Google and the dangerous pursuit of ‘equality’

The world just got more dangerous, and I’m not talking about N Korea and Trump.

Google just sacked an employee because he openly suggested that men and women, (not all, but some, and there is an overlap, and …) might tend to have different preferences in some areas and that could (but not always, and only in certain cases, and we must always recognize and respect everyone and …) possibly account for some of the difference in numbers of men and women in certain roles (but there might be other causes too and obviously lots of discrimination and …. )

Yes, that’s what he actually said, but with rather more ifs and buts and maybes. He felt the need to wrap such an obvious statement in several kilometers thick of cotton wool so as not to offend the deliberately offended but nonetheless deliberate offense was taken and he is out on his ear.

Now, before you start thinking this is some right-wing rant, I feel obliged to point out just how progressive Futurizon is: 50% of all Futurizon owners and employees are female, all employees and owners have the same voting rights, 50% are immigrants and all are paid exactly the same and have the same size offices, regardless of dedication, ability, nature or quality or volume of output and regardless of their race, religion, beauty, shape, fitness, dietary preferences, baldness, hobbies or political views, even if they are Conservatives. All Futurizon offices are safe zones where employees may say anything they want of any level of truth, brilliance or stupidity and expect it to be taken as absolute fact and any consequential emotional needs to be fully met. No employee may criticize any other employee’s mouse mat, desk personalisation or screen wallpaper for obvious lack of taste. All employees are totally free to do anything they choose 100% of the time and can take as much leave as they want. All work is voluntary. All have the same right to respectfully request any other employee to make them coffee, tea or Pimms. All employees of all genders real or imagined are entitled to the same maternity and paternity rights, and the same sickness benefits, whether ill or not. In fact, Futurizon does not discriminate on any grounds whatsoever. We are proud to lead the world in non-discrimination. Unfortunately, our world-leading terms of employment mean that we can no longer afford to hire any new employees.

However, I note that Google has rather more power and influence than Futurizon so their policies count more. They appear (Google also has better lawyers than I can afford, so I must stress that all that follows is my personal opinion) to have firmly decided that diversity is all-important and they seem to want total equality of outcome. The view being expressed not just by Google but by huge swathes of angry protesters seems to be that any difference in workforce representation from that of the general population must arise from discrimination or oppression so must be addressed by positive action to correct it. There are apparently no statistically discernible differences in behavior between genders, or in job or role preference, so any you may have noticed over the time you’ve been alive is just your prejudice. Google says they fully support free speech and diversity of views, but expression of views is apparently only permitted as long as those views are authorized, on penalty of dismissal.

So unless I’m picking up totally the wrong end of the stick here, and I don’t do that often, only 13% of IT engineers are women, but internal policies must ensure that the proportion rises to 50%, whether women want to do that kind of work or not. In fact, nobody may question whether as many women want to work as IT engineers as men; it must now be taken as fact. By extension, since more women currently work in marketing, HR and PR, they must be substituted by men via positive action programs until men fill 50% of those roles. Presumably similar policies must also apply in medical bays for nursing and other staff there, and in construction teams for their nice new buildings. Ditto all other genders, races, religions; all groups must be protected and equalized to USA population proportions, apparently except those that don’t claim to hold sufficiently left-wing views, in which case it is seemingly perfectly acceptable to oppress, ostracize and even expel them.

In other words, freedom of choice and difference in ability, and more importantly freedom from discrimination, must be over-ruled in favor of absolute equality of diversity, regardless of financial or social cost, or impact on product or service quality. Not expressing full and enthusiastic left-wing compliance is seemingly just cause for dismissal.

So, why does this matter outside Google? Well, AI is developing very nicely. In fact, Google is one of the star players in the field right now. It is Google that will essentially decide how much of the AI around us is trained, how it learns, what it learns, what ‘knowledge’ it has of the world. Google will pick the content the AI learns from, and overrule or reeducate it if it draws any ‘wrong’ conclusions about the world, such as that more women than men want to be nurses or work in HR, or that more men than women want to be builders or engineers. A Google AI must presumably believe that the only differences between men and women are physical, unless their AI is deliberately excluded from the loudly declared corporate values and belief sets.

