[thebladerunner]

To clarify, the first paragraph of defertoreotar@'s comment is a quote from Timnit Gebru's tweet where she admits to recently conspiring a legal battle against Google, while on Google's payroll. A wolf in sheep's clothing...

[istjohn]

I'm not sure why you seem to think that her willingness to assert her rights under the law should discredit her in any way.

[refulgentis]

The thrust of her thread today is that it is shocking how Google dumped her with no warning - it sounds like, instead, they continued employing her for months and months while her lawyer was threatening to sue the company, and the culminating event was making demands for the company to meet if she was to stay.

Declining to accept an employee's set of ultimatums, an employee who already engaged in threatening legal action for months and months, is arguably a much clearer framing than "her willingness to assert her rights under the law"

Therefore "recently conspiring a legal battle against Google, while on Google's payroll." is worth sharing, it provides information not present in the limited frame of "her willingness to assert her rights under the law"

[joshuamorton]

> instead, they continued employing her for months and months while her lawyer was threatening to sue the company

This doesn't at all sound like the case. It sounds like the company did something aggressive, she got representation who threatened to sue, and the company backed off, and all of this happened over a year ago and is essentially a closed chapter.

[cirno]

> all of this happened over a year ago and is essentially a closed chapter.

Very credibly threatening to sue your employer with a legal firm, regardless of whether you were in the right to do so, is never a closed chapter. Companies are made of people, and those people are not going to forget something like that. They're going to be waiting for their first chance to get rid of you.

Right or wrong, justified or not, if you threaten your employer with a lawsuit, you need to be looking for a new employer that very same day. The employment relationship is now irrevocably a hostile one.

[refulgentis]

Sorry, dumb question, which part are you disputing? I must be being too literal.

What you called out as "doesn't at all sound like the case": [1: they continued employing her for months and months] [2: while her lawyer was threatening to sue the company]

First paragraph of the email OP posted, which I am defending as worth sharing: "This happened to me last year. [[1]: there has been 11+ months, or months and months, since this occurred and she continued employment] I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google [[2]: her lawyer was threatening to sure the company]"

[joshuamorton]

"while her lawyer was threatening to sue the company"

My reading is that the situation you're describing is resolved, and has been for quite a while. Thus no lawyer is currently threatening to sue, nor have they for quite a while.

Thus: an employee asserted her rights under the law in the past, and the situation was, apparently, resolved to everyone's pleasure. "recently conspiring a legal battle against Google" is a misrepresentation of that.

[refulgentis]

Gotcha, my post didn't mean to imply that the lawsuit _wasn't_ resolved, just that there was a period in which there was a lawsuit threatened and she was employed. Thank you for the feedback! I've had more negative interactions on here than positive recently, and this was heartening.

[beervirus]

Rattling your sabre about suing your employer is certainly a career-limiting decision.

[geofft]

Yes, certainly it is and she undoubtedly knew that, but her job was guiding her employer to make ethical decisions / build an ethical framework. If you expect your ethicists to prioritize having a stable career and avoid potential career-limiting moves, I'm not sure how they're supposed to do their job. I would honestly be skeptical of a self-declared ethicist who's very good at climbing corporate ladders and has never gotten themselves in trouble with those more powerful than them.

Whether she was overly saber-rattling is, I think, not a meaningful discussion. "How could this ethicist have managed to keep her job" is a straightforward and uninteresting question: don't make any waves, don't challenge anyone too senior, make the company look good in public. "Does Google value talented AI ethicists who are genuinely committed to their work and are willing to sacrifice their career over it" is a much more interesting question.

Google found that there was a credible allegation that Andy Rubin raped another employee, and they figured out how to keep him around for years, until word got out, because he was valuable to the company. (And then they gave him a $90M exit package.) Timnit Gebru got fired while she was on vacation for simply being impolitic. That shows how much Google valued her work.

[frongpik]

Her real job was to make google look good in the progressive circles. If she understood that, she would've made a stellar career.

[kspacewalk2]

Her real job is in AI activism, not AI academia. She understands that very well, and she understands that an acrimonious parting of ways with Google, combined with obligatory accusations of racist bias, is a reasonable career advancement step in the field of activism (though it may have been distracting and debilitating in the field of academia).

[geofft]

Right. She offered her resignation. Google mishandled it, but obviously, she was ready to be thrown out of the organization. So saying "She could have stayed if only ___" misunderstands the entire situation - she wasn't trying to stay. She was trying to get the world to understand something about Google and how ethical the folks in charge of Google's AI are.