How Big Tech Is Struggling With the Ethics of AI
Companies criticised for overruling and even dissolving ethics boards
By Madhumita Murgia and Siddarth Shrikanth
After Jack Poulson quit Google, he was ushered into a meeting with Jeff Dean, the head of the company’s artificial intelligence division.
Mr Poulson, a former Stanford professor who worked on machine intelligence for Google, had resigned in protest at “Project Dragonfly”, a plan to develop a censored search engine for China, saying the company had promised just two months earlier not to design or deploy technology that “contravenes [ . . .] human rights”.
The meeting, according to Mr Poulson, was supposed to make him “feel better about Google’s ethical red lines”.
“But what I actually found was the opposite,” he said. “The response was, ‘[human rights organisations] are just outsiders responding to public information, [and] we just disagree that that’s a violation.’ There was no respect for them on this issue.”
He left the company the next day. In recent months, other Google employees have protested at its bid for a Pentagon cloud computing contract, and its involvement in a US government AI weapons program.
