Part 2: The engineer’s meteoric rise

"It wasn’t just the algorithms or their training data that skewed white." She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Tom Simonite unravels the controversial circumstances surrounding Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google, and the complex backdrop surrounding it. “I’m not worried about machines taking over the world,” Gebru wrote. “I’m worried about groupthink, insularity, and arrogance in the AI community.” In this instalment, Simonite takes a closer look into the engineer’s meteoric rise in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and how her drive for social justice landed her the job at Google in the first place.