Whistleblowers Warn About the Dark Side of AI

I'm Emily Chang, and this is the Circuit. For as long as I've been covering tech, I've covered the resistance to it, the critics, and the whistleblowers who've turned up the volume. Doing this is incredibly risky because these companies are just so powerful they basically make you take a vow of silence to work there. It's called signing a

So this is.

Where the coats live and the chickens and the rabbits, And yeah, I couldn't imagine doing all of this living in the Bay Area, but I built this.

We're joined by two women who've also spoken out about tech. Timney Gabrew, founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and a former Google ethical AI researcher. She says she was fired, Google says she resigned. UCLA professor Sofia Noble wrote the book algorithms of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism. Together, you might say the three of them make up a

At what point did you realize I need to speak up, like enough is enough?

I saw her on Twitter rab.

And we actually spoke before before I spaking.

Yeah, So, after Pinterest pushed me out, I knew at some point that I was going to talk about my story. I didn't realize it was going to be so soon. But Pinterest, along with many other companies who posted statements after George Floyd's murder about how.

They stood with their black employees.

And what was particularly galling for me was I knew the team who would have drafted that statement, and so I felt I had to say something.

Yeah, And to me, didn't you call I Foma the day before it all went down?

I was just at that point, I had been also tweeting about, like, you know, whistle blower pretection and being silenced in all of that and if you must sell whatever. I tweeted about whistle blower protection and was like, hey, I'm working on this thing, which ended up being the Tech Worker Book, right, And so she was describing to me the handbook that she was working on, and I was like, you know, I feel like they're really harassing me. She's like, you know, you gotta take notes and all

Taking so many people's input and all that.

Like, that was a few months before I got fired, Right, So what gave you the courage to speak up?

I don't know that anything gave me the courage. The way I've thought about speaking up always is what are you afraid of? And what would keep you from speaking up? And for me personally, the only thing that I've ever been afraid of was my mom passing away, and that happened, So honestly, what else do I have to lose?

How about you?

Two?

Yeah?

I think that for me, it's like what am I willing to lose in online? A position in my life, in my career right now.

To lose that.

And I was actually compared to a lot of people who have to think about putting food on the table kids, you know, they can't. I have been in situations in my life like, for instance, before I got my citizenship, when I had political asylum, I would never go to

I think you made a great point.

We have a lot of privilege sitting here, and I think it's important to acknowledge that I wrote shortly after coming forward about pinterest that if I had kids, if I had family who were on my health insurance, I never would have even hired an attorney while I was there, because I knew from the point I hired a lawyer what the end would be and I couldn't have risked that if I had people who dependent on me. So there is a level of privilege in even being able to say something.

Sophia, you've been critiquing the tech industry for years. What was it like on the outside watching their stories people?

I mean, I had so much respect and felt like, and still feel like, my work is in service of making it possible for you all to do what you've done in your careers, and also to be the person who holds up the studies and the research and says, you know, these things are happening, these things are real, and these are the people who pay the price, as well as millions of other people who look like us, who pay the price for the kinds of terrible.

Worker practices, labor practices, but also.

Product development that comes out of the tech industry. You know, I remember the night that to meet was being let go of Google. I'm going to put that generously. People were watching it happen and unfold because you were live tweeting what was happening, and I was watching, and I remember like sliding into your DMS and I was like, hey girl, are you okay?

And are you going to be all right? And we got you?

What do we need to do?

What do you need?

Do you need a fellowship like we've got to make sure that you can still pay your bills. I don't think I fully thought through that you were leaving Google, so you probably have money of many but at least

So if Yuma was working in the background every I feel like so many of them were working in the background on my behalf, Like you were finding lawyers, you know, writing letters and everything.

So there's a network.

Was this network?

If you will, Can you characterize what it's like being inside these companies and trying to raise these issues and the struggle of.

That, like are they trying to squash you?

Does it feel incredibly lonely? Oh?

Yeah?

