Google Protest Leader Meredith Whittaker on the Future of Tech Activism and the Deep Flaws of ‘The Social Dilemma’

When I interviewed Tristan Harris about The Social Dilemma earlier this month, my mentions filled with people saying, "You should speak to the people who were critical of the social web long before the film.” One name, Meredith Whittaker, stood out. An A. I. researcher and former big tech employee, Whittaker helped lead Google’s walkout in 2018 amid a season of activism inside the company. On this edition of the Big Technology Podcast, we spoke not only about her views on the film, but of the future of workplace activism inside tech companies in a moment where some are questioning if it belongs at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today, we're coming to you live from the World Summit AI, so it's a little bit different from our typical recording, but it's going to be a great conversation. Joining us today is Meredith Whittaker. She's the co-founder of the AI Now Institute, a former Google employee who founded Google's Open Research Group and played an instrumental role in Google's walkout, which protested payouts to executives accused of sexual harassment, as well as a lot of other activism inside the company, which we're going to talk about at length in the second segment. She's also the Mindrew Research Professor at New York University. Meredith, welcome to the show.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex. Really happy to be here.

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's get started with The Social Dilemma. Actually, the way this interview came about is that I conducted an interview with Tristan Harris, talking a little bit about the criticisms of the Social Dilemma movie. And then my mentions filled up with folks saying, hey, you know, why are we asking Tristan? Why don't we, you know, ask some folks who have been critical of these things for a long time? And your name was mentioned, and that's what brought us together. And I'm thrilled to be able to, you know, to speak with you about this stuff. And I think The Social Dilemma really is, you know, on many levels, a criticism of the attention economy today, which people might say.

• 2:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Talking a little bit about how algorithms at Facebook and Google, you know, will end up inflaming tensions and keeping us locked to our screens. And the business model ultimately is bad for humanity. So though we're going to be talking a little bit about The Social Dilemma, this will be new material for folks listening in on the podcast and hopefully for people out here at the conference as well. So let's begin talking a little bit about it. It seemed like your perspective is a little bit different from Tristan's. You've both ex-Google employees, but I'd love to hear like what your take is, you know, on the film and its main message and where you think it may have gone right and gone wrong.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Great. Yeah, and I want to, I will start this by kind of a high-level framing, which may echo some of the comments you saw in your mentions. I think one of the significant weaknesses with the film was that it sidelines and didn't give a platform to a lot of the people who have been researching and calling out these issues in frankly, the more nuanced ways for a very long time. So there are folks like Sophia Noble, Sarah Roberts, Ruha Benjamin. I'd look at, you know, black women like Inossa Crockett and Sadat Harry, who were sort of in 2014 and before, calling out racist trolls that were sort of, you know, germinated from message boards like 4chan.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And there are a lot of people who've actually been looking at some of the issues that are produced through and amplified through.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Social platforms and the consolidation of power that is now represented in a handful of tech firms. So I think, you know, that was, that was one of the primary issues. And along with, with that erasure, it erased some of the fundamental harms, the way in which a lot of these, these platforms and these algorithmic systems reproduce and amplify histories of racism, histories of misogyny. You know, who, who bears the harms of this type of targeted harassment or, you know, the way in which algorithms represent our world as Satya Noble has, has done so brilliantly? And who frankly reaps the benefits? And a lot of the people who were being interviewed were, you know, people who, who skipped from

• 4:56Speaker 01

  the side of, of reaping the benefits, right? Working at a tech company, which I certainly did, to being kind of critics of this technology. But a lot of the criticism was drawing very heavily on this earlier work, which I, I think, you know, I would love to see a number of these people on your podcast and I would love to see these critiques kind of enriched with some of those perspectives.

