Google

Want greater diversity? Try being less fair

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within a company — the freedom to ask: ‘What if we’re wrong?’ A business culture that can attract and accommodate people with complementary talents benefits everybody. So even if you don’t believe Damore’s theories (in which case you probably shouldn’t hire any systems geneticists), he’s surely right to speak up if he believes the complex question of diversity has been hijacked by wishful dogma. It should be the province of first-rate scientific inquiry, not second-rate social theory. If the diversity agenda is pursued badly, the cure may well be worse than

The hormone that makes you a liberal halfwit

People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn. More specifically, they are deficient in oxytocin, a neuropeptide hormone sometimes known as the ‘cuddle drug’ because of its ability to turn normal human beings into simpering halfwits. Psychologists ran a series of studies in which Germans were asked how much money they would like to give to, say, Tariq and Mohammed, who have just arrived here from Syria. ‘Nothing at all, unless they intend to spend it on a ticket home’ is of course the correct response, and indeed many Germans initially concurred with this. However, after they were

Don’t like our diversity agenda? You’re fired

Earlier this week, a technology website published an internal memo written by a Google employee called James Damore criticising the company’s efforts to diversify its workforce. This is ‘where angels fear to tread’ territory. The American technology sector has come under fire for years for failing to hire and promote enough women and Google is being investigated by the US Department of Labor for allegedly underpaying its female employees. What makes this memo particularly controversial is that Damore takes Google to task for discriminating in favour of women. He begins by saying that he is pro-diversity and accepts that sexism is one of the reasons women don’t constitute 50 per

A tale of two Valleys

Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of ordinary houses and picket fences, clustered in villages notable only for the mega-companies they serve: Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) or Mountain View (Google). There’s the odd charm, but it’s generally clean, sterile, young, overpriced. Life here, they say, is five years ahead of everywhere else. Well, if that’s the case, I’ve seen the future and it is a bit disturbing. The surface ordinariness of the Valley hides a deep utopianism. In the late 1960s San Francisco was the home of both hippie counterculture and the early computer communities. Both

The Google ‘anti-diversity’ memo isn’t anything of the sort

Earlier this week, a technology website published an internal memo written by an employee of Google called James Damore criticising the company’s efforts to diversify its workforce. This is where-angels-fear-to-tread territory. The America technology sector has come under heavy fire for a number of years for failing to hire and promote enough women and Google is currently being investigated by the US Department of Labour for allegedly under-paying its female employees. But what makes this memo particularly controversial is that Damore takes Google to task for discriminating in favour of women. He begins by saying he is pro-diversity and accepts that one of the reasons women don’t constitute 50 per cent of

Portrait of the week | 29 June 2017

Home In preparation for the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the Government, after weeks of negotiations, bought the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons by promising to spend a billion or two pounds in Northern Ireland on broadband and other good things. In reply to expostulations from the Opposition, Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the DUP, told the Commons: ‘We might publish all the correspondence and conversations we had in 2010 with Labour front-benchers, and in 2015 with Labour front-benchers, and indeed also the Scottish National party, because some of the faux outrage we have heard is hypocrisy.’ Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party,

Rory Sutherland

Why driverless showers are key to the housing crisis

Although it is commonly assumed that faster-than-sound passenger travel died with Concorde, this isn’t quite true: it overlooks the Caledonian Sleeper. With a few whiskies inside you, this is as close as you can get to teleportation. Yes, according to the timetable it takes about eight-and-a-half hours between Perth and London, but as you are asleep for eight of them, this makes for a supersonic speed of 900 miles per conscious hour. Quite simply, if you are asleep, or otherwise productively or pleasurably engaged, travel time isn’t that important. And if you accept this principle, it becomes clear that Google and Tesla’s Elon Musk have missed an opportunity to really

What the papers say: Why Google deserves its record £2.1bn fine

Google’s profits have soared in recent years. Now the company has been slapped with a fine to match, with the European Commission ordering the company to pay out £2.1bn, having ruled Google favoured its own shopping services in customers’ searches. Despite the huge fine, there’s little sympathy for the company’s plight in today’s newspapers: The Sun has a surprise in store for readers today – an editorial praising the European Union. The paper backs the European Commission’s fine as both ‘long overdue and richly deserved’. The paper says that the case typifies Google’s ‘arrogance’, and that the search company is also guilty of swerving ’its responsibilities as a publisher’, while YouTube –

Big money, big data and the dead cat strategy

In his new book Move Fast and Break Things, the American academic Jonathan Taplin makes a decent case that, democratically speaking, the internet has gone awry. Tools and freedoms which originally promised to allow individuals to challenge the powerful, he argues, are instead exploited by the powerful to dodge the demands of society. He’s writing about copy-right and tax, mainly. But he could have been writing about political advertising. On the radio last weekend, my friend and colleague Lord Finkelstein (I don’t actually call him Lord Finkelstein) was talking about the skills of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Tory election mastermind. ‘Lots of election campaigns are taking place where you can’t

What the papers say: Are tech companies doing enough to tackle terror?

