Workers at Google just scored an impressive victory

June 8, 2018 11:03 AM

And we stood up because we believe a strong ethical framework that values human life and safety is inseparable from positive technological progress.
posted by infini (39 comments total)

...and now Google knows exactly who to fire.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:27 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

If not Google, then some other Alphabet company? Still, it's nice seeing people stand up for themselves.
posted by doctor_negative at 11:43 AM on June 8, 2018

In the numbers they’re talking, I’m not sure management has a solution as simple as “fire all the dissenters.” 1) that’s a nontrivial chunk of their tech workforce, where retention is always a bear anyway, and 2) the bad PR generated would likely be a barrier to recruitment, at least in the short term. My hunch is that this battle is won (but the war... maybe not).
posted by eirias at 11:45 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Not going to happen. Not only is it hard enough for these companies to find workers (hence the high pay), if Google fired 5,000 employees (something like 6% of full timers) over this it would definitely affect the pool of potential employees. (Thats part of the point of having so many people oppose it, after all).

(And probably not another Alphabet company, especially since many in Congress / politics already seem upset by this. My bet is on Amazon getting the JEDI contract which is the "big prize" here for companies)
posted by thefoxgod at 11:45 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Glad to hear this, even if it's only one company backing out.
posted by Gorgik at 12:00 PM on June 8, 2018

Get Palantir to cancel their contracts next!
posted by yueliang at 12:07 PM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Those guys just qualified for free same-day delivery of bowling balls delivered by Amazon robot drones using their machine skooling algorithm.
posted by pracowity at 12:20 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Pardon me if my initial response to this is a shrug. Alphabet's various branches are breaking society all over the place and causing real harm - and this is where the line gets drawn? There's a reason why "don't be evil" has become a punchline in a joke that has become less and less funny.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:38 PM on June 8, 2018 [13 favorites]

Not only are tech workers hard to find, a lot of the most vocal critics were in AI, one of Google/Alphabet's big investments, and they're even rarer.
posted by airmail at 12:40 PM on June 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

Get Palantir to cancel their contracts next!

I'm not sure how you could even interview at a company like Palantir unless you drink the flavor of koolaid they're on. It's not like they're particularly subtle about being evil.
posted by Aleyn at 12:53 PM on June 8, 2018 [10 favorites]

Not going to happen. Not only is it hard enough for these companies to find workers (hence the high pay), if Google fired 5,000 employees (something like 6% of full timers) over this it would definitely affect the pool of potential employees. (Thats part of the point of having so many people oppose it, after all).


I respectfully disagree. I think they will be delighted to sundown 5000 dissenting employees and replace them with ones who won’t feel conflicted about the ethics question. For a contract worth ten billion dollars? Yep. A leadership that says things like “ethics is hard” and “You’re lucky that we let you voice your opposition” is not going to just shut down that revenue stream. No way.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:04 PM on June 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

(Not to abuse the edit window) I’m not suggesting that Google is going to get all those people in a room and give them pink slips, but I’d be willing to bet a slice of cake that the majority of them will find their projects wrapped up and positions eliminated within the next year or two.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:08 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

How would you describe the political orientation of the campaign? Another New York Times article quoted a former Pentagon official saying that anti-Maven organizing within Google reflected a “strong libertarian ethos among tech folks.” Do you agree?

No, he’s totally wrong.

Libertarianism is the ethos of the leaders of these big tech companies, not the rank and file. Our campaign had nothing to do with libertarianism. We stood up because we believe workers should have a voice. We stood up because we believe that companies should be accountable to their users, their workers, and their communities. And we stood up because we believe a strong ethical framework that values human life and safety is inseparable from positive technological progress.

