Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
by blueblisters on Thursday December 03, 2020 @03:33PM
(#25294377)
> If the upper management wanted to retract that paper then it seems reasonable to assume that preparing this paper did not produce any value to the company.
I don't know about publishing standards at Google but, assuming they are uniform for all researchers, I am pretty sure Google would be unable to retain talent if researchers were asked to prove value to Google for every paper they publish. I think for researchers, this reinforces the oft-dismissed notion that you give up significant academic freedom in exchange for a fat paycheck when you join an industrial research lab.
This can be particularly damaging for Google because many of its research projects don't have an immediate business impact, and it hires top researchers by offering an alternative to the slog of academia.
Doing work that needs to be actively suppressed is not producing value - at least not to the company. So apparently there's a fundamental misalignment between the work Dr. Gebru wants to do and the work that Google wants her to do; this was made clear with the suppression of the paper, and escalated as Dr. Gebru apparently (and understandably) did not want to work in a very different direction, (quoting her tweet) "asked for simple conditions first" which were totally unacceptable to the employer ("We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting."), so that's it, if neither is willing to compromise on their primary goals, they can't work together.
This does indicate that apparently listening to ethics researchers they hired is unacceptable to Google. Sad, but not surprising.