My situation is unique in that, not that I experienced it very much, not unique, but in that it was written about. There's one particular situation where the company had been a call to task for years on elevating plantations as wedding venues. Plantations you would not elevate any other place where people were tortured and murdered as a wedding venue. And civil rights organization came to us said, hey, we want to work with you, but if you don't make this policy change, we are going to go to the

That because I was biased, is.

What my white male manager said in my performance review for it.

Ended the promotion of plantations.

That's that's correct, and you were criticized and I was criticized for it, specifically for being biased, is what he said. As if there's an unbiased position to take, Apparently there's a pro plantation stance that could have been taken that

Here's what's going on.

And there was this dissonance that they believed that my work was good enough to be on all things considered to be the one who's out there talking about the company. Because my work was good, my face was the right face for it. But I wasn't worth being paid and respected the way that others were to me.

What was it like agitating for the stuff that you were agitating or advocating for inside Google?

So, like two months after I joined, I would say, was the Google walkout?

Yeah?

And I sent this email being like I am so glad this is happening because I've only been here for two months and this is ridiculous, you know. And ever since then, I think I didn't really make friends and with the higher ups, you know, and I think we what the way I tried to do it at Google is me and Meg were always a duo, and so my co leead Meg was in trouble when I got in, and yeah, so I always went to her HR meetings with her and they're like, what are you doing?

Like I'm with her, you know.

And they're like, I'm complaining about all the issues she's facing when they asked me like what what should be better? And I and they're like, but what about you? And I said, look, that's going to be me in like two years. So we tried to go as a team and back each other up every time we complained about whatever it is, like gender discrimination, racial discrimination, et cetera.

And they didn't ding.

Me on my performance review because my manager was trying to protect us. But it always felt like they were waiting for something, because you know, we always get that policing and it was really exhausting, and so I felt like that they found that one thing when I, you know, with my paper.

Sofia, when it comes to sort of the broader state of tech workers.

Is history repeating itself? I think it's the same history. It's just a new industry.

There's this way of critiquing people who have something to say about technology, calling us ledites, right.

I mean, this is like a you know.

A group of people of workers who understood that new technological inventions were going to reshape the labor force and we're actually going to take away the creativity, the creative labor in fact that the Ledites did.

You know.

I find that to be so similar today that people who are saying, listen, so many of these products that are being brought to bear in the marketplace are not only harmful, but they they steal our creative imagination, they steal our human agency. They are you know, these are dangerous to humanity. We get kind of I think marked as some type of not innovative, not forward thinking.

You know, Luddites, and I think we're in fact that's a compliment.

I mean we are actually people who have, like many people who are trying to say some technological innovations are actually going to undermine workers, the quality of work, the nature of work, the creative expression and joy that also can be tied to work. They are going to flatten our human experiences in so many ways, rob people of

And this is global too, right, I mean, isn't aren't there workers propping up tech around the world? Yeah?

I mean we had an event a Dare called Stochastic Parents Day, which is about a paper that I got fired for, and Sophia and I were actually on a panel there with somebody whose name was A Richard, and he was one of the workers who was labeling the outputs of the models of open A models like chat GPT or these text image models, and he was talking about how traumatic it was, and he was detailing for us the PTSD that comes with it, and how much

Experienced and they have no resources to do that.

So it's similar to the extraction industry. It is global and it preys on vulnerable people.

Open AI was accused of using workers in Kenya, paying them less than two dollars an hour to make chat GBT less toxic. I asked the CTO about this, and she said, we chose this particular contractor because of their known safety standards, and since then they've stopped using them. This is difficult work and we recognize that, and we have mental and wellness standards.

This is a known tactic to offload to a third contractor so that you are not the one who is being held accountable.

So yeah, they borrowed that right from the fashion and just and other industries. So there are many industries that have done that. The tech industry has pulled a page right out of those playbooks. And I teach my students at ECLA about all.

Kinds of different social movements.

One of the things that people feel about what's happening with tech is that it's just kind of it's totalizing, it's a fata complete. These are the technologies that we have. They're here now, there's nothing we can do. We have to live with them, make the best of it. And of course, people who live during the era of the Transatlantic slave trade, people who lived in the Americas during the time of the period of enslavement also got up every day and got their kids ready for school. They

And also people who are oppressed.

