hey chapo friends! Today Google fired Timnit Gebru, a highly regarded researcher studying ethical problems/biases with AI systems ... presumably for doing just that with AI systems that Google had already monetized. (Relevant: she's a highly successful Black woman in a very white male dominated field, who's also been fighting against the use of facial recognition among other things.)
This comes the same day as the Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board found that Google had also illegally fired/spied on employees trying to unionize/organize last year.
Anyways, AI twitter is going wild but curious to hear y'alls takes. Personally I'm not too surprised. AI Technology has the potential to generate so much profit for these companies (pretty much as close as you can get to value in the Marxian sense), so there are strong economic incentives to silence anyone doing good work exposing problems with these systems. The only thing we can do as (tech) workers is organize.
Yeah, I think we also need to start having conversations about ethics.
Like if you work for Uber now, you're just scum. You're just pure scum and there is no excuse for it.
Or for Google, or Facebook, or really any big tech corpo...
Agreed! But IMO we're having conversations about ethics, it's just those conversations aren't translating into what these companies are doing (bc that's not profitable). Or maybe that's just 'we' as certain AI researchers, idk.
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