• 5:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And Tristan made the argument, I mean, he definitely addressed this in the show I did with him. And he made the argument that since it was these people who had built the software in the beginning, it was going to be a powerful device when you started to show visually the fact that these were the people who had actually, you know, gone on and built it. And now they were saying, what we've built is a bit of a Frankenstein and that's what makes the film powerful. So I'm curious what you think about his defense from that standpoint.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, I think that is an argument, but it doesn't obviate the fact that those are the people receiving a platform, that a lot of people who are first kind of learning about some of these issues are learning it from that perspective and that the voices you raise up, the people you represent matter a lot in these debates, right? And that there was, you know, there was a lot of prior art, frankly. This is not, you know, these are not a brand new set of problems that just sort of occurred to folks, right? There's been decades of work and inquiry around these problems that was largely ignored, dismissed or considered sort of, you know, that's the byproduct, the externality of ultimately positive disruption, right? And it wasn't really taken seriously until, you know.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  wealthy white men frankly in Silicon Valley began to feel some of the the effects themselves.

• 6:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I definitely see that criticism. I think it's fair. Let's get to the argument itself. What did they miss? I think you mentioned there was enough of a focus on the victim and enough of a focus on who's going to get rich from this stuff. I did think that they did a decent job and, you know, I mean, in the previous show I did with Tristan, it wasn't all, you know, one big, one big hug. There was definitely, I think that we went through the criticism of the film a lot. And now, I guess, like in our discussion, maybe I'll, you know, play the other side. But like, there was a discussion of the rise of nationalism. There was a discussion of the rise of isolation and loneliness and polarization in our society. So what did they miss in terms of a byproduct

• 7:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  of these algorithms, of these social media platforms, in terms of who they're hurting? What did they look over?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I will, I'll highlight a couple of things that I think are really important in any analysis of tech and its social implications. And the first thing that really troubled me was this persistent picture of these types of technologies, these social media feeds, the kind of algorithmic systems that, you know, help to curate and surface some of this this content, etc., as almost superhuman, right? You heard phrases like can hack into the brainstem, right? Things that really paint this as a feat of, you know, superior technology. This is innovation has reached the point and now it's turned on us, right? And and we are but these lizard-brained plebeians who are now bearing

• 8:10Speaker 01

  the consequences of this tech. And I think that ignores the fact that a lot of this isn't actually the product of innovation, right? It's the product of a significant concentration of power and resources. It's not progress, right? It's the fact that we all are now more or less Conscripted to carry these as part of interacting in our daily work lives, our social lives as being part of, you know, the world around us. And that's only increased during COVID. I think this this ultimately perpetuates a myth that, you know, these companies themselves kind of tell that this technology is superhuman, that, you know, it is capable of things like hacking into our lizard brains and, you know, completely taking over our subjectivities.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, that also paints a picture that this technology is somehow impossible to resist, that we can't push back against it, that we can't organize against it. Right? I think, you know, and I think that's that's a real problem because it does sort of put us in a position of being these sort of, you know, these kind of, you know, doughy subjects who are, you know, incapable of resisting. And that, again, I think there's much more to the story.

• 9:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. I want to narrow in on your argument a little bit because on one hand, you know, you mentioned that these are a product of power. I mean, let me see if I can extrapolate, right? Saying that like, we have to hold our phone, we have to be attached to our computers because that's what, you know, the corporate structure today make us do. Like, we need to be, you know, available 24/7. And then there's, there's an ability for us to organize and push back, you know, as people to say, maybe this isn't exactly what we want. Is that, is that, am I getting it right? Is it the fact that like, when you think about power, there's a corp, there are corporations that are having us use these devices and our ability to organize is something we should be thinking about more of? Or am I off on that?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I think when I think about power here, I'm taking kind of a historical materialist analysis, right? I'm looking at these firms, right, as these sort of centers of almost improbable power at this case. And we have about five, you know, companies in the Western context that are dominating kind of this, you know, kind of big tech, as we call them. Right? And these firms are a product of the kind of commercialization of computational network infrastructure. So, you know, the internet. And the product of kind of the development of advertising technology and other, you know, other platform services that allowed them to gain, you know, a massive foothold with

• 10:47Speaker 01

  infrastructure, massive data collection pipelines that, you know, anyone who carries this is continually contributing data, you know, often to all five of these companies.

