Mr. Damore, Welcome To the Prophet Club

In the Bible, being a prophet was not a sought-after job.  Prophets were chosen by God to deliver messages that more often than not turned out to be unwelcome.  And sooner or later, the same lack of welcome greeted the prophet himself as he stood in the city gate telling the people things they didn't want to hear.  Bad things tended to happen to prophets when they got on the wrong side of the establishment.  The prophet Jeremiah, after telling King Zedekiah to surrender to the attacking Babylonians, was accused of treachery and thrown into a muddy well, where he was left to die.  Only the intervention of a friendly official rescued him from a miserable death.

I don't think former Google engineer James Damore has any special line to the Almighty, but by now he has experienced the same thing that the biblical prophets discovered:  say things that the leadership doesn't want to hear, and sooner or later you're going to pay for it.  In response to a ten-page memo he posted entitled "Google's ideological echo chamber" in which he criticized the atmosphere created by gender-diversity programs at his company, the Internet lit up with a storm of attacks on him, and Google ended up firing him.  But exactly what did he say?  First, some background.

Like many companies these days, Google has initiatives and programs in diversity, including ones that attempt to change the fact that the percentage of women in computing is about 24%, according to an organization called Girls Who Code.  The desired change, naturally, is an increase to something closer to the representation of women in the overall U. S. population, which is 50.8%. 

           

I say "naturally" because there is a widely held assumption that when the percentage of women in a desirable field of endeavor—CEO suites, being rich, holding political office, or working at any job that the culture perceives to be desirable—falls below 50.8%, this proves that there is injustice somewhere that needs to be rooted out so that the percentage will more closely approach the magic 50.8%. 

If you look at this assumption on its own in the cold light of logic, you can start to see some holes in it.  Some of the highest-paying jobs in the country are in professional sports.  Where are the protests that there aren't any women playing for the Green Bay Packers?  I don't want to start a trend, you understand.  And professional football itself is losing popularity in view of the revelations of long-term brain damage it can cause.  But the point is that many of the assumptions and assertions surrounding issues of gender diversity are based on something besides mathematically exact logic.  And that's a good thing, because logic and undisputed facts can take you only so far.  Something else is needed in order to discuss these matters intelligently:  an ability to articulate the foundations of one's moral judgments.  But these days, that ability is much rarer than the ability to code.

I have read Mr. Damore's memo, and at one point he refers to "moral biases."  Judging from his words, he is neither a political scientist nor a philosopher, but he recognizes that more than logic is required to deal with human-relations issues such as diversity and gender roles.  In his memo, he wrote some things that are undoubtedly unpopular in the Silicon Valley setting of Mountain View:  "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways."  He cites personality differences that women show compared to men, many of which are positive:  agreeableness, ability to work in teams, and so on.  And he admits that males tend to rank higher on aggressiveness and the willingness to put in long unpleasant hours to get ahead in an organization.  He winds up his memo with a recommendation to "[h]ave an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs." 

It is a matter of public record that Mr. Damore was let go by Google shortly before Aug. 7.  Legally speaking, Google is probably not breaking any law to fire him, as California has what is called "employment at will," which means an employer can fire you at any time for any reason, or no reason at all.  Nevertheless, firing him doesn't contribute to an atmosphere at the company that would encourage an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of diversity programs. 

Along with Mr. Damore's memo, the website Gizmodo posted a statement from Google's diversity officer, in which she said of the memo, "I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender."  But she didn't say what those incorrect assumptions were.

Engineers are trained to be logical, using known facts about the world to create useful products.  But human life is about more than logic and reasoning.  What Mr. Damore calls "moral biases" are really each person's conclusions, drawn from his or her world view, about what constitutes right and wrong.  And while "Googlers" (as they call themselves) may be mental giants when it comes to logic, programming, and the skillful exploitation of the Internet to generate revenue, neither Mr. Damore nor his opponents in the company are able to articulate the bases of their moral principles any better than they could when they were in high school, or perhaps earlier. 

Instead of a reasoned debate based upon clearly expressed moral principles, what happened when Mr. Damore posted his memo was the Internet equivalent of a riot, at which point Google called in their human-resources cops to quell the riot by arresting (firing) the riot's instigator—the cyberspace equivalent of dumping Mr. Damore down a muddy well.  He won't die from it, but he's certainly been soiled in the sight of many.  And it's far from clear that the conservative media outlets which have started to lionize Mr. Damore as a martyr to their causes will encourage meaningful debates about gender diversity either.  Mr. Damore may have left one echo chamber only to walk into another one of a more conservative bent. 

It's possible to have a reasonable, logical debate about gender diversity, but only if everyone can lay their moral cards on the table first.  And these days, we lack the vocabulary and often the courage to do so.

Sources:  I referred to reports about James Damore's firing carried by the San Jose Mercury-News at http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/07/googles-anti-diversity-engineer-should-he-be-fired/ and Bloomberg News at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo.  The percentage of women who code is from https://qz.com/814017/the-percentage-of-computing-jobs-in-the-us-held-by-women-is-expected-to-shrink/, and Gizmodo carried Mr. Damore's original memo and the response by Google's diversity officer at http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320.  The story of what happened to Jeremiah after he said unpopular things is in the 38th chapter of the Old Testament book of the same name.

Will Robots Ever Have Moral Authority?

