'There was all sorts of toxic behaviour': Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI's dangers and big tech's biases

'It feels like a gold rush," says Timnit Gebru. "In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it's humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that." Gebru is talking about her specialised field: artificial intelligence. On the day we speak via a video call, she is in Kigali, Rwanda, preparing to host a workshop and chair a panel at an international conference on AI. It will address the huge growth in AI's capabilities, as well as something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power. This gathering, the clunkily titled International Conference on Learning Representations, marks the first time people in the field have come together in an African country – which makes a powerful point about big tech's neglect of the global south. When Gebru talks about the way that AI "impacts people all over the world and they don't get to have a say on how they should shape it", the issue is thrown into even sharper relief by her backstory. In her teens, Gebru was a refugee from the war between Ethiopia, where she grew up, and Eritrea, where her parents were born. After a year in Ireland, she made it to the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, and from there to Stanford University in northern California, which opened the way to a career at the cutting edge of the computing industry: Apple, then Microsoft, followed by Google. But in late 2020, her work at Google came to a sudden end. As the co-leader of Google's small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed "intelligence" is based on huge data sets that "overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations". Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired. What all this told her, she says, is that big tech is consumed by a drive to develop AI and "you don't want someone like me who's going to get in your way.