Meredith Whittaker, now the president of Signal, led the Maven protests in 2018 while working at Google as an AI researcher. When Google made the pledge to not renew its Project Maven contracts, Whittaker said she was happy about the decision, noting the company “should not be in the business of war.”
She’s not the only Googler who’s dissented. Former Google AI researcher and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton previously called for global governments to prohibit and regulate the use of AI in weapons. Another longtime and revered Google executive, Jeff Dean — now the chief scientist of DeepMind — previously signed a letter opposing the use of machine learning in autonomous weapons.