Google has fired both leaders of its Ethical AI unit, raising concerns about the direction of the team as the company has come under fire about a number of diversity issues. The December firing of ethical AI expert Timnit Gebru has been cited as one of the reasons workers formed the Alphabet Worker Union, the first major union in Silicon Valley.
February 24th, 2021
Simpsons / 20th Century Fox
AI and ML systems have advanced in both sophistication and capability at a staggering rate in recent years. They can now model protein structures based only on the molecule’s amino-acid sequence, create poetry and text on par with human writers even spot specific individuals in a crowd (assuming their complexion is sufficiently light). But for as impressive as these feats of computational prowess are, the field continues to struggle with a number of fundamental moral and ethical issues. A facial recognition system designed to identify terrorists can just as easily be leveraged to monitor peaceful protesters or suppress ethnic minorities, depending on how it is deployed.
Google despide a experta en ética de su división de Inteligencia Artificial voanoticias.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from voanoticias.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In the aftermath of Friday’s firing, Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, tried to repair relations with the company’s staff, saying at an all-hands meeting that he took “some responsibility” for the break in trust with researchers.
“I take some amount of responsibility and I feel like other leads in the organization also take responsibility,” Dean said during the meeting. “We know that the ethical AI team feels sort of aggrieved by the decision to ask some members of that team to retract the paper and other subsequent events.”
Earlier, Mitchell tweeted “I’m fired,” adding she was “in too much pain to articulate much of anything useful. Firing @timnitGebru created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are being increasingly punished for that trauma.”