Sure, but it doesn't mean 96000 are in agreement either. So why wouldn't leadership just trust their own judgment and stay their course? That seems not just spineless, but also irresponsible since it means they are willing to discard all prior careful deliberation and research at the drop of a hat.
> do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained?
Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum - that is, left, moderate, and conservative views rather than just the far-left. There are also a wide range of opinions out there on topics like the use of AI for military purposes or on the modern transgender movement (which is the subject of controversy relating to this council). Only 8% of America are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And all this is still without consideration of the worldviews that exist around the globe, which is important given Google has customers globally.
> Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum
You may want it, but a lot of googlers definitely won't. A lot of people on the far left define ideological disagreement as "violence" and would be very vocally attack anybody that holds view they disapprove. And Google management is not invested in this project enough to spend a lot of political capital on it - plus they themselves are probably on the left side, so why would they battle for including somebody who they don't even agree with?
what is kay cole james' expertise on ai ethics that she should be on the council?
is there no other person in computer science, mathematics, privacy research or some professor that is a conservative that holds none of this baggage and says shitty things? and like one of staff at vox said, why bring someone who is entrenched in the political culture war in the first place?
you want a set of diverse views. assuming she wasn't actually anti-trans, anti-lgbtq, do you think this woman knows enough about ai to represent the views of conservatives?
let's say this ethics council actually had power and could dictate what google or alphabet as a company could do in regards to ai. do you trust her to understand the topic at hand to then also address conservative concerns? let's say they make a ruling and she was too ignorant to the issue at hand (maybe those sneaky leftists used language that hid their leftist agenda). what is the likelihood of outrage by the "far-right" that the council was setup to be some pro-left google cabal because they brought someone with zero knowledge of the situation to represent the conservative side?
They probably didn't bring her on for her expertise, they brought her on because she's a powerful conservative. Google wants politically powerful friends on both sides of the aisle in light of how much criticism there's been of them lately.
I didn't say that what they were doing was a good thing. The AI ethics council wasn't intended to do much but provide some nice PR and political connections.
One issue with this view is that such petitions tend to be spread with near perfect coverage. So only 2,000 people out of 98,000 signing does generally mean that the other 96,000 are more likely to be opposed/neutral to the 2000. And the current culture of Google such that openly expressing support for a panel that includes genuinely diverse ideological views is something that could have consequences.
As one interesting aside, this is the exact same reason that protests no longer have the effect or meaning that they used to. During things such as the social rights movement organizing and getting your message out was really hard. Imagine trying to organize people when your biggest form of advertising something would be either calling people on a phone manually entering those 7-10 digits each time, by doing things like stapling a sign to a utility poll. And on top of this travel was also quite expensive. What that means is that every protester would generally represent far more people than himself simply because those other people were either unaware or unable to attend.
But today you can reach nearly every single interested individual, and organize with extreme efficiency due to the internet. And a domestic plane flight or bus is incredibly cheap. Because of this a million people protesting today don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. So it creates quite the spectacle but has lost the very meaning that protests used to bring.
This is a pretty weird take. The sort of petitions you're talking about are not widely spread with remotely perfect coverage at companies like Google or Microsoft, there's no allowed way to distribute these via company-wide email or something and people are distributed globally across campuses and timezones. Personally at both workplaces I have never seen any of these petitions or open letters that make the news cross my desk or even heard about them before reading about them in the press.
Maybe perfect coverage at smaller companies, but even then I kinda doubt it.
This is inaccurate in a very ironic way. Not only are individuals specifically guaranteed the right to organize and discuss conditions/etc of work via company email [1], but this is a right that Google has been actively lobbying to rescind following the recent walkout that was organized largely by company email. [2] This right was specifically clarified/ensured by the NLRB in 2014.
I'm not talking about rights, i'm talking about functionally not being able to do it. There's no way for them to send everyone a petition or poll or open letter. It's why I've never seen them. I would've had to be on those mailing lists.
Yes you are talking about rights. You just said said literally, "there's no allowed way [for employees to organize]". This is obviously wrong. So now you're backpedaling and changing your story to it's technically impossible for employees to widely organize. So just to clarify you're now stating both that you were working at Google during the time this event occurred and that there are absolutely no means of internal group communication, such as newsgroups, etc?
