Writing to young women of colour, she says:
> So it’s not only important for you to participate in this technological future, but think about an alternative future where your imagination gets to shape what kind of technology we’re building. Because right now, your imagination is not shaping what kind of technology we’re building. We’re trying to do cleanup after all the white men who put us in this mess. We’re not creating technology in our own imagination. They create technology in their imagination to serve their interest, it harms our communities, and then we have to perform cleanup. Then while we’re performing cleanup, we get retaliated against.
Well, there we have it: all bad aspects of technology are from "white men who put us in this mess". To argue against that is "retaliating"; so I had better not engage in any whataboutisms, like say for example taking a look at the massive open source movement and how many of the people in there are white men who have donated person-years of time to building community projects for free, or have been involved in e-cycling programs to get older technology into the hands of people in then developing world, or any other such effort.
Even if we scope down "this mess" to "the problems of AI when it comes to racial dynamics", it's pretty hard to pretend this is all just white people (is Yann LeCun white?). It's also ironically privileged to pretend that the mess that is ML "artificial intelligence", which is really just designed to shove product down your throat and invade your privacy, is the critical issue for racial equity in the modern world. When it's perfectly equitable by race, when image recognition works as well for Black faces as it does for lighter ones, will this stuff stop being corporate totalitarian-liberalist profiteering bullshit? Not a chance!
Nobody is stopping you from using your imagination, Timnit; nobody is stopping you from developing the next amazing AI thing, you just can't do it at Google, because your work was undermining the company. Perhaps you should look at the owners and top managers of Google - are they really all people that positively identify themselves as white men? I don't think so. Even the men she mentions by name in the article, e.g. Andy Rubin, probably don't label themselves as such when asked. Timnit, your research made your employer look bad; and maybe they should look bad, maybe I dislike them as much as you do, but they don't pay my salary, and expecting them to pay yours when you do that is asinine. Do you think the corporate structure really wants an iconoclast? Go ask James Damore, because ultimately you have more common cause than you would ever be willing to admit.
We all know that AI has some difficulties with race because, as it turns out, it really isn't something we can just ignore in every dataset and pretend the results will reflect reality. It's also not something that is going to give results that reflect an ideological, mathematical equity between people; even when done perfectly correctly, at best it's going to reveal uncomfortable truths we don't like about reality. It is what it is. Some of this can probably be fixed; I can't see how it's in anyone's best interest, white man or otherwise, to develop AI that doesn't try to do a good job for everyone who comes calling, regardless of race and ethnicity. I see no reason to assume that an AI that treats Black people unfairly is going to treat white folks fairly either, and we know how subtle and rationalizable "unfair treatment" can be in reality.
Go on, Timnit, get away from Google. Use your name and cachet - fleeting as it may be - to build something, now. Get some folks together - completely exclude all white men if you feel the need, doesn't really bother me. Freedom of association is yours, nobody will ever force you to hire white men, so go and use it! Build some product that reflects the imagination of women of colour applied to AI. I'm eagerly waiting for it.
Until you do that, you paint _yourself_ as an angry Black woman rather than as someone who is contributing.
This seemingly endless micro-debacle is just proof positive of Sundar Pichai's weak, rudderless non-leadership of Google. I can't be the only one who sees this.
Pichai can't decide if he wants Google to be a safe space for progressives or a ruthless profit machine. He keeps playing both sides without success or conviction.
Icing on the cake - he effectively threw Dean under the bus by questioning his decision. This tells every other manager in the company to ape Pichai's indecisiveness and cowardice. Why does Dean even stay? He could trivially attract capital for any venture he might wish to start. His contact list is literally everyone who matters in Silicon Valley.
Pichai will continue to get away with it because Google's profit machine is on cruise control for now.
At some point in the future, Google will get a real CEO and that person will inevitably send out an all-hands that curtly requests anyone who doesn't like Google should leave ASAP. At some point, what else can you say? Managers can't exist only to change diapers.
As for Gebru...the shoe fits. You tried to play chicken with the machine and lost. And the fact that this story won't go away bears out how desperate you are to extend your fifteen minutes.
I don't know if much more can be squeezed out of this story. At this point what even would be the desired resolution? This person would be nuts to go back to Google, and Google would be nuts to offer that.
For context, here's the email where sundar dehumanizes her and treats her like an angry Black woman: https://www.axios.com/sundar-pichai-memo-timnit-gebru-exit-1...