Scientists can be some of the most dangerous people in the world because we think we're objective. I mean, I'm even thinking about an insidious part of this, which is that someone using this particular model might tell themselves, of course it's not biased it's computers it's science it's objective. You are actually making things a lot worse than they already are. So when you use this kind of data to train a model to then say that it's going to be crime hot spots in certain locations, then you send more police to those locations, and you arrest more people in Black and brown communities, and then you feed it once again into your training data, then this creates what they call a runaway feedback loop where you're actually widening societal inequity. GEBRU: Looking at the national survey for - of drug use, drug use - it was very evenly distributed around Oakland, but the people who are arrested for drug use is not very evenly distributed. She pondered data-driven policing, where police used computers to identify drug use hot spots. INSKEEP: She began to feel that some people in tech might not grasp the social power of what they were doing. At the same time, I would go to my conferences and other places and note that there were barely any Black people there at all. GEBRU: I started becoming very concerned with the potential negative societal impacts of some of this technology. INSKEEP: And that feeling of isolation led her to become a technology researcher. And, you know, I was the only woman - I mean, everything - right? - like, all of the isolation that you hear about - the only Black person, et cetera. GEBRU: When I started my Ph.D., I felt very isolated. Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-born engineer who studied at Stanford and worked in the male-dominated tech firms of Silicon Valley. Google has not said much about Gebru's case, though the CEO apologized for causing some employees to doubt they had a place at Google. Google is a financial supporter of NPR, which we cover like any other company. INSKEEP: What we're about to hear is one side of a personnel decision. GEBRU: Yeah, you know? Because they're saying I resigned, but I obviously didn't. But to be resignated means that someone announces that you resigned when you didn't. INSKEEP: Resignate - so that is like the word resignation. TIMNIT GEBRU: People have come up with this term, resignate - to resignate someone - I love this term - in our team. The company says it accepted the researcher's resignation, which Timnit Gebru says she never gave. The story highlights tensions over race and gender in tech. Many employees are protesting the departure of a Google researcher. We report this morning on the inside pressure.
State attorneys general accused Google of giving its own products priority in search results. The outside pressure comes from lawsuits. Google faces pressure from outside and inside.
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