Meredith Whittaker, who helped lead worker protests at Google over the search large’s navy work, synthetic intelligence and insurance policies, is leaving the firm.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed Whittaker’s departure after one other Google employee tweeted about the transfer on Monday. Whittaker did not instantly reply to a request for remark.
“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,” Chris Lu, a software program engineer at Google, wrote on Twitter.
Over the previous yr, some staffers at Google have erupted in protest, prompting the firm to drop a Pentagon AI contract and a search mission in China. Whittaker, who led Google’s Open Research group, was one of the most outspoken voices. She was one of six girls who organised huge walkouts after experiences that Google paid good-looking sums to executives accused of sexual harassment.
While at Google, Whittaker additionally served with AI Now, an ethics organisation affiliated with New York University that she co-founded. The group typically criticises companies and authorities businesses for utilizing AI programs, like facial recognition, in policing and surveillance. Whittaker additionally publicly denounced some Google selections, together with the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative assume tank chief, to an AI ethics board. Google nixed the board shortly afterward.
“People in the AI field who know the limitations of this tech, and the shaky foundation on which these grand claims are perched, need to speak up, loudly,” Whittaker wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “The consequences of this kind of BS marketing are deadly (if profitable for a few).”
In April, about six months after the massive worker walkout, Whittaker and one other protest chief, Claire Stapleton, mentioned the firm was retaliating in opposition to them for his or her position in the exercise. In an electronic mail to colleagues, Whittaker mentioned her Google supervisor informed her to “abandon (her) work on AI ethics” and blocked a request to switch internally. At the time, Google denied it retaliated in opposition to Whittaker.
© 2019 Bloomberg LP
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