Inside those systems come to accommodate in some ways because it is totalizing and overwhelming to live under those kinds of oppressive systems.

And there are.

Also people who seek to abolish who resist and are like absolutely not, no way, not in my lifetime, not in my children's, my grandchildren's.

I think we are, in fact.

All three of us the descendants of people who refused in one way or another.

And I think it's important to say we're not anti technology. My entire career was at Google, Facebook, Pinterest. I'm working on issues within the industry, but we're pro human dignity, and currently in the industry, unfortunately, human dignity is not even on the list of issues.

It's not there.

Algorithms are a complete mystery to most of us on the outside, a black box. You know, we know the recommending videos or targeting ads, but how are algorithms influencing us in ways that we are completely unaware of.

You know, sometimes I don't even know myself right when you're on social media and you're super angry and you're responding to everything versus not, you don't realize that that's because the algorithms that they're using maximize for engagement of any kind, and when you're angry, you're engaging with the site more So, I feel personally, even as someone in this field, I'm still learning about all the different ways in which my day to day life is being influenced

Decisions like to release chat GPT.

Yes, I mean that so chat GPT absolutely is important and we should discuss it. But even that using that is a choice. Currently, using social media the companies that I worked for, using their product is a choice. But where algorithms are particularly dangerous is where we don't have a choice. There are algorithms that determine what kind of care you're going to get if you're black and you

So when chat GPT comes out and there is so much buzz so fast, what goes through your minds?

Eye roll so hard that COMPLI roll to the back of my head, you know, Like I wrote a paper about large LA models like two years ago, and most people didn't know what it was. I'm not surprised at the rate, I would say, of deployment, but I am surprised at the constant daily hype, the free pr that's being given some of these companies, completely uncritical right of dear claims like it's disheartening personally speaking, What are.

Your what are your biggest concerns about AI? Now that it's not in a lab at Google anymore, it is out and everybody knows about it.

What worries you most?

I think the thing that keeps me up at night is the amount of data that's collected on us every single day just by having a data collection device in our bag or our pocket, the phone, and all the kinds of things that we're interacting with, and the predictions that get made then from that data that's collected about

To me.

When you left Google, it sort of triggered this wave of agitation within you. Now were hearing that some Google employees begged for Bard to not be released.

They said it was a pathological line.

Is the tension building, you know?

Unfortunately, I would say that there was a moment that we had where people were speaking up, and now it's like backlash all the way down, and I feel like they're making the calculation that they don't even need to pretend anymore.

The tension is it building in like a progressive way, like a way that leads to progress, or.

So I think that we need regulation.

So perhaps that kind of momentum is building. More people are thinking about regulation. But in terms of worker protection and workers inside these organizations pushing back, they're facing so much backlash with a lot of the layoffs of these ethics teams at Microsoft, at Google, at Twitch.

I'm sure there's more too.

I mean, let's not even here's where policy as I'm not a computer scientist, I'm not an academic, but I know policy, and here's where policy makers are really dropping the ball.

We had an opportunity to move forward on something like healthcare and disentangling health care from employment. That's one piece that would allow people to speak up, because if your access to healthcare, if your family's access to healthcare isn't dependent on your employer, then you can talk about harms

Right, or just pushing the onus of.

Like control from being harmed to the individual. The thing that people forget is that so much of the R and D for these kinds of technologies is offloaded already it's the riskiest part of the business, and it's offloaded to the public. The public pays for the most dangerous dimensions of what the companies do because most of those companies have partnerships with academic labs and they get NSF National Science Foundation funding and other kinds of government funding

I mean, Silicon Valley got most of its money from the government. Right during World War two, and after that, right, like Elon Musk the amount of money California taxpayer money that he got, and they talk about, you know, pulling yourself up with the straps.

There's this perception that artificial intelligence is magic, but what's really happening.

There are human beings like the one who you mentioned who are tagging things. They're human beings who are ensuring that we, those of us in polite society, don't have to see the murders that are being captured, the beheadings that are being played live on Facebook or on YouTube or anyone else.

