Something perverse about Google employee culture

From Half as Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project by Hanna Bogorowski.

For a company whose original motto was Don't Be Evil, Google has been traveling some dark alleys and laying with strange bedfellows.

2008-2016 raised some of the earliest material concerns with large numbers of Google executives taking positions in government and Democratic Party insiders taking positions with Google. Then there were the weekly White House meetings. And also the noise about the sophisticated data-mining activities of Obama's campaigns. What was going on?

Then there was the firing of James Damore in 2017 for the audacity of making factual statements bearing on the effectiveness of diversity management. Statements which are extensively supported by the data, broadly acknowledged within academia, and widely held in society but strongly disputed in Social Justice postmodernist circles. The summary dismissal of Damore carried more than a whiff of Orwellian concern for thoughtcrime.

This year, we have been hearing about a Google initiative to refine their service offerings in order to better allow the Chinese Communist Party to censor and control communication within China.

But then there was this heartening news from The New York Times, suggesting that Google and its employees were not complete Social Justice Jacobins:

Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.

In the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, employees wrote that the project and Google’s apparent willingness to abide by China’s censorship requirements “raise urgent moral and ethical issues.” They added, “Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.”

The letter is circulating on Google’s internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,400 employees, according to three people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The internal activism presents another obstacle for Google’s potential return to China eight years after the company publicly withdrew from the country in protest of censorship and government hacking. China has the world’s largest internet audience but has frustrated American tech giants with content restrictions or outright blockages of services including Facebook and Instagram.

Thank goodness. People thinking about civil rights as opposed to commercial opportunity.

But immediately afterwards, there were reports of Google employees speculating about how they might adjust their search algorithms to counter federal policies with which they disagreed.

And the news from the Daily Caller throws some pretty icy water on the cheerful hope that Google employees are concerned for human rights.

However, around twice as many employees signed a letter in April opposing Google’s involvement in a Pentagon program, Project Maven, that aimed to improve drone analysis to better identify civilians, thus reducing the amount of accidental civilian casualties.

This opposition letter was signed by between 3,100 and 4,000 employees between April and June and included dozens of senior engineers, according to another Times report.

Thousands of Google employees addressed their letter to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive officer, asking that Project Maven be canceled.

“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter read.

At the time of the internal unrest, Google and the Pentagon worked to ensure the employees that the project “would not create an autonomous weapons system that could fire without a human operator, a much-debated possibility using artificial intelligence,” the report states.

Instead, the Department of Defense would be using “open-source object recognition software available to any Google Cloud customer” in an effort to flag images for human review, which would “save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work,” Google told its employees at the time, according to the same report.

Google eventually complied with its employees’ request, announcing June 1 the company would not renew its contract with the Department of Defense for artificial intelligence work.

The upshot appears that Google employees are twice as opposed to a democratic government using technology to save civilian lives during conflict as they are about helping a totalitarian repressive regime censoring its own population.

Good to know that is where they are coming from even though that is disappointing knowledge. If we are lucky, this bad reflection is due only to an unrepresentative minority of employees. If we are not lucky, then we are in trouble.