Google scraps artificial intelligence ethics committee after criticism of member

Google closes its Advanced Technology External Advisory Council about a week after it was founded. The Ethics Committee should have been overseeing developments around artificial intelligence, but a very conservative member was criticized a lot.

“Obviously, the Ateac can’t function as we wanted it to. We’re canceling the commission and going back to the drawing board,” Google said in a statement to Vox. Google had set up the committee on March 27, and immediately after that fierce criticism of one of the eight members: Kay Coles James. The woman is president of the American Heritage Foundation, which openly speaks out against immigrants, transgender people and the LGBT community and is skeptical about global warming.

Google employees, along with researchers and professors, opposed the appointment in an open letter. Google was petitioned to remove James from the committee. The presence of someone with such ideas does not belong in an ethics committee, according to the thousands of Google employees who signed the petition. They argue that Google is undermining its own position when it comes to ethics and equality with her appointment.

Initially, Google defended the choice for James by stating that she was appointed to represent a diverse body of thought on the committee. Alessandro Acquisti, one of the committee’s eight members, withdrew a few days after the committee was founded. In a tweet he said that for him this is ‘not the right place to do this important work’.

The Ateac was founded with the aim of looking at Google’s work in the field of artificial intelligence from an ethical point of view. The committee would meet four times this year to take a critical look at Google’s AI projects. In the statement, Google says it is now looking for other ways to get feedback on the projects.