Someone is seeing that it's just not us, and.

They don't think it's magic.

The people who are doing the data labeling, the people who are content content moderation, and a lot of the people whose work is being stolen to train these models, like the artists whose images have been taken without any sort of attribution or payment, or the writers who you know, I was just at a conference listening to artists and writers talk about some of the issues that they see with these generative AI models, right, and what the future holds for them. And they don't see it as magic.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with convenience. We all appreciate convenience, but I don't want my convenience at the expense of another human being.

What's your long term view about how many jobs this will disappear and create? Because you know, we're talking about more not so great jobs, right the tagging of chat GPT, like, like, how do you see this playing out?

So I'm very worried about like the centralization of power that this type of technology is enabling. So if you whether you believe their claims or not, the claims of these companies or not right, what they're striving for is one model that does everything for you. You you want to go to a doctor, talk to a chatbot, a lawyer, talk to their chatbots. So what they're planning on having is they're like the super renter where everybody else builds.

On top of them.

They have APIs on top of one or two or three companies for everything. So this is not the world I want to live in.

So what does society even look like?

In this world?

Is there like a massive wealth gap? Is there on casts?

I mean?

Or is everyone happy because we're on universal basic income?

Not the last one because I mean they're not, but they could do that now. Like it's just like according to open I Ah, you know, utopia is just around the corner any day now, and we're all gonna be happy. I don't think that we're all gonna like work less. I think that's not what's going to happen. But I think that the work, certain people's work, I feel like

I think that the content moderation.

Requirements are going to be exploding with the amount of synthetic media that we have on the Internet, and so I feel like we'll have a lot more content moderation kind of jobs.

But then we know what those jobs are like. So I'm not looking, you know, I'm not optimistic.

There's a lot of doom mongering about the capabilities of AI.

For the people who are scared, what do you want them to know?

They're not wrong wrong, that's right, they're not wrong.

Well, I mean, I would say that degradation is a really helpful word in this, because people have a sense that something is off and something is going to be lost with these technologies. I will tell you right now in classrooms around the country, and I'm seeing this already in our university system. Some people think something like generative AI helps level the playing field.

So there's a lot of mythologies.

Right if you're not a great writer and you're in the sciences or you're a math student, you don't have to worry about that when you're those English classes. Now because you've got open AI is going to help you write those essays.

What is lost?

Imagine not learning the things that you learn when you put yourself in an environment to learn something. So I think we will have a transformation in the field of education that will not be what we want.

I don't think it will help us think critically.

A lot of us are doing experience experiments where we're looking up certain types of things where we are subject matter experts and we know a lot about that, and we're asking open AI and it's giving us terrible answers.

That look good enough.

And so the loss of expertise, the loss of knowledge, those kinds of things are very important in societies that we have reliable information that we can all act upon as voters, as parents, as a residence, as people who live in communities.

Fake it so you make it, and it's making it right now.

I'm predicting the wrong things.

One of the things that I think is important here misinformation disinformation have been a focus of mine is the shrimping of context, and that's one of my main concerns with chat, GPT and AI bots like that, because.

We're losing, we're not gaining that.

Yeah, because it's one thing, I think to present a bad answer. It's another thing to present it as though it's the only answer, and without showing your sources or anything else, so that if you're the person on the receiving end of that answer, you can say, Okay, well this came from this source. I can look that source up and make my own determination.

You know, a bunch of people sign this letter, including Elon Musk, calling for a pause on the development of AI.

What was your take on that?

I mean, we had to write a statement responding to it because it really confused the conversation. A lot of people are like, great, that's what you've been asking for, this is what you want, and we had to put a stake in the ground and be like, no, we are different from those people.

We called it unhinged.

Yeah, yeah, it was completely unhinged because some of the things that all three of us are discussing right now are not sci fi scenarios. We're talking about people losing

We don't even know how it's gonna Oh.

No, they just want to slow down so they can get catch up. That is like my take on it is that not only do they are they trying to positive as magic, but they're doing that as a tactic so they can catch up because they're behind.