• 10:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's a phone for our listeners at home, yeah?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Holding up a phone.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  For the people not watching the video, I was holding up my, my cell phone, my Android. And so, you know, we, we have to look, these, these companies represent extraordinary powers over our lives, not magical, right? That power is, is reflected in their ability to, you know, to give away platforms for education to all of our school districts, right? To replace other sort of social fora, right? Instead of, you know, having the debate on CNN, we have the debate on, you know, YouTube now, to begin to become the spaces for our commerce, for our sociality, et cetera, and

• 11:43Speaker 01

  to then financialize and commodify those, you know, those, those roles in that ecology. So I think it's, you know, we, we need to, we need to also analyze kind of the material power that these firms have and, you know, and, and look a little bit more closely at how these technologies work.

• 12:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, we're gonna head right to break and come back with a little bit of more of a discussion about the activism that you touched on and sort of what, what's happening or what happened inside Google and where it goes today. All right, we'll be back in a moment after this on the Big Technology Podcast here at the World Summit AI.

• 12:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back on the Big Technology Podcast with Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee who founded Google's Open Research Group, and we're talking at the World Summit AI. And, you know, the first part of this discussion, we talked a little bit about the Social Dilemma movie, which again, tends to blame algorithms and the business model for big technology companies for all the world's problems. I think we did a good job discussing that with a bit more nuance, talking about where that film could have been better. Now I want to talk a little bit about Drill down and talk a little bit more about your activism inside Google, Meredith, because, you know, as a reporter watching this from the outside, I had been speaking to folks

• 13:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  and it was always clear that, you know, you had played a pretty central role in what happened inside the company. Now you can take a look a little bit at, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, you did say you were retaliated against and then ended up leaving the company. We can get into that. And, but now you've been out of Google for a bit. Do you think this activism worked inside the company? What does it mean that you're not there anymore in terms of whether it will persist?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I certainly think it works, right? But I don't, you know, again, I don't frame that type of organizing as, as, you know, having a goal and then subsiding, right? The goal was both to push back against, you know, unethical, immoral business decisions and the, you know, the, the

• 13:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And those decisions, just for the benefit of the audience, I think we were talking about use of AI in warfare, the decision to, you know, pay out $90 million to someone who was, you know, accused of sexual harassment. And then there was, yeah, we talked about military, we talked about that. Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And there was, you know, it was, yeah, all, all of those things, I think, what, and the, the inequitable treatment of the contract

• 14:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Laborers. Workforce, which made up more than half of our colleagues, but were not, you know, afforded the privileges of full-time work that you think about when you think about, you know, the glorious tech company workforce.

• 14:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And the scorecard on that was they ended up not renewing the contract with Maven. I don't think, I think that people who were also accused of misbehavior inside Google were not awarded payouts. They were sort of summarily fired.

• 14:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then the laborers, I think the laborers is still an open question, but, um, but sorry, go ahead.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they changed some policies in the right direction, um, you know, resistantly. And this is again, you know, this is a, this is an ongoing struggle. This isn't something you win once by changing executive's minds because they finally see the light, right? This is, you know, again, we're dealing with capitalist logics and capitalist logics dictate that, you know, ultimately the objective function, to use an AI term, of any firm is, you know, continued revenue growth, continued growth, you know, exponential growth forever over time, right? These kind of impossible goals that we're beginning to question more and more as we see sort of the, the fragility of the planet we live on. And they, they harm that type of, um, operation in the world has, has, has done in so many ways.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  But, you know, beyond that, I think, you know, we need to continue to, you know, that type of organizing is meant both to win these specific, you know, goals, right? We want to make sure that all of our colleagues have, you know, a dignified job, are not sleeping in their cars, right? Are making a living wage, have healthcare, uh, and that we erase these sort of, you know, two-class worker systems, right? We really want to do that because that's justice now. While doing that, we also want to build these sort of collective muscle to gain the power to make these decisions ourselves, right? To have a, you know, more collective decision-making and not leave these to, you know, a handful of people at the very top

• 16:18Speaker 01

  whose duty is to the board, whose duty is to shareholders, who, um, ultimately are sort of calibrating their decision-makers making around those capitalist incentives.

