Margaret Mitchell fired from Google
My general impression of this entire thing, starting with Gebru being fired, is that the department should have never been named &quot;ethical AI&quot; anything.<p>It&#x27;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).<p>These are things that can have &quot;ethical&quot; implications but when you start talking about &quot;Ethical AI,&quot; you inadvertently convince people &quot;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.&quot;<p>Good luck with that. It isn&#x27;t happening and the implied contract there suggesting it will is just going to piss people off and give them unrealistic expectations.<p>No, I am absolutely <i>not</i> justifying shitty behavior of any sort, not in this case nor in the general case. Don&#x27;t come at me with ridiculous accusations of that sort.<p>It&#x27;s hard to make progress. It&#x27;s actively counterproductive to inadvertently set expectations that this one department will meet some crazy strict set of <i>ethics</i> 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.