This has not been my experience of tech workers in general, but I hope it's true, and encouraged if it is.
posted by klanawa at 1:08 PM on June 8, 2018 [15 favorites]

This is not a small thing. People risked their high-paid jobs over it, people quit their high-paid jobs over it. This is what we need to have happen in tech. That they didn't miraculously remedy everything wrong with the company is less important than that some workers finally decided to organize to draw a line.
posted by praemunire at 1:26 PM on June 8, 2018 [41 favorites]

I have a libertarianconservative friend who works at Google who claims that most of his coworkers are lefties who support everything from nationalization of Google to unions (gasp!), single-payer healthcare (gosh!), and higher taxes (faint!).

So perhaps all is not lost.
posted by clawsoon at 1:35 PM on June 8, 2018 [8 favorites]

This is not a small thing. People risked their high-paid jobs over it, people quit their high-paid jobs over it. This is what we need to have happen in tech. That they didn't miraculously remedy everything wrong with the company is less important than that some workers finally decided to organize to draw a line.

Project Maven was easy to organize against - it was a DoD project that looked to use machine learning to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. But Alphabet's been doing things that have been causing harm for quite some time now, and employees haven't been up in arms about those things - many times, they've been happy to sign on as well. So you'll pardon me if their drawing a line at a project that could have come out of a Hollywood movie doesn't strike me as all that terribly impressive.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:47 PM on June 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

So you'll pardon me if their drawing a line at a project that could have come out of a Hollywood movie doesn't strike me as all that terribly impressive.

Your movement that depends on people having always done the right thing all the time in the past for them to be able to do something good now is not going to be one of the great successes in history.
posted by praemunire at 1:50 PM on June 8, 2018 [65 favorites]

Alphabet's various branches are breaking society all over the place and causing real harm
Alphabet's been doing things that have been causing harm for quite some time now

...Like what?
Not necessarily doubting you here, just not sure what y'all're talking about here, an googling "alphabet causing harm" isn't helping.
Which is understandable now that I think about it.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 2:28 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

A lot of the problems you see with Alphabet tend to be more subtle, which is part of the point. Things like racial bias in search, or how their virtual monopoly on search grants them immense power in shaping the internet. (As you may recall, this website wound up on the wrong side of that.) They also come up with concepts that are chilling, like a proposal for The Selfish Ledger, a social engineering system straight out of Black Mirror.

The tech industry, Alphabet included, has had a long running problem with ethics. Seeing the industry basically repeat itself (the opposition to Maven is reminiscent of the opposition at Atari over converting Battlezone into a trainer for the Bradley IFV) does not strike me as being the first step in confronting that history.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:44 PM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]

Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics etc. just breathed a huge sigh of relief. Google succeeding at a significant Pentagon contract would have been a huge threat to the walled garden they have built with their throngs of retired officers and holders of high clearances. (Very few Googlers in percentage terms are cleared, not many even could be cleared at a high level; I'd be surprised if Google nationwide has more than a handful of retired 20+ year service military or intelligence agency officers.)
posted by MattD at 2:47 PM on June 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

It would have been easy to believe that most highly paid tech workers don't care about this kind of thing.

They do care. This is important: people care more than you may think they do.
posted by amtho at 2:58 PM on June 8, 2018 [17 favorites]

My bet is on Amazon getting the JEDI contract which is the "big prize" here for companies)

Donald Trump is president.
posted by benzenedream at 2:59 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

I have a libertarianconservative friend who works at Google who claims that most of his coworkers are lefties...

Can confirm, I worked there for awhile, after having escaped from Texas. Turns out when you only hire really, really smart people, you end up with an overwhelmingly liberal work force (who'd a thunk it?) And let me tell you, it was great not having to listen to fucking idiots whenever politics came up. The rank and file employee also took that "don't be evil" motto pretty damn seriously in my experience, and nobody I knew there was happy about it being officially de-emphasized.
posted by smcameron at 3:05 PM on June 8, 2018 [19 favorites]

I’d be willing to bet a slice of cake that the majority of them will find their projects wrapped up and positions eliminated within the next year or two

I'm one of them, so I'll let you know. But IME Google is not a company where anyone is fired for dissent, nor is it the kind of company where thousands of people "coincidentally" being let go over the course of a few years would go unnoticed, because our company culture is deeply committed to the value of statistical evidence (on account of it being the basis for so much of what we do, from product decisions to the products themselves). Googlers don't necessarily make a fuss over things Metafilter considers evil, because we have a very different perspective on the proper role of technology in the modern world, but we have our own ethical standards and we get very upset when they're violated.
posted by shponglespore at 3:12 PM on June 8, 2018 [23 favorites]

This has not been my experience of tech workers in general, but I hope it's true, and encouraged if it is.

