According to reports, former Google employee Meredith Whittaker will soon join the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as an artificial intelligence policy adviser.For Google, Wang Taike is a very unusual female former employee.
Wang Taike’s most famous move during his work at Google was to organize a protest by Google employees in 2018. Twenty thousand employees expressed dissatisfaction with the way Google handled sexual harassment of internal executives. Subsequently, Wang Taike left Google, and she claimed that Google deliberately retaliated against her and other organizers.
FTC is in the process of hiring Wang Taike. She will participate in the formulation of the regulatory system for US artificial intelligence and large technology companies in the future.
On November 3, Wang Taike himself confirmed the news and announced that he would join the FTC as a senior consultant for artificial intelligence. She posted on Twitter that she would maintain a humble attitude and learn from Lina Khan, Chairman of the Trade Commission and her excellent team.
According to a report by an authoritative technology media, the official trade committee has not officially announced the appointment, and the background investigation of Wang Taike does not seem to be over yet. After all recruitment procedures are completed, Wang Taike will bring rich work experience in the technology industry to FTC. From 2006 to 2019, she has been working at Google, and her work is also related to the ethical issues of artificial intelligence.
In addition to organizing the aforementioned protests, Wang Taike is also an activist within Google. She called on Google to stop using artificial intelligence technology for military purposes in the U.S. military. In addition, she opposed Google’s internal ethical issues review report, believing that these reports are superficial. The article did not respond to the problems the company really faced.
When leaving Google, Wang Taike said that it is clear that Google is not a place where she can continue to work for the social responsibility of technology.
Prior to this, Wang Taike had also helped solve problems in the field of public administration. For example, she once participated in an algorithm working group in New York City, and her main job was to ensure that the various automated systems in New York City are fair and fair in use, can be properly supervised, and maintain transparency. However, after New York City completed the project and released the report, Wang Taike bombarded the project as a waste of time. She and some members of the working group pointed out that the New York City report did not include some objections.
The newly appointed chairman of the Trade Commission, Lena Han, has announced that in the future, it will focus on technology giants and anti-monopoly rectification activities. Before, the American e-commerce giant Amazon even asked Lenahan not to participate in antitrust investigations against the company, mainly because she had published views on the spin-off of Amazon in the past.
In the past few years, the FTC and the Department of Justice, another federal government’s antitrust agency, launched a series of antitrust investigations against technology giants. Some investigations have progressed quite difficultly. After Lenahan became the chairman, the Trade Commission began to recruit. More experts enter to enhance professional work ability.
Foreign media pointed out that the joining of the FTC by the technology “veteran” like Wang Taike has released a signal that the FTC is determined to rectify the American technology giants. These practitioners with a wealth of scientific and technological knowledge, they have access to Google, Amazon,AppleWith first-hand experience working with companies such as Meta (former Facebook), their voices of internally changing corporate ethics have been largely ignored, but they are likely to make a difference in new positions in government regulators.