Opinion: Google's ethics effort is looking rather evil

Tech companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook have created internal ethics groups and external tools in an effort to display responsibility and keep their algorithms unregulated. — AFP

Google used to have a simple motto: Don’t be evil. Now, with the firing of a data scientist whose job was to identify and mitigate the harm that the company’s technology could do, it has yet again demonstrated how far it has strayed from that laudable goal.

Timnit Gebru was one of Google’s brightest stars, part of a group hired to work on accountability and ethics in artificial intelligence – that is, to develop fairness guidelines for the algorithms that increasingly decide everything from who gets credit to who goes to prison. She was a lead researcher on the Gender Shades project, which demonstrated the flaws of facial recognition software developed by IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others, particularly in identifying dark female faces. As far as I can ascertain, she was fired for doing her job: specifically, for critically assessing models that allow computers to converse with people – an area in which Google is active.