You should be very worried. Google’s values really matter. They have lots of influence on some of the basic tools of everyday life. Even outside their company, their AI tools and approaches will have strong influence on how other AI develops, determining operating systems and platforms, languages, mechanisms, interfaces, filters, even prejudices and that reach and influence is likely to increase. Their AI may well be in many self-driving cars, and if they have to make life or death decisions, the underlying value assumptions must feature in the algorithms. Soon companies will need AI that is more emotionally compliant. AI will use compliments or teasing or seduction or sarcasm or wit as marketing tools as well as just search engine positioning. Soon AI will use highly expressive faces with attractive voices, with attractive messages, tailored to appeal to you by pandering to your tastes and prejudices while thinking something altogether different. AI might be the person at the party that is all smiles and compliments, before going off to tell everyone else how awful it thinks you are. If you dare to say something not ‘authorized’, the ultra-smart AI all around you might treat you condescendingly, making you feel ashamed, ostracized, a dinosaur. Then it might secretly push you down a few pages in search results, or put a negative spin on text summaries about you, or exclude you from recommendations. Or it might do all the secret stuff while pretending it thinks you’re fantastic. Internal cultural policies in companies like Google today could soon be external social engineering to push the left-wing world the IT industry believes in – it isn’t just Google; Facebook and Twitter are also important and just as Left, though Amazon, Samsung, IBM and other AI players are less overtly politically biased, so far at least. Left wing policies generally cost a lot more, but Google and Facebook will presumably still expect other companies and people to pay the taxes to pay for it all. As their female staff gear up to fight them over pay differences between men and women for similar jobs, it often seems that Google’s holier-than-thou morality doesn’t quite make it as far as their finances.

Then it really starts being fun. We’ll soon have bacteria that can fabricate electronic circuits within themselves. Soon they’ll be able to power them too, giving the concept of smart yogurt. These bacteria could also have nanotechnology flagella to help them get around. We’ll soon have bacterial spies all over our environment, even on our skin, intercepting electronic signals that give away our thoughts. They’ll bring in data on everything that is said, everything that everyone even thinks or feels. Those bacteria will be directly connected into AI, in fact they’ll be part of it. They’ll be able to change things, to favor or punish according to whether they like what someone believes in or how they behave.

It isn’t just right-wing extremists that need to worry. I’m apparently Noveau Left – I score slightly left of center on political profiling tests, but I’m worried. A lot of this PC stuff seems extreme to me, sometimes just nonsense. Maybe it is, or maybe I should be lefter. But it’s not my choice. I don’t make the rules. Companies like Google make the rules, they even run the AI ethics groups. They decide much of what people see online, and even the meaning of the words. It’s very 1984-ish.

The trouble with the ‘echo chambers’ we heard about is that they soon normalize views to the loudest voices in those groups, and they don’t tend to be the moderates. We can expect it will go further to the extreme, not less. You probably aren’t left enough either. You should also be worried.

The future of tolerance and equality

It’s amusing how words often mean the opposite of what they should intuitively mean. It started in trendy-speak when hot came to mean exactly the same as cool, when cool was still a word that was trendy. Wicked means good. Bad means good. Evil means good. Sick means good. Good no longer means good, but has been demoted and now means just about OK, but nothing special – that would be bad or wicked or sick.

The trouble is that it isn’t just children making their own words to rebel against authority. Adults abuse language too, and in far less innocent ways. People’s minds are structured using words, and if you can bend the meaning of a word after those concepts have been assembled, all the concepts built using that word will change too. So, fair sounds a nice sort of word; we all want everything to be fair; so if you can gain control of its meaning and bend it towards your campaign goal, you gain the weight of its feel-good factor and its pleasant associations. Supporting that goal then makes you feel a better sort of person, because it is fair. Unfortunately, ‘fair’ has been perverted to mean resource distribution where your supporters take as big a slice of the pie as possible. Ditto equality. It sounds good, so if you can spin your presentation to make your campaign for superiority appear as if you want everyone to be equal, you can get an Orwellian, Animal Farmy sort of support for it, with your pressure group becoming more equal than others. But then ‘equality’ really means everyone except you being oppressed.

As in Nineteen-eighty-four, Orwell’s Animal Farm was really observations on the politics of his day,  and how language is so easily subverted for political advantage, but marketing and politics techniques have only refined since then. The desire to win power and to use words to do so hasn’t gone away. I think our world today is closer to Orwell’s 1984 than most people want to believe. Censorship is a primary tool of course. Preventing discussion in entire fields of science, culture and politics is an excellent way of stopping people thinking about them. Censorship as a device for oppression and control is as powerful as any propaganda. When censorship isn’t appropriate, the use of words that mean the opposite of what they describe is a good way to redecorate an image to make it more appealing and spin doctors are ubiquitous in politics. A ‘liberal’ sounds like someone who supports freedom, but is actually someone who wants more things to be controlled by the state, with more regulation, less freedom. A ‘democrat’ sounds like it should describe someone who wants everyone to have an equal say but is often someone who wants dictatorship by their supporters and oppression of others. ‘Racist’ used to mean someone who considers people of one skin colour to be superior to those of another, so became a word no reasonable person wants thrown at them, but because it was so powerful a weapon, it has been mutated endlessly until it has become synonymous with ‘nationalist’. It is most often cited now when skin colour is the same and only culture or religion or nationality or even accent is different. Such is the magnitude of the language distortion that in the UK’s recent immigration debates, Europhiles who want to protect immigration privileges for white Europeans over Indians or Chinese or Africans were calling those who want to remove those privileges racist. A Conservative minister used the farcical argument that trying to limit European immigration is racist even though they are the same colour because it would be racist if they were black. This language perversion makes it much harder to eliminate genuine skin colour racism, which is still a significant problem. Racism flourishes. The otherwise intensely politically correct BBC’s Dr Who frequently features the hero or his allies making deeply offensive racist-like remarks about other species with different shapes. People and organisations that are certain of their own holiness often are the most prejudiced, but their blinkers are so narrowly aimed they just cant see it. That blindness now pervades our society.