Well he started Elon Musk started this truth Chat truth GPT thing now right right after he's signed saying stop, It's like, oh, I have.

My own things.

Know. What they mean is slow down so we can catch up, Sophia, to use your term algorithms of oppression algorithms supercharged on AI.

Given all the bias and misrepresentation and misinformation issues that already exist, how much damage could we do?

What could the fallout be?

We are already doing a lot of damage.

We have products in this industry, in the tech industry, that are made up and launched out of the public, no oversight, no one checking for whether these are going to do damage until the kinds of communities of researchers and technologists that we're part of start to end. Community organizers and journalists start exposing the evidence of harm.

AI is so much more than chatbots. What are all the other ways that AI is developing. I mean, we're talking about surveillance and facial recognition and all of these other things that are very.

Consequential surveillance in ways that people can't opt out of and people can't defend themselves from. They are people who have been arrested because their face came up in a police database where it wasn't actually their face.

There's no way.

To opt out of being included in this database. And there are no guardrails for both the police departments that are buying this technology using our dollars, our taxpayer dollars, and then the companies that are scraping this content from the Internet. There are no guardrails anywhere, and actual people are paying the price.

And by the way, you've got a handful of companies that are based in Silicon Valley deciding what the next tech platform will be.

Where most of the people who work there are white men.

Let's be honest, are you thinking to yourselves like here we are, here, we've been going.

And the consequences of that are really mundane in ways, like maybe this app can help me track my period better than I could in my diary, so I use that, and now law enforcement has about door to come and arrest me because it might look like I'm planning to have an abortion from some type of analysis of my period.

Trekker.

So that seems so sci fi, but that's actually happening today, right, very mundane kinds of ways. We do these things in education where students have to use these learning management systems and upload papers and give comments and do all of these things in these tech systems, and then algorithms are run on them that predict which students are going to

Well, you know who that is.

It's not somebody like me who had to work thirty hours a week to get through undergrad his parents couldn't pay for them to go to college.

I would definitely fail the.

Statistical model right of who the most idea kind of university that seems so banal. These kinds of things are really they're not part of the doomsday machine, but they actually are the kinds of things that, even if you don't think you're ever going to get entrapped in a mugshot database, you care about whether your kids get an

You've got to be kidding me. There couldn't be more snake oil to be sold. So everybody's in on this.

Everybody needs to be concerned because everybody could potentially be harmed.

The issues that you're raising sound like what a lot of the tech leaders say they care about. Reid Hoffman and Sam Altman and Sacha Nadella and so Darkachai and even Elon Musk who said we want AI that benefits society.

Where do you diverge?

I mean, I don't think we say what they say. I don't think.

I mean I would say, I think there are a lot of types of AI that should be abolished, that should not be in the marketplace, that are making claims that are unfounded and are actually proven to be harmful. And I'm not convinced in fact that AI can be used for good.

I'm not one of those people.

I also think that they have adopted the language of the people who have been raising the criticisms and have incorporated those criticisms and then put themselves in charge of solving the very problems that they're being critiqued for.

So this is where you know.

To me, and you know, I always laugh with her because I remember the day that Google announced that it was forming like an ethical.

AI team, and I was like, am I being punked?

Like there's just no way in the world that the people who have been denying that their products are harmful for a long time are now in charge of addressing that there are some harms. It's profitable for them to look socially responsible. Companies have been trying to put posit themselves as socially responsible at the point that consumers start to be concerned about the lack of social responsibility of those companies.

But I don't think that we're actually saying the same thing at all.

What's been more communication, like with tech workers on the inside of Google and Apple and other companies where there has been organizing.

It seems like everybody we've been communicating with has been getting fired. We have you back channels, and we have some kind of channels of organizing. But my sense is that right now a lot of people are scared because of the layoffs, and a lot of people are Yeah, So that's that's been my sense recently.

Should people speak up, walk out, leave if they see injustice? Is there any way to communicate your concerns internally effectively.

I'm glad you asked that because my view is and always has been, no one should make themselves a martyr.

I don't believe in martyrdom.