Robots build cars, clean carpets, and answer phones, but would you trust one to decide how you should be treated in a rest home or a hospital?  That's one of the questions raised recently by a thoughtful article in the online business news journal Quartz.  Journalist Olivia Goldhill interviewed ethicists and computer scientists who are thinking about and working on plans to enable computers and robots to make moral decisions.  To some people, this smacks of robots taking over the world.  Before you get out the torches and pitchforks, however, let me summarize what the researchers are trying to do.

Some of the projects are nothing more than a type of expert system, a decision-making aid that has already found wide usefulness in professions such as medicine, engineering, and law.  For example, the subject of international law can be mind-numbingly complicated.  Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are trying to develop machines that will ensure compliance with international law by programming in all the relevant codes (in the law sense) so that the coding (in the computer-science sense) will lead to decisions or outcomes that automatically comply with the pertinent statutes.  This amounts to a sort of robotic legal assistant with flawless recall, but one that doesn't make final decisions on its own.  That would be left to a human lawyer, presumably.

Things are a little different with a project that a philosopher Susan Anderson and her computer-scientist husband Michael Anderson are working on:  a program that advises healthcare workers caring for elderly patients.  Instead of programming in explicit moral rules, they teach the machine by example.  The researchers take a few problem cases and let the machine know what they would do, and after that the machine can deal with similar problems.  So far it's all a hypothetical academic exercise, but in Japan, where one out of every five residents is over 65, robotic eldercare is a booming business.  It's just a matter of time until someone installs a moral-decision program like the one the Andersons are developing in a robot that may be left on its own with an old geezer, such as the writer of this blog, for example.

What the Quartz article didn't address directly is the question of moral authority.  And here is where we can find some matters for genuine concern.

Many of the researchers working on aspects of robot morality evinced frustration that human morality is not, and may never be, reducible to the kind of algorithms that computers can execute.  Everybody who has thought about the question realizes that morality isn't as simple and straightforward as playing tick-tack-toe.  Even the most respected human moral reasoners will often disagree about the best decision in a given ethical situation.  But this isn't the fundamental problem in implementing moral reasoning in robots.

Even if we could come up with robots who could write brilliant Supreme Court decisions, there would be a basic problem with putting black robes on a robot and seating it on the bench.  As most people will still agree, there is a fundamental difference in kind between humans and robots.  To avoid getting into deep philosophical waters at this point, I will simply say that it's a question of authority.  Authority, in the sense I'm using it, can only vest in human beings.  So while robots and computers might be excellent moral advisers to humans, by the nature of the case it must be humans who will always have moral authority and who make moral decisions. 

If someone installs a moral-reasoning robot in a rest home and lets it loose with the patients, you might claim that the robot has authority in the situation.  But if you start thinking like a civil trial lawyer and ask who is ultimately responsible for the actions of the robot, you will realize that if anything goes seriously wrong, the cops aren't going to haul the robot off to jail.  No, they will come after the robot's operators and owners and programmers—the human beings, in other words, who installed the robot as their tool, but who are still morally responsible for its actions. 

People can try to abdicate moral responsibility to machines, but that doesn't make them any less responsible.  For example, take the practice of using computerized credit-rating systems in making consumer loans.  My father was a loan officer at a bank in the 1960s before such credit-rating systems came into widespread use.  He used references, such bank records as he had access to, and his own gut feelings about a potential customer to decide whether to make a loan.  Today, most loan officers have to take a customer's computer-generated numerical credit rating into account, and the job of making a loan is sometimes basically a complicated algorithm that could almost be executed by a computer. 

But automation did not stop the banking industry from running over a cliff during the housing crash of 2007.  Nobody blamed computers alone for that debacle—it was the people who believed in their computer forecasts and complex computerized financial instruments who led the charge, and who bear the responsibility.  The point is that computers and their outputs are only tools.  Turning one's entire decision-making process over to a machine does not mean that the machine has moral authority.  It means that you and the machine's makers now share whatever moral authority remains in the situation, which may not be much.

I say not much may remain of moral authority, because moral authority can be destroyed.  When Adolf Hitler came to power, he supplanted the established German judicial system of courts with special "political courts" that were empowered to countermand verdicts of the regular judges.  While the political courts had power up to and including issuing death sentences, history has shown that they had little or no moral authority, because they were corrupt accessories to Hitler's debauched regime.

As Anglican priest Victor Austin shows in his book Up With Authority, authority inheres only in persons.  While we may speak colloquially about the authority of the law or the authority of a book, it is a live lawyer or expert who actually makes moral decisions where moral authority is called for.  Patrick Lin, one of the ethics authorities cited in the Quartz article, realizes this and says that robot ethics is really just an exercise in looking at our own ethical attitudes in the mirror of robotics, so to speak.  And in saying this, he shows that the dream of relieving ourselves of ethical responsibility by handing over difficult ethical decisions to robots is just that—a dream. 

Sources:  The Quartz article "Can We Trust Robots To Make Moral Decisions?" by Olivia Goldhill appeared on Apr. 3, 2016 at http://qz.com/653575/can-we-trust-robots-to-make-moral-decisions/.  (I thank my wife for pointing it out to me.)  The statistic about the number of aged people in Japan is from http://www.techinsider.io/japan-developing-carebots-for-elderly-care-2015-11, and my information about Hitler's political courts appears on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum at https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005467.  Victor Lee Austin's Up With Authority was published in 2010 by T&T Clark International.