• 16:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, but I also want to talk about, you know, who's going to make the decisions inside the company? You know, I think laborers, that's something we could both agree on, they should be paid more and treated better. There were some, uh, uh, other, you know, like there were some more controversial, uh, protests, or there were some protests over some more controversial issues inside Google. For instance, like the funding of the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference in Washington DC. And then there have definitely been debates over Maven and whether, you know, whether it makes sense for tech companies, you know, to work with the military. So I wonder, like, the employee activism definitely takes a certain, you know, political bent and, you know, the leaders of the companies obviously have theirs.

• 17:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  But we talked about how these are very powerful companies. And should we, shouldn't we have like a more, you know, democratic type of

• 17:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  way of deciding what, what these companies should do from a like much more from like, you know, doing when they actually implement these policies that have a big impact on the world? What do you think about that? Like, should it be, you know, should it be in the hands of this one group of employees?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And especially when you're looking at the outside power that a company like Google has, right, they type, you know, it's staggering to think about how much extraordinarily intimate information that company has about billions of people, literally, right? This is, you know, this is, you know, rooms full of dossier dossiers on each one of us, right? And it's staggering to think about the way in which that company is able to use that data, that information to, you know, create AI models, to create other services that are then sort of, you know, making determinations in ways throughout our social institutions, right? So there's two levels on which I think, you know, we really need to take this power seriously

• 18:19Speaker 01

  and recognize, you know, the risks there. And certainly what I'm not suggesting is that, you know, a handful of, you know, 100,000 or 200,000 people in the world should be the arbiters of all of those decisions. But, you know, part of the work we were doing organizing was also building, you know, whistleblower networks, right? You know, beginning to build the connective tissue with other social movements so that, you know, we could kind of organize it in ways that, that hinted at that type of democratic decision-making that is ultimately going to be. You know extraordinarily necessary to, you know, create or recreate technology that

• 19:02Speaker 01

  could serve the public interest. Um, but I, you know, I, I agree with you that the goal is not just build this sort of, you know, hermetically sealed workplace democracy at Google, right? Especially given the issues with representation, the issues with misogyny and racism at that company, right? We don't want just like, you know, a larger collection of the same people making those decisions. Um, but that, you know, the politics of that was to open up the face for at least more collective discussion and decision making. And, and ultimately the goal would be to sort of link with social movements and take a lead. Um, and I think the No Tech for ICE movement is one example where you saw tech workers across the industry sort of taking the lead of people who, you know, do immigration policy,

• 19:46Speaker 01

  uh, immigration advocacy, um, you know, on the US southern border and really understand the context and what it means to be, you know, hunted and tracked by this technology, communicating that to the people who don't have that experience, but may have an understanding of how these systems work to build a campaign that is then pushing back against the companies who are provisioning those types of systems to ICE.

• 20:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I wanna, I'm gonna get back to a little bit of the political activism, but I wanna just do a quick digression one, because you mentioned the Stasi dossier. Uh, can employees at Google just access like basically all your, you know, go into someone's personal information and access it? So elaborate a little bit on what you mean by the dossier. Is it, is it simply somebody being represented?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so it's someone being represented by numbers and, sorry, go ahead.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, there are people who can access different parts of that, right? And it's not in that, I, you know, I'm using that as a metaphor because it's more easily graspable than like, you know, the different shards of a database where different parts of that information that may not even be identifiable to me without sort of, you know, matching that to some, you know, whatever. Um, it, you know, yeah, but they, you know, were their kind of permission, were, were they to spend a lot of money and a lot of time reconfiguring their systems so everyone could have access, that would be possible, right? Um, they do, you know, collect that information. And, and, you know, at this point, I, I will say like, it is not easy to access that information.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  They log that very strenuously and, and that's in part because, you know, when I started back in 2006, it was a lot easier to access that information.

• 21:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  There were a couple of incidents.

