned and operated machines to search and send company proprietary information to outsiders than there’s no question she deserves firing. It’s incredibly dumb.
- torgian 6y agoIf we are to believe the memo that Google wrote about their investigation for firing her, then it seems pretty cut and dry. Either she should have tried going through official channels first, then be smart in her own investigation, or google is lying. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
- PBnFlash 6y agoI found her ted talk, it seems very hyperbolic and doesn't really have much of an understanding of what these systems are. >I put this picture of a burning house into a image classifier running on my computer and it returned "beautiful" and that sent chills down my spine These don't strike me as particularly valuable insights, does she have an interesting body of work somewhere? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twWkGt33X_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twWkGt33X_k
- civilized 6y agoFor context: 1. Gebru is alleged to have terrorized a Google Brain manuscript discussion forum with unfounded accusations of racist disregard for her contributions https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/geqzqlq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... There is some disagreement within this thread as to exactly what happened, but it seems to me that Gebru had a tendency of taking perceived slights and blowing them out of proportion, creating a more difficult work environment. 2. Mitchell was fired for stealing thousands of company emails I wasn't impressed with the process Google used to rid themselves of Gebru, but let's not pretend that Google lost the ethics A-team here.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoMitchell ran a scripts to scrape emails (wonder if it was her company ones or mailing lists for the AI group) for signs of racism (heck how on earth does that work) against Gebru.
- mcphage 6y ago> heck how on earth does that work Scraping text to analyze what is being talked about is what Google does.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoWords but can it figure out the intent and the subtext behind it ??. It is not as cut and dry as a KKK recruitment flyer.
- throwawaygulf 6y ago"AI ethics researcher" is codeword for "leftist activist".
- jgalt212 6y agoHonestly, who's the bone head who set up this department in first place? It's like letting the cock sleep in the henhouse. Either this department is one big charade, or it tries to do a good job and is in constant and acrimonious conflict with rest of the org. It's like a bank or HF having a compliance department who is not only responsible for ensuring rules (it doesn't entirely understand) are followed, and making up new rules at the same time. In effect, a dual legislative and judicial branch.
- seany 6y agoGood?