Dr. Gebru is a pathbreaking scientist doing some of the most important work to ensure just and accountable AI and to create a welcoming and diverse AI research field.
I dunno really. It’s a commercial company. You know, profit matters. Perhaps working on how to make AI work would be more useful?
BTW, her earlier work on how facial recognition systems near entirely fail with black female faces – a couple of commercial systems had failure rates of 45% and the like on even guessing gender – is exactly that. Research that leads to making AI work better. Because going and telling the engineers “This is pretty shit performance, ya’ know?” is indeed making it work better.
Fighting to make it all just and welcoming isn’t quite the same thing.
Until December 2, 2020, Dr. Gebru was one of very few Black women Research Scientists at the company, which boasts a dismal 1.6% Black women employees overall
I dunno about Tim’s dunno.
Y’see, Google isn’t merely a commercial entity, it is a very political player and has been for some time.
One of the political things Google has been promoting incessantly is ethnic identity grievance – in everything from their amusingly right-on Google Doodles to their increasingly unapologetic censorship of non-leftist opinions and vicious internal culture of Maoist struggle sessions against any white man who looks insufficiently cowed by the dangerhairs.
Google says Black Lives Matter and it’s time they acted like it. I want at least 50% of Google data scientists to be morbidly obese Black women of colour, machete-wielding Somali Mohammed-Jihadders, and pygmy negritos dancing and ululating around a bonfire in the Google employee cafeteria.
Any failure by Google to achieve these Diversity (which is Our Greatest Strength) goals can only be explained by white supremacy, in which case I’m afraid the only remedy is to burn Sundar Pichai at the stake for social justice.
Steve is absolutely right about the Google Doodles. Today we have some fairy lights, which I took to be an inventive reference to “fairy lites”, or those who have gay sex but are insufficiently committed to the political struggle for gay equality. But it turns out that they are about “December Holidays”, including Kwanzaa and something called Christianity.
just and accountable AI and to create a welcoming and diverse AI research field.
The second bit means she is a Token designed to show other Black girls they can make it and supposedly encourage more Black girls into IT. sort of like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maybe that she is also there to bully gutless White boys into silence.
The first means she is there to make sure the AI lies. Like we do. Reality, alas, is somewhat racist. This is unacceptable to liberal opinion. We all censor ourselves all the time to make sure we do not commit Crime Think or Bad Speech, but AIs can’t. So she is there to make sure they do. Fudge it in other words.
You can see this with the app designed to warn you about high crime areas. High crime areas being, naturally, Black areas. That app was, I believe, banned for that reason. This is especially true of murder – 54% of American counties had zero murders last year. 2% of counties had over half, 1% about 37%. Now we all know why but we can’t say it. She has her work cut out if she wants to prevent an AI saying it too.
The phrase is “algorithmic racism”. AIs have been used to decide who is likely to be a recidivist and so too dangerous to let out of jail. Black people, in short. Can’t have that. Even if it is what the science says.
Reminds me of a story on Instapundit a while ago. Black female demands black male have sex with her. Male declines, things get heated, male jumps out of the window. The story was accompanied by a photograph. People complain that the photo depicts the victim, where it should depict the aggressor. Police clarify that the photo is indeed of the female aggressor.
So my point is I would be amazed if AI could sex individuals from head shots better than people, and we can’t get it right every time. We have specimens here that require multiple data points, adams apple, hands, pelvis, over all muscularity for a positive ID.
“Until December 2, 2020, Dr. Gebru was one of very few Black women Research Scientists at the company, which boasts a dismal 1.6% Black women employees overall.”
Google has 5.5% black people. The San Francisco valley area is 5.2% black.
“Pathbreaking”? So, destroying the path so that nobody can follow her?
The people: “We demand that black people are treated exactly like white people and that Google stop discriminating along racial lines!”
Google: “OK, she’s really difficult to work with and her research isn’t helping us make money, so she’s fired. Just like any white person would be.”
The people: “No, not like that!”
>Police clarify that the photo is indeed of the female aggressor.
I just had to look that up. Gold.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/bse2iy/double_take/
The question is: how many black women are there with STEM degrees, never mind Masters of PhDs*?
I don’t know, but I know a man who could probably find out for us.
*My guess is there are a lot more black women with useless degrees in feminist studies, black history, interpretative dance and the like.
I’m curious about this “Black Science”…
Does it come with bi-weekly rituals to summon Our Lord and Devouver C’Tulhu, and does it give access to Certified Virgins™ ? A friend wants to know..
A “progressive” international business that vigorously winnows out unprogressive content from its platforms and itself stumbles into a “progressive” gin trap?
One should celebrate
diversitydisunity!As usual, the linked-to f*wits ***demand*** a response.
They won’t – pray god – get what they demand.
And – were they to be conscious – if they were pointing out injustice, they’d not be pointing it out as any sort of Black thing. Firing someone for seeking to publish a paper approved by internal processes – if that’s all there is to it – is a pretty stupid thing to do – regardless of the colour of the firee’s skin, religion, culture, political party affiliation etc. But no – these shortsighted woke f*wits automatically assume it’s race based.
Then when they don’t get the response they ‘demand’ – what do they do?
The obvious thing is for all those who are Google employees is to quit. Let’s hope they do.
I dunno about the ins and outs of the research paper submission – but as a manager, who therefore represents the company, sending an email like that? If she wasn’t fired before, she sure as heck would have been fired after.
Would it be more successful to identify black women by their arses?
I wonder as what type of privilege do we use to describe the attitude shown in her email?
Surely the logically corollary of “It’s not about freeze peach dumbass, they’re a private company they can censor who they want” is “It’s not about freeze peach dumbass, they’re a private company, they can fire who they want”.