Above is a rare positive response to Senior Fellow & SVP of Google AI, Jeff Dean, who experienced a tidal wave of online wrath on July 2, 2021, when he tweeted the AI Team’s machine learning mentorship program encouraging “students from historically marginalized groups to consider applying.”
Dr. Jeff Dean likes to be known for his design contributions to tools like TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library, and for a cloying 2018 New Yorker puff piece written about how his collaboration and longtime coding partner, Sanjay Ghemawat, “made Google huge.”
In fact, Dean remains most notorious these days as the lead of Google AI, who fired AI Ethics team co-leaders, Dr. Timnit Gebru and Dr. Margaret Mitchell. In December 2020, Gebru was ordered to withdraw, or remove the names of all the Google employees from a paper entitled, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” that interrogated the risks of the large language models Google deploys. When Gebru challenged Google’s research review process, Google claimed she resigned. Google then fired Mitchell for attempting to investigate her colleague’s firing. Google has endeavored to deflect controversy over firing two of its best and brightest women researchers, by blaming Gebru and Mitchell themselves.
Thus, it was no surprise that the public roundly trounced Dean for his tweet over Fourth of July weekend. Here are just a couple of examples: Tech and public affairs writer, Olivia P. Walker:
Ali Alkhatib, interim director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco:
jeff, it's been hardly more than 6 months since you fired Timnit and then Margaret for reasons that strained credulity & fell apart under the most basic scrutiny. you can't possibly seriously expect me or anyone else familiar with this matter to send people your way, can you?
Dozens more respondents speculated on Dean’s motivations behind his effort to “encourage students from historically marginalized groups” to apply. After deriding an important Black woman researcher’s work and ensuring her termination, how could Dean now play the welcoming ally to students of color? Had he missed the irony of his actions? Did he believe anyone would be persuaded by such a misguided attempt at reputation rebuilding? Or, did Dean, and those at Google who bullied Gebru and Mitchell, somehow believe that the financial rewards of associating with Google are so great, the public, and especially people from historically marginalized groups, are willing to overlook what Google had done to its AI Ethics co-leads? Moreover, what do these UNPAID mentorships do anyway? It’s not like Google is recruiting for jobs with these mentorships. In all of these cases, one thing was clear: Ethics and inclusion for Google remains nothing other than a public relations campaign that has little interest in interrogating their products or reshaping their corporate culture.
Many respondents warned off potential students of color, but the one tweeter, William Dillard, whose handle and motto are @blacktechjunkie and “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard” posted a strikingly hopeful tone. Dillard aligned learning tech skills and working for Google with the celebrity wealth and fame of rappers and athletes. In fact, he suggested engineering skills may even prove more accessible than other narrow roads out of marginalization. Dillard is right. Tech is more accessible—once students survive the punishing CS curriculum and the hazing corporate tech interview. Working for a corporation like Google does promise extraordinary wealth to its workers. But the questions remain, how does tech treat historically marginalized workers and what is it doing to their communities? Research into these questions got Gebru and Mitchell fired.
Like Dillard, many once believed that the access to the technology and wealth that Big Tech offered might be worth whatever corporate evils they might experience. Now many critics are moving to a position of refusal: Don’t work for Google. Don’t participate in its research. Don’t give them your data.
Such refusal proves ethically consistent, but difficult to maintain for low-income students. Many these students who witnessed what happened to Gebru and Mitchell now feel trepidation about working for Google and other Big Tech corporations. Some of those who “liked” Dean’s post told me: “I liked the opportunity, not Google,” “what Google did was horrible, but I hope to enter this field,” and “someday I could replace the bullies and be the anti-Jeff Dean.” To that their friends reverted: “Aim higher, he’s just one dude. We could be the anti-Google.” These students confided that they’d hoped to inspire change from within the corporation, and that with more women and people of color, the organization might evolve. Such were Gebru and Mitchell’s hopes as well when they joined, and their experience underscores arguments for refusal.
So, for those who refuse to consider such “mentorships” or even employment at Google someday, I hope these students will land in organizations that treat them better than Google. I also hope that the public has witnessed enough abuse of power from Google and Big Tech that it will fund independent research and data collection. There are already a lot of efforts to build such new organizations. I hope these independent orgs will in turn impart greater freedom to universities, so they have other options besides accepting corporate funding.
For those who go to Google for either mentorships or work or both, these students can replace Jeff Dean and all those at Google who use ethics and inclusion as PR concepts to occlude any real interrogation of their product. Google knows it made a mistake in its firings and knows it has no choice but to do better by women and people of color. There are opportunities at Google that historically marginalized groups should not exclude themselves from--even as they should understand the context. Most of all, they need protection.
A few things would help protect these students and effect a regime change at Google and other corporations. Tech media et al. are you listening? Drop the puff pieces that describe coding as some magical rockstar gift of some rare, eccentric dude. The Jeff Dean piece was written at the height of the techlash and The New Yorker, that bourgeois literary tastemaker, was asleep at the wheel. Though, the story did get one thing right. Collaboration is the key. Computer science faculty are you listening? You know how you always repeat that 1980s statistic that the best programmers are worth 300 workers? That was a lie. The best programmers work together. If our students go to Google, they need not one or a few collaborators in code, but an army of supporters in every institution who can help protect them and so they can take that “long march through the institutions” and become management. Someday soon they will shape company products and culture for better. Corporations will remain corporations, but they will be different with our students from historically marginalized groups in power.
Update:
Dean’s since deleted that Tweet and has tried another tact:
Of course he knows, though, the internet is forever, and all our comments won’t disappear. It really will be a “long march through the institutions” to get change at Google. But students are ready.