• 21:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it has been interesting speaking to employees who have worked across, let's say, Google, Facebook and an Apple. And say Facebook is, Facebook and Google, they felt was, were fairly open and Apple was like Fort Knox when it came to user data. And it's not part of their marketing. But we could spend an hour talking about that. I want to go back to the politics stuff. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, you know, caused a bit of a stir in Silicon Valley when he banned employee activism, political activism, you know, within the company. And, you know, I thought about that and I said, well, we've definitely had like some interesting results from employee activism inside tech companies over the past couple of years. But on the other hand, like, maybe it's better for employees', you know, political energy

• 22:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  to be channeled through normal, normal political channels versus, you know, trying to work within their company to have them, you know, make statements. I think about like the energy people could put in, you know, try to work through like the way that the American political system operates, you know, versus, you know, working to get their CEO, you know, to take a political stance or the other. And maybe the energy would be better placed, you know, working through the traditional political system. So I'm curious what you made of the move and what you can sort of think about, you know, how people's energy is, is best spent.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot of questions I have about that framing because when you think about the traditional, yeah, political system, I'm like, are you thinking about it without the voter disenfranchisement that has been part of the far right agenda for 20 years driven by Karl Rove and others? Or are you thinking about it sort of with that, right? Are you thinking about it before Citizens United when, you know, kind of corporate donations became corporate speech and you had, you know, millions of billions of dollars of kind of corporate dark money flooding into these campaigns or before that, right? Like what conditions of normal politics are we talking about that, about such that, you know, volunteering to get out the vote would be as effective as, you know, organizing for worker power?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And I guess that's, that's a question we all have to wrestle with because I think what we're dealing with right now is a extraordinarily atrophied, if not broken, political system that has, you know, been at the receiving end of legal activism and lobbying and a really organized campaign by the far right for many, many, many years. And, you know, we're having, right now, we're speaking, I think that the Amy Coney Barrett hearing is happening right now, which could further gut, you know, the last threads of, you know, voter protections that we have. So I don't, you know, again, I wanna, I wanna be really careful about that frame.

• 24:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  And I think-

• 24:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I mean, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 24:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was just gonna say that, like, these are, I mean, I think these are real issues, but like, it's also like, I don't know, like, if you, if folks don't like the way that the political system is operating, you know, it's, it's one thing to, to, you know, say it's wrong, it's another thing to throw up their hands and say, well, this is, you know, it's kind of broken and we can't fix it. And I also wonder if the energy would be well-spent trying to push back against some of the things that you're talking about.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think, you know, part of trying to push back against that would be things like pushing back against the sort of, you know, slush money that these corporate PACs are pushing into far-right causes that don't, you know, represent the views of the people who are there or represent, you know, arguably the best interests of the public. Right? So, you know, again, I think we can't ignore the outsized influence, like vastly, vastly orders of magnitude outsized influence that large corporations have in shaping our political system and the way in which sort of individual goodwill and sort of volunteerism doesn't even, you know, it doesn't even come close to ranking against, you know, the way these companies are able to operate. So, you know, again, this isn't saying, give

• 25:15Speaker 01

  up on the political system, right? Like, I think, you know, try all tools, you know, definitely vote, right? Get your parents to vote, like, do, do the work. But I think, you know, I, frankly, I think worker organizing is also politics.

• 25:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Right? I think when you, you know, the Coinbase story, one of the pieces that I often hear missing from this story is that the CEO wrote that, you know, that sort of polemic blog post- After he had been challenged by a number of workers who ultimately staged a walkout because he wouldn't say Black Lives Matter. So there was context already for that, right? And, you know, what do you, what do you make of a CEO who won't say Black Lives Matter during a time of unprecedented rise in sort of white supremacy and, and a, and a kind of veering towards authoritarianism? Right, like that is political.