I think if you feel the conviction, if you are able to because of your familial situation, your financial situation, to speak up, then you should. But we live in a capitalist society. Capitalism all has us all by the throat, and so if you need money to shelter, to have shelter, to have healthcare, to have food, to care for your family, I don't want anyone to risk all of that because

You help get the Silence No More Act pasted in California. You've got the attention of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Yep.

This means that companies can't use NDAs to prevent employees from speaking out about certain things.

Right.

Is that enough protection?

I mean it's protection for forty million people for both non disclosure and non disparagement agreements. So it's more than existed before. But the work is continuing. A similar bill

You also created the Tech Workers Handbook R What can workers find?

There?

Resources on how to seek legal help, resources on how to speak with reporters. One of the things that I've talked about a lot is one of the advantages and privileges that I had when I came forward is I had experienced speaking with people like you. It's not easy to sit down and talk about a traumatic experience you've had, and it's not easy to sit down and answer questions

The circuit continues after this quick break.

So is regulation the only way to keep us in check.

It's the most important way because it's the way that impacts the largest number of people, and we want everyone operating under the same framework and protections. We may be shareholders of a company, but we're small fry. I mean the banks, the folks who are really making the decisions because they own one to three percent of a company, They could step in, and they should step in because long term their investments are impacted by the harms that these companies are perpetrating.

Yeah, I would say just a build on that too.

Workers should be looking at their pensions and where their investments and their four one ks are. We remember there were so many people I remember just two decades ago who were organizing around making sure that they were not investing in prisons or in military weapons and other kinds of things. They did not want to see their pensions

If you had one year to run these companies, what would you do.

I like my life here raising my goats and chickens, so I wouldn't. But I am happy to continue the work that I'm doing now. I mean there's so much harm, like I said, that's been done that before you figure out the plan for what's next.

There needs to be repair work that's done.

So what does that look.

Like actually paying people for the harms that they've endured, whether that's consumers who have been harmed by privacy violations or the workers who have been harmed through wage theft and asking physical harm to themselves.

Let's say your Google's search algorithm is populating some kind of disinformation about you, and you can't get that off of the search engine and it's precluding you from employment.

You need repair from that.

You can't just submit online a request for Google to take that down. They have hundreds of thousands of takedown requests that are never going to be attended to.

So you need to have these spaces, these.

Intermediaries where people can go and say I have been harmed, this product is faulty. There needs to be liability both for the company, but also I need to be able to litigate or have some type of repair.

We don't really have.

The laws on the bark action so that people can in fact get the remedies that they need through courts. We also don't have a judiciary that is properly educated yet so on how.

To resolve some of these things.

So we need human and civil rights laws that give people the kinds of protections that they need to and when really, I think Congress is not caught up with the digital age and the kinds of harms and civil rights violations.

So this is also another place of enforcement.

So civil rights for the digital age, which is absolutely been calling for.

What about you to meet?

If you could go back to Google and you were in charge for a year, what would you do.

I wouldn't put out a chat bought version of a search engine, you know. I think open Ai can do that, because that's the only thing really people expect from them. Search is not their bread and butter, and so I think that, in my opinion, Google just trying to act like they're also innovative or.

Something like that.

I don't know.

They wanted to be in the hype cycle too, I suppose, and they just put something out there, I would say, Okay, this is our bread and butter. Search is our bread and butter. You know, we have to maintain the integrity of the information ecosystem. As a researcher. Also, I think a lot of researchers in computer science can.

Do something, can choose to do something different.

There was just a professor at University of Chicago who created a tool called Glaze that artists can use to when so that when they put out their work, they can't be used to mimic their styles. So it fools tools like Dally and some of the other texts to image generators. So, because you know, when artists are in these lawsuits, it takes years for their course to decide, they don't have time to wait for this kind of stuff. So tech workers could actually choose to use their skills

So policymakers too, who are bought and paid for by the companies that they're supposedly legislating against and meant to be regulating.

When when you look at.

The spending that Google and others do in campaigns that they make sure is fifty to fifty on either side, they're funding absolutely everyone. Who is it that we can turn to as a champion when they're all accepting money from these companies.

