Despite employees urging Google not to move forward, the tech giant has reportedly signed a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) allowing its AI models to be used for classified work.
According to The Information, citing a source familiar with the matter, the agreement gives the DoD the ability to use Google’s AI for “any lawful government purpose.”
Employees need to start figuring out that whining about it doesn’t change shit because you’re in a corporation, not a democracy. The only leverage they have is their numbers. They need to put up or shut up, the only way to stop this is for entire swaths of people to quit their jobs. Further, Google has plenty of people wealthy enough to start their own business, these people have options that a lot of others don’t. If they still care more about their paychecks than they do their ethics, I couldn’t give a fuck about their opinion that they won’t actually stand up to defend.
At least Timnit Gebru stood on principles (mostly anyway, she at least threatened to quit and they fired her), and the paper Google fired her over is more important today than when it was written in 2020. It was literally a prophetic document for all the issues we face regarding AI today.
Google pretended it fixed things by doing a lot of fake inclusivity bullshit (not that including people is bullshit, but rather Google’s methods are those weak and pointless corporate ideas of “inclusivity” are bullshit), and brushed the contents of the paper under the rug. The reality is that paper was way too on the nose of real problems for them to allow to be published as it was.
Anyway, if the employees didn’t figure it out six years ago when they shitcanned Gebru for standing up for herself (and humanity), I doubt they’ll magically figure it out now.
EDIT: typos
There’s a middle ground: unionization and strikes. Not always successful but more effective than just complaining.
A paid, non working, in-the-press employee body is more of a drain on business than an absent one, I bet.
That’s definitely a path as well, but considering how smart (at least in math and computer science) you have to be to be developing AI in general. Those are not easy people to replace because of their skill levels and skillsets. Them just leaving and refusing to do the work is honestly a lot better play than trying to get everyone in the company on board for unionization. Only OpenAI is strictly an AI company. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter all have their fingers in other pies, meaning you would need to get everyone in a massive company on board. Far easier to just get all your colleagues on board and just bail to build your own thing.
They fire the good ones and leave the shady ones. Now that’s what’s left.