The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total surprise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; so it’s also worth asking who she was causing difficulties for... and whether it was her, or just her research.) Google can’t have it both ways: it can’t credibly claim to be home to meaningful research about AI ethics, but not provide the tenure-like academic freedom protections that enable researchers in universities to discover and publicize results without regard for whether they paint a company’s products or direction in a bad light.
In my opinion, she is being very unfair to a lot of her colleagues by not telling the whole truth and at the same time making very serious accusations. She sent email to large group of employees which violated some standards expected from a manager by Google. She is giving all the information except for what exactly she did. It's ironic that she is in "ethics business" but at the same time not realizing that it's unethical to withhold what she did while launching attacks on everyone.
> but at the same time not realizing that it's unethical to withhold what she did
Have you considered that she has to remain vague due to the potential litigation coming down the road? In fact didn't she leave some tweets hinting at that ? ("Everything I say will be used against me ..." ?)
I can't imagine a reason that she'd be free to say Google fired her because of her demands, free to post the termination email, but not free to say what her demands were.
From what I understand, her access to said information (I assume you mean the content of the email she sent to the group) was cut off, so she wasn't actually in a position to (legally) share it any longer.
This seems to be it though, and I quoted some (I think) relevant parts of what she's criticizing:
Internal ethics commissions aren't independent and cannot really work in opposition, so the effectiveness is always questionable and it doesn't seem that ethical behavior of Google products was the issue in this conflict.
AIs were accused of being biased so Google may have hired her as a defense mechanism. Her job was to justify Googles actions, basically a PR job and not a control organ.
As somebody who has been involved in various diversity efforts for years, I'm honestly not that upset about all of this. There are real problems associated with discrimination in the US, for example in the criminal justice system. Likewise, there is discrimination in less high-stakes areas like tech.
However, the main problem with Timnit and her colleagues is that they come into every situation assuming racism even when the situation is ambiguous. Likewise, if you disagree with her or want to have a nuanced discussion, she'll accuse you of imposing intellectual labor on her and in some sense you are racist for forcing her to engage in discussion.
Again, so while I appreciate how she is purportedly working to make my life better in tech, there needs to be a real awakening as far as giving people the benefit of the doubt and allowing for discussion without shaming. Google has accumulated many people with this type of attitude who have created a culture of intimidation. You can see all of this happening in real time as her colleagues come to her defense knowing little about the situation and assuming that she was fired because she was black.
I think this mindset is especially toxic when people have access to data accumulated by Google, nor would I trust them to handle user data in confidence. This is not a small problem.
(1) If she was difficult with/for everyone then she would have been fired earlier. It makes sense for the people who liked her management style to be supportive and vocal about her, and those that were not happy to not say a thing. Especially in the cancel-culture that we now live in and the economic-uncertainty.
(2) I don't understand how someone can make public accusations without providing the full picture. Maybe she is legally constrained, but then she shouldn't have said anything and handle the whole situation legally first and then write what she wants to write about it. Google might be wrong here, but we definitely cannot see that.
P.S. It seems to me that the only person who handled "firing" professionally was the most ridiculously dressed person on the planet who goes by the pseudonym Dr. Disrespect. So much drama going on around nowadays.
people here have been passing premature judgement, as have you. You are projecting criticism of the commenters onto google; it hasn't been stablished that google fired her because she was difficult or made them look bad. There is indeed a scenario where that is the case, but there are others where Google is right to fire her without undermining their ethical position; to say otherwise is to say that she is infallible, an attribute usually reserved to religious groups. If she wants some non faith based support, she should be transparent about the terms of the email where she put forward conditions to the company.
Dunno where you've worked but people who are disruptive to team functioning can (and should!) be terminated. Nobody should have to put up with a hostile work environment.
Lots of people have jobs where they should be disruptive to other teams. Financial audits are disruptive to accounting. Legal can disrupt just about any team. HR can disrupt hiring decisions. Security disrupts my desire to move fast and break things.
That does not create a hostile work environment. It's healthy and normal. I would expect an ethicist to fall under a similar category.