The opinion is as relevant or not as any opinion expressed on Hacker News, the fact that the person who expressed it works for Google is irrelevant.
It is important that the engineer is an insider, as from outside of Google access to its internal knowledge is limited.
Also, the document we're discussing was not written as a serious research paper. It's a more like one of Steve Yegge's rants, written to be provocative.
Citation needed! ;-)
I suppose you might be referring to diversity training, but it's not the same thing.
Even if it doesn’t represent a monolithic “googles thoughts on AI” it is interesting and newsworthy to consider how at least some folks who work at Google think about the recent developments.
If Google goes on a AI-everything spree and forces it awkwardly into all their products a la Google+ — this may indicate how and where AI will be useful to people (or not).
Imagine this was written by Blake Lemoine, who believed that one of the earlier models was sentient. Would it be reasonable to present this as a company-wide belief?
And what matters is how informed and honest that particular employee is. And if ultimately that employee is right or wrong. If there is some objective truth in his or her statement.
(And for a reference, I don’t think that these 200,000 Googlers or Lemoine were right or wrong, it feels like Lemoine was asking/answering a wrong question, which needs to be asked differently to have a well defined answer).
It does matter a great deal whether a particular opinion is held by someone with the power to act on it or by someone who can only try to influence those who can act on it.
And as to not being the leader at Google, this hardly matters. Being politically adept and leadership skills don’t necessarily correlate with having better feel and insights into the future technology.
And not being the leader reduces filters, doesn’t have a pull of a contract to protect specific people you lead and your own project, etc.
It’d be better to hear that from a founder, for certain, but a honest opinion of a well seasoned engineer often enough is a better reflection of the reality, than an official statement by a “leading force”.