[Traster]

I think a lot of the commentary is incredibly naive about the chain of events. It may be that this researcher was a complete arsehole, who despite this had managed to climb to a well respected position in Google and within the community in her area of expertise.

However, I think it's much more likely her toxic behaviour is a direct result of her being put into an extremely difficult position by her employer. Her job is to publish research on the ethics of the AI work that Google is doing. But by the sounds of it, Google want to block her from actually publishing anything critical. It would be one thing to say that her work was unsound, but that doesn't really seem to have happened. Instead there seems to be the classic corporate pocket veto. They don't want her publishing something critical, but they also want the PR of having respected AI ethics researchers. So they don't say she can't publish critical work, they just won't let her publish critical work. And when she asks why she can't publish critical work... well she can publish critical work Google has always been very clear that she's free to publish critical work. So she can publish the work? No. No you can't publish the work. That would make me pretty crazy too. I don't she's handled it well, but at the end of the day she's a person and she's facing her job basically being taken from her (and arguably finding out she's been a useful idiot for quite a while).

It's pretty clear here that Google wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to tell the world that it's got respected scientists doing research into the ethics of their AI work, but they don't actually want researcher to do research about the ethics of their AI work because a lot of what they're doing is unethical.