• 26:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt. Yeah, I mean, that should be an easy, easy one.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, but there's more, by the way, I think that there's more to it than just, you know, volunteerism, like people can run for office, they can advocate for laws to be changed. Okay, um, so you're, you got retaliated against, you left Google, I think Claire Stapleton also left inside Amazon, another company I cover and spoken with Tim Bray, former Amazon VP who left because of this. The whistleblowers there were fired. Um, uh, and so I wonder, uh, what's going to happen now that it seems like mostly active, I mean, you, not, not only you and Claire, but it seems like a good chunk of people who led the walkout are, uh, of Google now. So what's going to happen if the fact that like, you know, to these movements, if the fact that a lot of people who led them have now left and maybe a people, you know, who

• 26:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  might take your, your place probably feel, feel fearful of, uh, of continuing on, given what happened.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Well, happily, there's still a lot of organizing going on at these companies that I'm aware of. I think, you know, the good, the good news is that there's a lot of ways to organize with your colleagues that don't involve, um, kind of a, a public onslaught that engages the media, which was very much part of our strategy. But, you know, there are a lot of leaders that people don't know about that were part of that organizing, right? A lot of people who didn't, you know, want to or didn't, you know, for, for one reason or another, didn't want to take the risk of being sort of public with that, right? And, and we each made our own choice, but, you know, again, I don't, I, I certainly don't think this sort of diminishes. The strength of the organizing and I would caution against sort of equating

• 27:43Speaker 01

  visibility with, you know, continuity. There's a lot of organizing that's continuing and as you see with, you know, the Coinbase, right? Like, you know, we now have tools in our toolbox across tech, like the walkout, right? Like, you know, a number of Facebook workers who've sort of whistleblown and written their stories as they leave that are becoming kind of common sense. And I think that's, you know, that's one of the ways this type of organizing and this type of consciousness, you know, permeates over time. And it's certainly, you know, there's certainly continuity between the organizing that was happening when I was there and what we're seeing now. And I think what we're seeing now is like learning from some of the mistakes that I and others made, right? There's, you know, developing sort

• 28:26Speaker 01

  of stronger and more precise muscles to continue, you know, to continue this work.

• 28:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt. And I mean, I covered this a little bit in my book, I'm talking about the run up to your protest action. But what was notable about it was that it engaged, there was always dissent inside Google, but it engaged the outside world and the press in particular in a way that, you know, I don't think had happened inside Google before. Okay, let's take one more quick break and come back for a discussion about AI ethics and politics. And we will be back in just a moment.

• 29:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for one final segment with Meredith Whittaker, who is the co-founder of the AI Now Institute. And Meredith, you're one of the leaders in the field of AI ethics. And I feel like we should talk about this because, you know, I think for a lot of people, the term AI ethics has become a bit of a lightning rod where people see it as a way, as a vehicle through which, you know, political views, you know, are potentially injected into the tech companies. And we talked a little bit about conservatives. When they see AI ethics, they say, well, is it your ethics or is it our ethics? You know, forgive me, but I'm gonna, I don't really like his methods, but I found this one slide that James

• 29:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  O'Keefe unearthed was was interesting. He has this slide talking about how, you know, algorithms are programmed and then media is filtered, you know, through those algorithms and then people are programmed. I'm sure you've seen the slide. And so I'm just kind of curious what you make of that slide and whether you think that these algorithms are actually programming people.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  No, I do not. I find, you know, the entire project he's a part of extremely problematic and like very, very, very flimsy. Right? And I think the critique I offered around the social network and this picture of tech as a kind of, you know, almost godlike force that's able to subdue us mere mortals with the power of its algorithms, like, again, no, that's not what's going on. And, and, you know, again, that, you know, that sort of bolsters some of the rhetoric that is ironically coming from these tech companies themselves that are claiming that, you know, these, these systems can do a lot of things that they've never been proven to do. So, no.

• 30:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was an internal group. That was an internal Google slide, I think, so.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I, well, I, I, well, I would disagree with the person who made it. I don't, you know, again, like, I, I don't spend a lot of time digesting Project Veritas.

• 31:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. No, I, look, I'm not a fan of the methods, as I mentioned. But like, the, I feel like, yeah, there are moments where it's worth, like, taking a look at some of the material they unearth. Whether the methods are good or not, and then talk about it.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't like that. I don't really, I'm not, I'm less concerned with who said it, although that's definitely, you know, something we need to take into consideration. Like, that's not true. Right? That's not how these things work. And it's feeding, you know, dual narratives, right? That I think the tech companies have one interest in presenting this technology as infallible because it justifies the proliferation of this technology into domains where they are gonna make money. Right? And the far right has another interest in, you know, presenting these technologies as like scary bogeymen that we need to be very frightened of because it perpetuates a kind of campaign to subdue these companies and ultimately bend them to the will of the far right.

