Yesterday Margaret Mitchell tweeted this out:
I'm fired.
— MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) February 19, 2021
This might not seem troublesome on the surface. However, earlier this year they fired Timit Gebru, who was the co-lead with Dr. Mitchell of Google’s AI Ethics Team.
- Here’s Gizmodo’s write-up of Dr. Mitchell’s firing.
- This is an open email Dr. Mitchell wrote about the firing of Dr. Gebru.
- Here’s a look at the paper Dr. Gebru wrote that upset the powers-that-be at Google enough to fire her.
Add to the above this behavior by Google executives (Tweet below), and I see a toxic environment dominating the company with a code of conduct statement “Don’t Be Evil“.
Because he can't harass me on Twitter, Michael Lissack deciding to harass me over email.
Absolutely normal stuff, right here. pic.twitter.com/Un53jMFSQP
— Dr. Alex Hanna (@alexhanna) February 20, 2021
One of my areas of interest is Corporate Social Responsibility, and I’ve been looking at how this might be applied in the tech sphere. And Google is giving me solid evidence of those applications, in the most negative way possible.