Meredith Whittaker Learned From Her Experience At Google What To Avoid

The Signal Foundation was fortunate to have Meredith Whittaker take on a top position last year, moving from academia, government work, and the tech industry into the nonprofit sector for the first time.

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With tens of millions of people using it to keep their chats private and out of sight of big technology companies, she is now the President of an organization that operates one of the world's most popular encrypted messaging apps.

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Her prior work experience at Google, where she spent 13 years, gives Whittaker real-world reasons to be sceptical of the use of data by for-profit companies.

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In 2017, after working at the search giant for more than a decade, she was told by a friend that the search giant's cloud computing unit was working on a controversial contract with the Department of Defense called Project Maven, a controversial contract. A number of other workers and she saw it as a hypocrisy that Google would work on artificial intelligence technology that could potentially be used for drone warfare. So they began discussing taking collective action against Google.

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In an interview with Trade Algo, Whittaker said, “There was already a kind of consciousness in the company that hadn't existed before” he added. “People were meeting each week, talking about organizing the company in honor of Women's History Month.

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Google workers soon discovered that despite credible sexual misconduct allegations against Android co-founder Andy Rubin, the company paid him a $90 million exit package despite credible sexual misconduct allegations against him, as tensions were high within the company.

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In order to demand greater transparency and an end to forced arbitration for Google employees, Whittaker organized a massive walkout against the company, bringing together thousands of Google workers. It was a historic moment in the tech industry, which had had very few high profile instances of employee activism prior to this walkout.

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In response to Rubin's revelations and ensuing walkout, Whittaker was heard saying, "I will give you a break," saying, "Everyone knows that the whisper network is no more whispering."

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I requested a comment from Google, but they did not respond immediately.

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She left Google in 2019 to return to New York University, where she co-founded the AI Now Institute in 2017, which is focused on ensuring that the AI systems that are used by the community and contexts to which they're applied are accountable to those communities and contexts.

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Aside from her major in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Whittaker never intended to pursue a career in technology. In 2006, when she submitted a resume to Monster.com and discovered that she was broke and needed a job, she joined Google. After landing a temporary job in customer service, she eventually moved on to a permanent position.

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At that point, it didn't seem like every kid was learning coding at the same pace - that knowledge wasn't saturating the whole world yet," Whittaker told us. He recalled the moment he was told that servers are a different type of computing system.

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"What is the point of getting free juice?" he asked.

The culture of the industry was another thing Whittaker had to adapt to, in addition to learning about the technology. At the time, at companies like Google, this meant an abundance of lavish perks and a lot of pampering.

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As Whittaker explained, it was also a matter of trying to figure out the meaning of getting free juice. “I didn't grow up in a wealthy family, so it was all so foreign to me.”

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As Whittaker said, she intends to “osmotically learn” about the tech industry and Google’s role in it through observation and asking questions. Google’s mission to index the world’s information sounds quite straightforward to her, even though the project involves numerous issues regarding politics, economics, and society, she recalls it sounding relatively simple when it was explained to her.

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It is hard to understand why Google is so passionate about net neutrality, he said, referring to the company's ongoing struggle to ensure that internet service providers offer equal access to the distribution of their content to their customers.

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According to a report published by Trade Algo, several European telecoms providers are now calling on regulators to impose "fair share" fees on tech companies, while the tech industry calls such fees an unfair "internet tax" that unfairly burdens them on a daily basis.

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In addition to the technical stuff, Whittaker said that he also learned the political and economic aspects. "Now I see what we're saying publicly and how it might work internally."

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Whittaker doesn't have to worry about sales at Signal. Signal has gained popularity among journalists, researchers, and activists because it scrambles messages to prevent them from being intercepted.

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Since Signal is a nonprofit with a goal of protecting private communications, Whittaker believes that the app's stated position of protecting private communication is in fact "existentially important" for society and that there are no underlying financial motivations to deviate from that statement.

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Whittaker said, “We sometimes go to great lengths, investing a lot of time, energy, and money to make sure we have as little data as possible.” He added. We don't know who's talking to whom, who's in the groups that you speak to, we don't know who you are, we don't know your profile picture, and we don't know who you are talking to.

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In November, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that "the goal of Twitter DMs is to supersede Signal," in reference to the direct messaging tool Signal. He has praised Signal as a direct messaging tool.

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There is a common concern among Musk and Whittaker about companies profiting from artificial intelligence technologies. Musk was an early backer of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which is a nonprofit organization founded by Musk. It was said by him recently in a tweet that OpenAI is becoming “an extremely profitable company effectively controlled by Microsoft.” In January, Microsoft announced a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, a company that describes itself as a “capped-profit” company that has a mission statement.

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There is more to Whittaker's misguided apprehension than just the confusing structure of OpenAI. He was out of the loop when Google recently debuted their chatbot dubbed Bard, which is part of Google's generative AI initiative.

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Despite the hype around the technology, Whittaker says she finds little value in it and can't see any game-changing uses for it. She believes the excitement will eventually subside, but maybe not at the same rate as the excitement surrounding Web3 or some other technology.

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According to Whittaker, ChatGPT and similar tools have no understanding of anything at all. They only predict what the next word in a sentence is likely to be, and that's all they can do.

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There was no immediate response from OpenAI when a request for comment was made.

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As a result, writers, editors and content creators will lose their jobs if companies use generative AI software to “justify the degradation of people’s jobs.” That is her fear. In addition, she would like people to know that Signal will never be incorporating ChatGPT into its service, as she definitely wants people to know that it is not.

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Whittaker stated to the camera, flatly and loudly, "No!" he said as loudly as he could.