I think most people in software in CA are sort of wishy-washy mainstream liberals. But recent events have perhaps galvanized such people more than a cynic would have predicted.
posted by atoxyl at 3:32 PM on June 8, 2018

Sergey Brin, one of Google’s cofounders, responded first. And his response really paid us dividends. He said something like, “Letting you ask that question is the voice that you have. Very few companies would allow you to do that.”

Not the highest bar there, is it? When I was in grad school and the lab group I was part of got involved with a military funded project, I felt like I couldn't, and thus didn't, say anything at all. The culture of silence soured my experience of STEM research, and factored in my life choices thereafter.
posted by polymodus at 3:34 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

New company motto: "Be LESS Evil"???
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:35 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

polymodus, not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but Kim continues:

But his remark came across as tone deaf and out of touch to almost every Googler who heard it.

i.e. Brin's statement "paid dividends" because the workforce was so insulted by it it galvanized them to take further action.
posted by airmail at 4:04 PM on June 8, 2018

It funny how they dropped Boston Dynamics because they didn't like the look of being a killer robot company…
posted by rodlymight at 4:16 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's hard and scary to stand up to your employer. This doesn't mean that Silicon Valley Is Good Now, and this won't stop the government from finding someone to do their bidding, but maybe those someones won't be from the Google talent pool. "Someone will do a bad thing for money" is not an excuse for "I will do this bad thing for money." Good for the workers who objected. I hope their courage is contagious.
posted by grandiloquiet at 4:21 PM on June 8, 2018 [9 favorites]

I respectfully disagree. I think they will be delighted to sundown 5000 dissenting employees and replace them with ones who won’t feel conflicted about the ethics question. For a contract worth ten billion dollars? Yep. A leadership that says things like “ethics is hard” and “You’re lucky that we let you voice your opposition” is not going to just shut down that revenue stream. No way.

Uh, not to make to feel anyone feel bad about their career choices, but a $10B contact would only cover 4ish years of comp for 5k senior engineers. Even less if all the 5k were on the AI side of things. In fact, trying to find 5k of those guys/gals would distort the hiring market so much (recruiters would just have to lead with "how large of number is it going to take to convince you to leave Apple/FB/Amazon/whatever?") that'd it be a better investment for Google to just lay everyone off and shutter the division.
posted by sideshow at 5:33 PM on June 8, 2018 [8 favorites]

this won't stop the government from finding someone to do their bidding

It will make it harder though. Outside of the hardcore "our business is killing people and business is booming" military-industrial complex, it is a larger step to take on something that has already been publicly walked away from by a competitor on ethical grounds. Most companies will hesitate to write a press release announcing that they won a contract by having lower ethical standards than the other guy. They'll have to worry about leaks, their own employees resisting, activist shareholders, and general public trust.
posted by allegedly at 6:14 PM on June 8, 2018 [8 favorites]

I worry, given their increasing footprint in Africa, whether they'll find those who genuinely cannot afford to give up the pay, or risk it.

and don't come at me with a comment on "lack of talent"
posted by infini at 12:30 AM on June 9, 2018

Person 1) good news
Person 2) oh yeah, well it doesn't solve everything, in fact its probably making things worse
Person 3) lets be reasonable and split the difference: this bad news is just as bad as some other bad news...

Wash rinse repeat until doom
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 2:21 AM on June 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Google Sets Limits on Its Use of AI but Allows Defense Work
posted by infini at 4:10 PM on June 9, 2018

(Not to abuse the edit window) I’m not suggesting that Google is going to get all those people in a room and give them pink slips, but I’d be willing to bet a slice of cake that the majority of them will find their projects wrapped up and positions eliminated within the next year or two.

