Gebru spent Thanksgiving writing a six-page response, explaining her perspective on the paper and asking for guidance on how it might be revised instead of quashed. She titled her reply “Addressing Feedback from the Ether at Google,” because she still didn’t know who had set her Kafkaesque ordeal in motion, and sent it to Kacholia the next day.
Gebru’s tweet lit the fuse on a controversy that quickly inflamed Google. The company has been dogged in recent years by accusations from employees that it mistreats women and people of color, and from lawmakers that it wields unhealthy technological and economic power. Now Google had expelled a Black woman who was a prominent advocate for more diversity in tech, and who was seen as an important internal voice for greater restraint in the helter-skelter race to develop and deploy AI.
The story of what actually happened in the lead-up to Gebru’s exit from Google reveals a more tortured and complex backdrop. It’s the tale of a gifted engineer who was swept up in thebefore she became one of its biggest critics, a refugee who worked her way to the center of the tech industry and became determined to reform it.
Gebru’s mother had a visa for the United States, where Gebru’s older sisters, engineers like their father, had lived for years. But when Gebru applied for a visa, she was denied. So she went to Ireland instead, joining one of her sisters, who was there temporarily for work, while her mother went to America alone.
Some of her teachers, Gebru found, seemed unable or unwilling to accept that an African refugee might be a top student in math and science. Other white Americans saw fit to confide in her their belief that African immigrants worked harder than African Americans, whom they saw as lazy. History class told an uplifting story about the Civil Rights Movement resolving America’s racial divisions, but that tale rang hollow.
As Gebru learned more about the guts of gadgets like the iPhone, she became more interested in the fundamental physics of their components—and soon her interests wandered even further, beyond the confines of electrical engineering. By 2011, she was embarking on a PhD at Stanford, drifting among classes and searching for a new direction. She found it in computer vision, the art of making software that can interpret images.
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