Google AI Ethics Council Is Falling Apart After a Week

Google recently appointed an external ethics council to deal with tricky issues in AI, but, according to Bloomberg, in less than a week, the council is already falling apart. That development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts.

On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. “While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work,

On Monday, a group of employees started a petition asking the company to remove another member: Kay Coles James, president of a conservative think tank who has fought against equal-rights laws for gay and transgender people. More than 500 staff signed the petition anonymously by late Monday morning local time.

Joanna Bryson, a professor of computer science at the University of Bath, in England, who was appointed to the Google ethics council, said she also had reservations about some of her fellow council members. "Believe it or not, I know worse about one of the other people," she said on Twitter in response to a post questioning Coles James’ appointment. "I know I have pushed Google before on some of their associations and they say they need diversity in order to be convincing to society broadly, e.g. the GOP.

The AI council is meant to act as a check on the company’s decisions, meeting regularly and producing reports on developments in the field and in Google’s technology. It does not have veto power but is meant to offer “diverse perspectives to inform our work,"’ Google’s Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker said in a blog post.