Another Google Walkout Organizer has Left the Company

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Let me tell you something about protesting or complaining about your company. You don’t do it because you want to leave. I’ve worked in plenty of office spaces I had issues with, but the only ones I’ve ever tried to change were the ones I loved. Trying to make your company better for women, people of color, gender and sexual minorities, and everyone is not an act of defiance, it’s not an act of anger, and it certainly isn’t an act of hate. It’s an act of love. Love for your coworkers, love for your job, love for what you do. You break up with a person you have no hope for a future with. You go to therapy for a person you think you’ll spend the rest of your life with.

So with that in mind, consider the Google Walkout. Over 20,000 people all over the globe took issue with Google’s stance on sexual harassment. An article in the NY Times revealed that Google had given Andy Rubin a $90 million golden parachute and a pat on the back when he left Google for sexually harassing female employees. Google, over many other examples, sided with the male sexual harasser over women. Employees at Google, especially the women who saw this sexist culture running rampant at the company, took action.

This week, Meredith Whittaker, one of six Google employees to organize this historic walkout, left Google. She is now the second of those six employees to leave the company over harassment and retaliation for organizing the event.

Meredith Whittaker’s Story

This isn’t the first time Whittaker has come up in this blog. She also came forward about the harassment and retaliation she faced after the walkout. In fact, so many Googlers faced harassment for simply joining the 20,000 person walkout that they staged a second protest, a sit-in.

To sum it up, Meredith worked on Google’s AI platform, specifically specializing in the area of AI ethics. Google informed her that her job at Google would change dramatically, and she was no longer allowed to work with an outside group she co-founded called the AI Now Institute, which focused on AI ethics.

This isn’t the first time Google has tried to abandon AI ethics before either. It seems they really have a problem with the “Ethics” part of that.

Leaving a Job You Love

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Today is @mer__edith's final day at Google. Watching her experience as a whistleblower at Google and a victim of retaliation cannot signal good things for how AI institutions will react to negative criticism. #NotOkGoogle

— Dreaming of Taipei urbanism (@thegreenfrog611) July 15, 2019

Few things are more difficult than moving on once you’ve found your purpose. But when reconciliation doesn’t work, that’s what you have to do. Meredith joins Claire Stapleton, another woman who had to leave her job at Google following intense retaliation. She was demoted for protesting, a decision that was only reversed once she got lawyers involved.

Whittaker was now in the same position. She tried her best to improve Google for herself, for women, and, really, for all Google employees. Google made some concessions, they did end forced arbitration for sexual harassment cases at the company, but they didn’t do enough to prevent sexual harassment or retaliation. It was clear from the beginning that Google didn’t want outspoken women at the company. Now they’re getting what they wanted.

The Importance of AI Ethics

AI ethics may be more important than AI research right now. Pushing ahead with AI without understanding the implications of it would be as dangerous as conducting nuclear bomb tests with people present or putting radioactive materials in kids toys without realizing the potential of causing cancer. Yeah, we’re repeating the mistakes of our past again.

There are cases, like Project Maven, Google’s work with the U.S. government on drones, which Meredith Whittaker spoke out against, or Google’s assistance in censoring searches in China. But those are obvious problems. Everyone can see the issues with those decisions. But what about the fact that facial recognition is more likely to make mistakes on people of color, women, and transgender people? That’s important when police and immigration start using facial recognition in public places or hospitals. How about the fact that self driving cars are more likely to not see dark skinned people as people, and therefore more likely to hit them when “choosing” between hitting a white person and the person of color. These are biases that come from a predominantly white and male workforce training these AIs. Implementing something that has a bias like this would be an incredible ethics violation, but it’s exactly what Google, Amazon, and others are doing.

Side Effects

This is why we need AI ethics. You can’t just have someone who doesn’t understand AI or how machine learning works doing this. You must have someone who can both break down a machine learning algorithm and find ways it could have unintended side effects.

There’s a paradigm in clean code and especially functional programming, both heavily used in machine learning, that states no function should have unintended side effects. Therefore, the people making this may thing they’ve made something perfect, that only does what they say with mathematical precision. But when it interacts with humans, it introduces input parameters the programmers may not have considered, and that creates ripples through society. Basically, they were so concerned about the inputs of their functions, they didn’t think about the fact that the returns were going to humans. Diverse, real, humans. That’s where their code is riddled with a different kind of side effect.

Google’s Side Effects

The first side effects are obvious: people will be afraid of making anything better at Google. This is already happening. YouTube, owned by Google, recently allowed a man to continue to spread hate speech and targeted harassment of another man because he was gay and Latino. Google employees were terrified of speaking up. However, they did eventually stage a small protest, marching without the company at Pride, They essentially made Google’s Pride float nothing but straight people. Though, to be fair, that’s true of many corporate Pride floats.

But that was the limit to what they were willing to do. Google is literally giving hate a platform, pushing LGBTQ people out of its service, and defending hate speech and the violence it leads to. LGBTQ employees are furious. But they’ve stopped trying to fix it. This is what I talked about at the beginning of this article. Once people stop trying to fix a dangerous problem, it’s not because they’ve accepted the problem, it’s because they’ve accepted that the thing they’re trying to fix is beyond saving. In this case, they’ve decided Google is beyond help.

This will lead to an exodus from Google. LGBTQ people, women, and people of color have seen that, when it comes to sexual harassment, hate speech, racism, and homophobia, Google will side with the sexual harassers, white supremacists, homophobes, and misogynists. As a software engineer, I’m afraid of going to Google for a job, even though I know people who work there and could likely go there. Other female engineers I’ve talked to say they same. Google is a place you go to watch your career freeze, because they won’t promote women or take them seriously. You go there to collect a paycheck while facing sexism and harassment until you can find something better. Google isn’t a place to have a career as a woman.

Hurting Google’s Bottom Line

Right now, AI is still in its infancy. We’re not using it at the large scales we will be in a few years. However, once it reaches a larger, more diverse audience, it’s going to be clear that software made without diversity in mind is subpar. Google’s setting itself up for failure by making itself a workplace where only straight white men feel comfortable. This doesn’t just have consequences for people, it’s going to hurt Google’s bottom line in a few years. Then, they’ll likely launch a diversity initiative, but by then, it’ll be too little, too late. They’ll find themselves like Microsoft in 2007 with smartphones, being surpassed in a product category they hadn’t considered. All because Google had the choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing and chose the latter.

Google’s losing diverse talent and they won’t be hiring more. Every study on the subject says this hurts business at a company, no matter what industry they’re involved in. For a company so laser focused on machine learning and data collection, you’d think they’d have learned something by now.

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Sources:

• Mark Bergen and Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg
• Catherine Shu, TechCrunch
• Vanessa Taylor, AfroTech
• Georgina Torbet, Engadget