• 31:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and so I'm actually curious about that. So can you talk a little bit about how like the company rhetoric is playing into that far-right campaign? And what do you think the far-right's goals are? You know, if we talk about like them kind of seizing on to AI ethics as one thing, as a battleground that they're interested in fighting, fighting on, what do you think they're aiming to do?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I don't, I don't see as much of the, you know, the far-right kind of fought around issues of AI in politics. And I also have problems with the term AI ethics because I think it's just, you know, almost so broad as to be meaningless, right? But, you know, there was, there was organizing we did around a sort of ethics review board that Google, Google put together, you know, in, in effect to try to sort of pacify some of the stance around the choices they were making around AI in the military, et cetera, right? And on that review board, they had Kay Cole James, who was the head of the Heritage Foundation, a deeply far-right organization that has taken, you know, she personally and the organization

• 33:02Speaker 01

  as a whole have taken a number of fairly virulent anti-LGBTQ positions, right? Anti-trans positions. And, you know, when you look at the way that these AI systems constructed through machine learning work, it is very clear to anyone who works with these systems that, you know, again, they aren't, they aren't intelligent, right? What they do is they process huge amounts of data, whatever data they have available, and from that data, they build a model of the world. So if you show them a bunch of data about cats, they're gonna, you know, here's, here's a million, 20 million pictures of cats, right? They're gonna get some picture of what a cat looks like. And then if you show them a picture of a truck, they're gonna be like, that's not a cat.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  You show them a picture of a cat, they're gonna be like, I predict that this is a cat, right? Like, that's how they work, right? So they're given data from the world we live in, right? That represents our past and our present. And Very, you know, kind of irreducibly, right? Like, kind of encodes the values that are in that data, right? So these systems, very often, and there's now, you know, there's research, Joy Billimwini, Timmy Gebrew, Deborah Raji, others have shown this over and over again, that these systems replicate patterns of racism, patterns of misogyny, they sort of encode these assumptions in, you know, their understanding of the world, because of course, their understanding is trained on data that is pulled from that very same world, those very same contexts.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  So when you're looking at the politics of AI systems, when you're looking at their implications, when you're looking at issues of bias and fairness, and yes, even ethics, you need to be really, you know, weighting very heavily the views of people who kind of experience those harms of marginalization. So you're looking at, you know, people who, you know, understand the dynamics of race and racialization, right? People who understand, you know, issues with anti-LWTTQ bias, right? And so, you know, a lot of our organizing around these issues was sort of pushing back on, you know, the idea that, you know, a board like that was suitable to make these decisions, and pushing forward the notion that we really needed to center the voices

• 35:13Speaker 01

  of people who are most likely to be harmed by these systems.

• 35:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there was that case, that very famous case inside Amazon, where they built this recruiting algorithm, and even when they didn't tell the recruiting algorithm what the gender of the person was, it would look for attributes that would indicate that person was a woman, and then end up removing them from the search. And it ended up becoming so broken, I think Amazon gave up on even rolling it out.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a classic example, right? And I think, you know, what that also is, is a pretty interesting diagnostic tool to kind of reflect back the persistent misogyny that was sort of encoded in Amazon's hiring practices, right? So we can also think about these systems as sort of, you know, showing us, you know, some of these uncomfortable and potentially latent issues that are, you know, part of the construction of the data that, you know, in this case, the resumes, the hiring, the weighting, the performance reviews, et cetera, that train this algorithm.

