8 Comments

Maybe Timnit and Margaret getting fired from Google had nothing to do with their ethnicity or their gender, but that neither of them was actually particularly talented? It seems to me like they're both one trick ponies, with their only talent being to soak every viewpoint in critical theory.

I read an early draft of Timnit's problematic report and it sounded like an ignorant student ranting against the machine but without any real engineering suggestions of how to improve anything at an actual technological level. I also just had a look at Margaret's own personal website and it's also embarrassing from a technical point of view. There's even a <head> tag malformed on one of the pages. She has no right working in tech if that's the best website she could muster up. Both of them would probably be much better suited to working in the make-believe world of academia, rather than the private sector, as neither seem like much of an asset to Google when all's said and done. I doubt either added any real value to the company and its products.

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You're really using malformed HTML as an excuse to discredit an ethical AI researcher's technical abilities? Really scraping the barrel to find a dumb example there, bud.

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I'm just saying, these people don't come across as particularly technically competent to me. They seem to be rather ignorant about the machinery they're actually part of. They also shouldn't be advising about artificial intelligence if they're incapable of showing a bit of human intelligence themselves; Big Tech has ethics departments for one reason, and it clearly isn't because it wants the kind of "morally righteous" behaviour these employees got themselves fired over. If either of them had any real ethics they would have quit working at Google themselves a long time ago and gone about their fight in very different ways. I can't think of any line of work where you could use company commissioned and paid for research, to try and so openly damage a company's reputation and then be surprised when management wants you gone.

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>but that neither of them was actually particularly talented?

No, but I bet you wish it were true. Then you could feel safe keeping your head in the sand and ignoring important social issues that you think don't affect you.

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What big tech does affects all of us, frighteningly so. Also, Critical Theory isn't going to solve any of the social issues it purports to be a solution for. It will make them worse. Don't be so naive. This is the same company that fired James Damore, remember. A properly run modern ethics department should have all the cards to win the fight, yet they still lost. They should have worked out how to initiate change effectively and been more effective rabble rousers. What they did strikes me as third rate student activism, they have failed to win the argument and persuade the powers that be. They are using a divisive ideology to try and win every argument. They also have potentially damaged the reputation of the company in the process of their work. That's not acting like a worthwhile employee.

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Drink that kool-aid so that you don't reflect on the dumbness of the people who control your livelihood.

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What an asshole comment

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What a naive comment.

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