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Dr. Alex Hanna

18 Feb, 5 tweets, 1 min read

It turns out the Ethical AI team was the last to know about a massive reorganization, which was prompted by our advocacy. This was not communicated with us at all, despite promises that it would be.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Nothing about what we asked for has been addressed here.

* Samy Bengio is no longer in our reporting chain.
* An apology has not been offered to Timnit by Jeff Dean or Megan Kacholia.
* Our input for such an organization was solicited, but then decided upon behind closed doors.

This is nothing short of a betrayal.

We were told to trust the process, trust in decision-makers like Marian Croak to look out for our best interests. But these decisions were made behind our backs.

Research leadership has talked a big game about accountability. But there is zero accountability for anything that's happened for the past three months. Research leadership doesn't know the meaning of the word, as far as I'm concerned.

Meg Mitchell is still suspended from her corporate account. The last email that the Ethical AI team got from research leadership was over two weeks ago.

We're in the lurch and left out to dry. This should tell you a lot about what Google thinks about ethics research.

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More from @alexhanna

Dr. Alex Hanna

@alexhanna

9 Dec 20

@sundarpichai

A thing to pay attention to in @sundarpichai's non-apology is this bit:

"One of the best aspects of Google’s engineering culture is our sincere desire to understand where things go wrong and how we can improve."

Google has the notion of a "blameless" postmortem, the idea that if a system breaks, then folks sit down and write up what went wrong, without anyone to blame.

This was brought up by a higher up in a prior meeting as well.

@timnitgebru

But the idea that HR and @timnitgebru's firing operate like engineering systems (which are already social systems, but let's bracket that) shows how brittle this analogy goes.

There is blame to go around, and we know where to put it.

Read 5 tweets

Dr. Alex Hanna

@alexhanna

9 Dec 20

@Stakselrod

watching The Christmas Gay movie with @Stakselrod and this is now a Jane fan account

these two aren't going to go very fast in this ice skating race without doing crossovers

amazing, they put her in an actual closet. A+ writing everyone

Read 11 tweets

Dr. Alex Hanna

@alexhanna

20 Sep 20

The time has come.

That's right, I'm going to sit down and give The Social Dilemma (2020) the Cats (2019) livetweeting treatment.

@libshipwreck

Note, if you want a well-thought out critique of this movie, Tristan Harris, and CHT more broadly, I refer you to these sources by @libshipwreck librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/fla… and @gleemie and @ruchowdh wired.com/story/tech-nee…

But this? This is going to be purely affective and annoyed.

All right. We're starting out with some scary music and some vague quote from Sophocles. Previews of many, many white people who are giving us their very storied bona fides.

Read 46 tweets