So are we stuck?

I mean, is there a glimmer of hope?

Like, yeah, absolutely, we know we know many how many people who are glimmers of hope.

And you know, it's interesting because ten years ago it was very hard to have this conversation.

So we know that a lot of envelopes are being pushed and that we're even in a space to bring these conversations up and have them understood. So of course there's lots of hope. I mean, this is why I think, you know, scholars and journalists and tech workers and artists, we're able to make those conversations legible to everyday pe And to me, that is incredibly hopeful.

If the CEOs of Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple, Facebook, we're in this room right now.

What would you say to them?

Nothing?

That nothing that would be super effective if their gcs weren't also here, Because some of these CEOs may want to do things differently, but they have legal counsel who's ensuring they don't. And so what I have found, even when I've been in conversations with CEOs and decision makers is they are looking to the people who really make the decisions, and those are the ones who are mitigating for risk. And right now, it's not a risk to harm workers, it's not a risk to harm consumers. It's

Well it was to say, I mean are of course, but also the fines that they pay to when they violate the law, and you know, the court cases that they settle.

It's like pocket.

Lint to these companies.

It's not their money.

So for sure we know that CEOs, if they were personally liable in any way for what happens in those companies, well it would be slim pickens for who would want to be the CEO of most of these companies. I think that if American tech companies in particular really wanted to seal their legacy and reputations, they would take these conversations to heart and say, all right, you know, we

I also want to add really quickly, I think some of the responsibility is on your industry as well, because we have living Hagary Graffi's that are done about these people. Like we were watching the harms, we're sometimes talking about

Yeah, fair point.

It matters what stories are told, how the stories are told, who's telling the stories, whose voices are lifted, So thank you for lifting your voices with us today. It sounds in many ways like this is an impossible problem to solve.

Is it impossible?

No, we're I mean, we're providing solutions there, and we're we are following the work of many, many, many other people who are not represented here, who are never asked to be on camera, who are never asked for a quote, and you just have to look at the work that they're doing, and the work that communities are asking for and that people are stepping up and saying is important and necessary.

If things don't change, what does the future look like?

I think, you know, I'm worried about the fundamental remaking of society the same way it happened with cars. For instance, I was just reading this book called The Road to Nowhere by Paris Marx talking about that that in the beginning, you know, in like the nineteen twenties, nineteen tens, it was not okay when cars killed people, people protested people, you know, out in the streets. And now it's completely normalized and we have a completely different sort of society

There, where by the time we.

Regulate things, the society has already been remade, you know, in ways that we weren't you know, that we don't want and then normalized.

Yeah, we are pummeling toward a type of global inequality that will be very hard to come back from, and that will also have incredible consequences, social consequences. You know. I think of us and so many other women like us and people like us as like the canaries and the coal mine. You know, we're we're like chirping, we're trying, and then we're gonna go silent.

And what that.

Means is we're dead because the fumes have taken us over. And that that part seems so tragic and unnecessary when we know that there's enough evidence to pivot in other directions.

If things do change for the better, what could the future look like?

Oh man, I was just looking outside at the goats and thinking that my dream, Like what I want for my kids, what I want for everyone is work to not define your life. I want you to be able to make a living that enables you to do what brings you joy. If that's milking goats, if that's taking eggs from your chickens, like, that's what you should be doing.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's so much there's so much wealth in the world.

Really everybody could have a high quality of life.

Yeah, you know, like, let's spread a high quality of life for everyone.

I want.

I don't just want to save incredible world, a joyous world like you're talking about. I'm not sure if I would do the animals, but I'm just saying, like my urban city version of that, I want that for everybody's kids, you know, I want that for everybody's generations.

For everyone, for everyone. Thank you. That was amazing.

Pinterest said in a statement that it has quote introduced pay transparency tools for employees, and taken steps to continually monitor employee pay to ensure that we're achieving equal pay for comparable work. We've increased the percentage of women in leadership and continued to set goals for increasing diversity. The company set it's committed to ensuring that every employee feels quote empowered to raise any concerns about their work experience.