• 36:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, now, there is a field that you are in which looks at these issues. And then you also have the US government, which seems, you know, interested in sort of taking it into its own hands. We're about to see, it seems like a push from the Department of Justice under Bill Barr to, you know, attack Google in some way. I mean, obviously, there's going to be real antitrust issues that they're looking at, but they're also probably going to be looking at the way that Google treats conservative content. That's at least the, you know, the previews that we've seen. That's what it seems like it might be. So I wonder, do you worry that, like, you're, even if the field that you're in does good work, that the government with the, you know, will come in with blunt force and end up rolling some of it back or changing it or actually, you know, even in bad faith manipulating

• 36:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  the way that these companies treat content and treat algorithms?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, these are, you know, these are political battles. And what the, you know, the far right and the sort of, you know, proto-fascist government is saying right now is that if you deplatform hate speech, if you deplatform, you know, Nazi content, if you deplatform the sort of, you know, propaganda arm that we are, you know, that we have kind of implemented through these, these systems, then we are going to come after you. Right? That's the, you know, there is, there is zero proof that anti-conservative bias exists. In fact, you know, these companies bend over backwards to not enforce their terms of service for people like President Trump. Right?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  But you see that, you know, you see that, um, you know, why, why during the, the kind of big tech hearings did, you know, Jim Johnson and Representative Gertz spend so much time just like kind of globulating about this? Right? They're setting up a narrative that is effectively communicating to these companies, don't touch this content. And I think, you know, again, that gets back to the fact that this is organized, that there's actually, you know, there, there is money going in to the propagation of this type of content through these networks. Right? It's not magic. It's organization and it's funding.

• 38:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be a very interesting couple of months ahead as we see sort of first this Department of Justice action, maybe the outcome of what we've seen from the House, you know, Subcommittee on Antitrust, and then, of course, the election. Okay, why don't we end with one question? Let's see, so you tweeted today, which will be tomorrow or whatever, a week later by the time this airs, but you said, you know, if you could, you, you, an interview question you ask to people is if you could shut down the internet, would you? So if you could shut down the internet, would you?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Oh, well, one of the things I also tweeted, when I tweeted that interview question, which is something I used to ask at Google when I was interviewing people, was that what I was looking for was who was someone who would actually take that question seriously, would think about, you know, in total, do I think this is sort of a positive or a negative force? And I think, you know, and I would work with people to sort of think through that, right? You know, what would be the reason for shutting it down? What would be the reason for, you know, keeping it on, right? All things considered. And I think my view on this is that, you know, it's gonna be really hard to turn these sort of computational network technologies, so like the internet plus everything that's

• 39:39Speaker 01

  been built on top of these, you know, these original protocols and all of the infrastructure that was built out and is now mainly privately owned to, you know, carry this content, et cetera, all the devices. It's gonna be really hard to sort of repurpose that to good, given the consolidation of power that is right now sort of dominating those infrastructures. And, you know, frankly, given these sort of neoliberal capitalist incentives that are, you know, driving those to dominate these infrastructures. So I think it's, you know, I think it's worth fighting. I think there, you know, I'm certainly not, you know, anti-computers or anti-technology, but I think we have to recognize these as questions of power and control and not questions

• 40:19Speaker 01

  of the hypothetical benevolent uses of these technologies when, you know, we can look at, you know, what generally actually happens when, you know, people with a certain set of incentives are the ones governing their use and utility.

• 40:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I think that the good news is right now we're starting to have these conversations in a way that we weren't a couple of years ago. And I think your work, Meredith, is a big reason for it. So we do appreciate it. And it's always great to be able to, you know, talk about this stuff and go deep into it. And, you know, hopefully it leads to more and more discussions. Okay, I think that's gonna do it for our time. So I just wanted to say, thanks, everybody out there at the World Summit for AI. We appreciate you tuning in. If you like the podcast, we'll have more of these discussions. We do it every Wednesday. You can go to Big Technology Podcast in your app of choice, and it will hopefully be there. We just got on Stitcher, so we're there too. And for everyone listening, you know, through one of those podcast apps, if this is your first time and you liked

• 41:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  it, please hit subscribe. If you're a longtime listener, if you could give us a rating, that would help with discoverability. So appreciate that. Most of all, thank you, Meredith. It's been great sitting down here and speaking with you about these very important issues. And I hope to continue the conversation. So thanks for being on the show.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex. Thank you all. Have a great day.

• 41:48Speaker 02

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