Google AI Ethics Council Is Falling Apart After a Week
Google AI Ethics Council Is Falling Apart After a Week
·
Employees launch petition Monday against
conservative member
·
Behavioral economist withdrew his membership
from the council
By Mark Bergen, Jeremy Kahn, and Gerrit De Vynck April 1,
2019, 11:15 AM PDT
Google recently appointed an external ethics council to
deal with tricky issues in artificial intelligence. The group is meant to help
the company appease critics while still pursuing lucrative cloud computing
deals.
In less than a week, the council is already falling
apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more
military cloud-computing contracts.
On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist
and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. “While I’m
devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and
inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in
this important work,’’ Acquisti said on Twitter. He didn’t respond to a request
for comment.
On Monday, a group of employees started a petition asking
the company to remove another member: Kay Coles James, president of a
conservative think tank who has fought against equal-rights laws for gay and
transgender people. More than 500 staff signed the petition anonymously by late
Monday morning local time.
Employee activism on equal pay for women, sexual
harassment, AI ethics and doing business in China has roiled Google over the
past year. The protests have been effective. The company pulled out of a deal
with the U.S. military to build object recognition technology for drones,
prompting criticism from politicians including U.S. President Donald Trump.
Google changed its policies after thousands of workers walked off their jobs to
protest how the company deals with sexual harassment complaints.
At the same time, conservative politicians have said the
company’s algorithms and content moderators unfairly discriminate against them
in search results and YouTube, though there is no proof for these claims.
Appointing Coles James, who is the president of influential right-wing think
tank the Heritage Foundation, could be seen to conservatives as a sign that
Google is hearing their concerns.
Some AI experts and activists have also called on Google
to remove from the board Dyan Gibbens, the CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, a drone
technology company. Gibbens and her co-founders at Trumbull previously worked
on U.S. military drones. Using AI for military uses is a major point of
contention for some Google employees.
Joanna Bryson, a professor of computer science at the
University of Bath, in England, who was appointed to the Google ethics council,
said she also had reservations about some of her fellow council members.
"Believe it or not, I know worse about one of the other people," she
said on Twitter in response to a post questioning Coles James’ appointment.
"I know I have pushed [Google] before on some of their associations and
they say they need diversity in order to be convincing to society broadly, e.g.
the GOP."
AI is core to Google’s future. It’s spent hundreds of millions
of dollars acquiring AI startups and paying leading researchers to work at the
company. The technology is also key to the sales pitch for its cloud business,
which is becoming more important as revenue growth at its core search ads unit
slows down. A Google spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
The AI council is meant to act as a check on the
company’s decisions, meeting regularly and producing reports on developments in
the field and in Google’s technology. It does not have veto power but is meant
to offer “diverse perspectives to inform our work,’’ Google’s Chief Legal
Officer Kent Walker said in a March 26 blog post.
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