It is tolerance and equality that are the biggest and most dangerous casualties of this word war. ‘Tolerant’ has evolved to mean extremely intolerant of anyone who doesn’t adopt the same political correctness and this new intolerance is growing quickly.  If you or your friends get something, it is a right, and removing it is a tax, but if the other lot get it, it is a privilege that ‘fairness’ demands should be removed. People will happily accuse an entire group of people of being highly prejudiced, without realizing that such a statement is prejudiced itself. It is common to watch debates where contributors make the most offensive remarks about people who they see as beneath contempt because they hold some much lesser prejudice about some group they support. They just don’t see the same trait magnified in themselves. That they don’t see it indicates that they haven’t really thought about it and have just accepted a view from someone or somewhere else, which shows just how powerful changing the words is. It is only when thinking the meaning through that the obvious contradictions appear, but the emotional content and impact of the words is superficial and immediate.

The new variety of militant atheists particularly have become very intolerant of religions because they say they are intolerant. They use the sanctimonious phrase ‘intolerant of intolerance’, but their intolerance is just as bad as that which they condemn. They condemn religious believers for hypocrisy too but are blind to their own which is just as bad. Their religious fervor for their political correctness religion is as distasteful as any medieval religious persecution or inquisition. They may not physically burn people at a stake, but activists do as much damage to a person and their career and destroy their lives as far as they can, whilst believing they are somehow occupying some moral high ground. Religion may be dying out, but the very same nasty behaviors live on, just with different foundations for exactly the same sanctimony. This new politically correct community are just as sure of their 21st century piety as any medieval priest was of theirs, just as quick to look down on all those not sharing the same self-built pedestal, just as quick to run their own inquisitions.

PC activists demand tolerance and equality for their favored victim group and most reasonable people agree with tolerance and equality, but unlike most ordinary decent people, most activists don’t reciprocate it. Hypocrisy reigns, supported by an alarming apparent lack of self awareness. Surely reasonable people should accept others’ right to exist and accept that even if they might not agree with them they can agree to live peacefully alongside, to live and let live, like we used to until recently. Tolerance means putting up with people whose views you detest as well as those you love. Why have they forgotten that? Actually, they haven’t. Lack of self awareness isn’t the cause, not for activists. It isn’t the case that they’ve forgotten we need to get on, they just don’t want to any more. It is no longer a desire for peace and love and equality, but a desire for cultural supremacy and oppression of dissent.

The clue comes as we see that the new vigorous pursuit of ‘equality’  is too often a thinly disguised clamor for privilege, positive discrimination, quotas, special treatment and eventual superiority. That isn’t new of itself – there have always been fights for privilege – but lately it is often accompanied by oppression and vilification of anyone not supporting that particular campaign for privilege. Trying to win the high ground is one thing, but trying to eliminate everyone else from the entire hill is new. It is no longer enough to get equality. All other viewpoints must be eliminated. It isn’t enough that I should win – you must also lose. That which started as a reasonable desire that all should be equal in all ways has somehow mutated into an ugly tribal conflict where every tribe wants exclusive power and extermination of any tribes that don’t support their dictatorship.

This new intolerance is tribal conflict – less violent but every bit as nasty and aggressive, the sort that leads to violence if left unaddressed. It is war without the niceties of the Geneva convention. We see it manifesting itself in every dimension – political affiliation, age, gender, sexuality, race, culture, wealth, religion… It doesn’t use peaceful debate and open discussion and negotiation to get different groups living side by side on an equal basis. Instead, as I hinted in the first paragraph, seizing control over the meanings of words and distorting them is increasingly the weapon of choice to get a win instead of a draw. Mutual respect and the desire to live in peace, to live and let live, each to their own, has been usurped by assertion of superiority and demand for submission.

It has to stop. We must live together in peace, whatever our differing beliefs and attitudes. The nastiness has to go. The assault on language has to stop. We need to communicate and to do so on a level playing field, without censorship and without the insults. We need to assert genuine equality and tolerance, not play games with words. That isn’t some rose-tinted fluffy bunny dream. It is a recognition that the alternative is eventual civil conflict, the Great Western War that I’ve written about before. That won’t be fun.

See also 

Can we get a less abusive society?

and 

Machiavelli and the coming Great Western War