Then Google should hurry up and pull the trigger so their newly ex-employees will respond to my team's recruitment efforts.
posted by pwnguin at 8:54 PM on June 9, 2018

"Things like racial bias in search, or how their virtual monopoly on search grants them immense power in shaping the internet. (As you may recall, this website wound up on the wrong side of that.) They also come up with concepts that are chilling, like a proposal for The Selfish Ledger, a social engineering system straight out of Black Mirror."

Okay, lets break this down a bit, eh?

Does anyone here think that the engineers at google sat down and tried to engineer racial bias in search? Do you think it's possible that when they were presented with research that this might be the case that they might have devoted significant resources into developing technology to counter this phenomenon?

Yup, their virtual monopoly on search grants them immense power. This is true. But that power itself isn't inherently evil, although it has the potential for evil (see racial bias in search results for an example). But they set out to make a great search engine. Then they did that. I hope they get some real competition in that area (so they'll do even better at searching), but I'm still waiting.

The beginning of the article on "the selfish ledger" says 'Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals' (emphasis mine)...' guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.' Okay, well, solving poverty and diseases don't strike me as inherently evil, nor does users working towards their own goals. Frankly, the feedback loop of the internet already moves our behaviors in certain ways (some of them problematic), shouldn't companies be more self-aware about this, and perhaps even harness this to do things that we ourselves want to do (and attempt to engage in progress as a civilization).

I'm not saying google has always done good things, or is incapable of evil (see military robots, this very effort to support the DoD in offensive technology), but the critiques of them in this thread have been fairly weak-sauce, in my opinion.

Now at the end of the day, either Google or Amazon will probably have it's cloud computing used for AI work for the military, and certainly other evil things, and they will profit from it. But I think it's pretty remarkable, and damned near unheard of, for company employees to impact the strategic direction of a company by standing up and refusing to be part of something evil.

I've been unable to get coworkers to even discuss the possible ethical ramifications of work we were doing, in private one-on-one settings. The fact that this happened; both the discussions that occurred between the workers, and the company's response to it is nothing short of breathtaking.

I'm saddened by the cynical dismissive reaction that this has gotten; I would have hoped that it would have been a inspirational positive story that gave hope to the future of the tech sector, and became a blueprint for workers attempting to guide their company's to do the right thing.
posted by el io at 11:46 PM on June 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm saddened by the cynical dismissive reaction that this has gotten; I would have hoped that it would have been a inspirational positive story that gave hope to the future of the tech sector, and became a blueprint for workers attempting to guide their company's to do the right thing.

Your response in many ways illustrates why I am dismissive of this as being illustrative of any larger trend. It keeps being said how "difficult" this was to do, but from my point of view, it was actually easy - the workers were able to build support not only within Google/Alphabet but also from the larger community as a whole, in large part because a large contingent agrees that working for the military is "evil". And again, it's not like this was unprecedented - as I pointed out before, this response is very similar to what happened at Atari with Battlezone over 30 years ago (and that had a similar resolution, with Atari management pledging to not work with the DoD in the future.)

No, what I would see as difficult is running against your own community's grain to combat the issues that are harming people there. And that's where I don't see a lot to encourage me. Things like Google's response to Cory Altheide illustrate the difficulty there, with management not only refusing to deal with an extreme right wing contingent in the company, but also hammering down on someone who was trying to push back. The tech industry has a number of issues with racism and sexism that I don't see any real push to really combat, and where efforts to push on them routinely get hammered down.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:55 AM on June 10, 2018

"If not Google, then some other Alphabet company? Still, it's nice seeing people stand up for themselves."

Yeah, I'm with you here, I don't buy for one second they're just going to drop this completely. Best case scenario is that some other company picks it up and gets the JEDI deal, which ultimately is just as bad. I wonder how long before the first AI killing.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:34 AM on June 12, 2018