AI Now's Meredith Whitaker: "Exploitation by design"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Meredith Whitaker, founder of AI Now and organiser of the Google walk-out, to talk about how she arrived at the search giant 13 years ago (3:40), delving into tech’s effects on society (4:30), becoming a critic (6:15), and then a labour organiser (8:40), the debate on Silicon Valley working with the Pentagon (11:30), AI bias (14:50), sentencing algorithms (17:00), the Google walk-out (19:45), retaliation (22:30), the dangers of government co-opting Big Tech in the coronavirus response (25:25), how AI can reinforce societal divides (32:30), and the plight of “essential” workers (34:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.4	Across the gig economy, we need to be transferring wealth to these workers, transferring
0:09.8	protections to these workers because they are what the fabric of our social infrastructure
0:14.7	relies on.
0:20.6	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley. We are back for the second time this week. Thank you for tuning in again. This is a good one. You'll be glad you're here. So I started pestering Meredith Whitaker about 18 months ago. And this week, she is here.
0:38.4	Figuratively speaking, of course, we actually did this podcast bi-coastly.
0:42.3	She's based in New York.
0:43.9	I am, of course, here in Oakland.
0:46.3	And just to give a bit of background, I started peppering her with messages way back when,
0:50.6	because as the various revelations and employee dissent at Google started picking
0:56.8	up pace over the months, whether it was over Project Maven, the Pentagon drone contract,
1:03.2	or sexual harassment payouts for executives, she was right in the center of it.
1:08.6	She had been at Google for many years, and she became one of the lead organizers of the Google Walkout, which saw 20,000 people, employees just leave their desks in unison at Google offices all around the world. So she helped kind of organize that, get that off the ground, and realize that. She left Google last year after
1:29.4	13 years at the company, after what she claimed was a steady kind of campaign of retaliation
1:35.9	from the company. The company obviously denies this. And she is now full-time at AI now, a research institute where they tackle all the hard
1:47.7	questions that are coming up around AI, like how things like bias, sexism, racism,
1:54.0	seep into AI and the potentially very terrifying results that that can generate.
1:59.0	Point is, she's up to tons of interesting stuff. She knows very well
2:04.6	how powerful big tech truly is, having been inside the machine for so long, and we finally
2:10.6	managed to catch up at a really critical time, which is when governments around the world
2:14.6	are co-opting Silicon Valley to fight coronavirus.
	...

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