Amber Rudd has vowed to ‘call time’ on tech companies who are giving terrorists ‘a place to hide’. The Home Secretary’s comments come after it emerged that Westminster attacker Khalid Masood was sending encrypted message on WhatsApp in the lead-up to the attack; Rudd is ‘right to read them the Riot Act’, says the Sun, which ups the criticism of WhatsApp in its editorial this morning. The paper says that if tech companies don’t start behaving then ‘there will be no alternative’ but for the Government to bring in new legislation to force them to co-operate with the security services. After all, when Rudd says that companies like WhatsApp are giving the terrorists

Portrait of the week | 23 March 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that on 29 March she would send a letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, triggering the process of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. A summit of EU leaders was convened for 29 April, with the aim of briefing its negotiator, Michel Barnier. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, elicited the support of the Scottish Parliament for her policy of seeking a second referendum on Scottish independence ‘within a short time of’ Brexit. Mrs May had dismissed her request, saying: ‘Now is not the time.’ Ms Sturgeon said an

Martin Vander Weyer

Google still needs to try a lot harder to do the right thing

Shortly before agreeing, early last year, to pay token back taxes on a decade’s worth of UK-generated profits, Google also abolished its global slogan ‘Don’t be evil’. Instead it adopted a code of conduct that urged employees to ‘do the right thing’ — but at least in one important respect, they didn’t. Marks & Spencer, HSBC, Audi and numerous other top brands found their banner adverts displayed alongside a variety of YouTube hate videos which Google had failed to exclude, apparently because it did not have sufficient resources to monitor all the video content that was being uploaded at the rate of 400 hours per minute. For fear of losing

Is this the American Houellebecq?

I Hate the Internet is not so much a novel as a wildly entertaining rant. Jarett Kobek is a self-published former software engineer who has been hailed as the Michel Houellebecq of San Francisco — a city whose tech-era hypocrisies he doesn’t so much as satirise as carpet-bomb with excrement. Kobek lacerates so many aspects of western culture that we may as well alphabetise them as follows: Advertising; Alan Greenspan; the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire;Ayn Rand; the Bush family; Californians (in particular, their inability to understand the difference between irony and coincidence); the sacred literary cow David Foster Wallace; Doctor Who fans; Google; Lena Dunham’s TV show, Girls; literary

Google’s commitment is good news for Britain. But it doesn’t have much to do with Brexit

Google’s decision to employ an extra 3,000 people in London is undoubtedly great news for Britain. But it’s nonsense to try and tangle the company’s plans as being all – or, indeed, anything – about Brexit. Of course, it was only a matter of time before Google’s announcement was glimpsed through the Brexit prism. Everything is these days. Some have said the new jobs promised by Google and the firm’s £1bn investment is ‘despite’ the outcome of the referendum. In their coverage of the announcement, Bloomberg said tech firms had been left wondering ‘whether they’ll still be able to hire workers from overseas…after the country leaves the bloc’. This suggested Google’s announcement was something of a

Contours of the mind

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore knickers made out of second world war airmen’s silk escape maps. Maps certainly colonise our imaginations in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much of personal value can be lost in the creases and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And couples who often travel

What’s Twitter really worth?

Can Twitter be worth more than Deutsche? On Tuesday, as rumours swirled of possible bidders for the microblogging site, the market was valuing it at $20 billion, compared to $18 billion for the troubled German bank. That might be a reasonable assessment of their relative prospects, or it might be confirmation that social media valuations are always bonkers. You’ll gather from my tone that I’m no Twitter devotee, and am unconvinced by its attractions as a business: it has never made a profit in a decade of existence, has plateaued at around 300 million users (Facebook has 1.7 billion), done little to develop its original offering beyond attracting a global

If Deutsche Bank goes down without a bailout, I really will eat my hat

‘Can anyone seriously imagine the German state and corporate establishment allowing the bank that bears their country’s name to go down?’ I asked in February, adding rather bravely, ‘Of course they won’t.’ And that, I fear, makes my next question, ‘Am I about to eat my hat?’ Shares in Deutsche Bank have plunged to their lowest level since 1992 as the US Department of Justice seeks to impose a $14 billion fine relating to Deutsche’s issuance of mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 crisis, and rumours say Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out a state bailout. Deutsche boss John Cryan says the bank hasn’t asked for her help to fight its

Dancing with robots

Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected images from YouTube. The computer churned through them, and announced that it kept finding these strange things with furry faces. It had, in other words, discovered cats. Artificial intelligence has, all of a sudden, become the next big thing again. It is not so much sweeping across our world as seeping into it, with a combination of enormous computing power and the latest ‘deep learning’ techniques promising to give us better medical diagnoses, better devices, better recipes and better lives. Soon, it might even be able to give us new

The Spectator podcast: The memory gap. Is technology taking over our minds?

Smartphone ownership is predicted to hit 2.5 billion by 2019 and 60 per cent of internet traffic now comes through our mobile devices. But does the world becoming more reliant on handheld gadgets to guide us in day-to-day life come at a price? In her cover piece this week, Lara Prendergast claims that we are outsourcing our brains to the internet and that technology is taking over our minds. On this week’s Spectator podcast, Lara is joined by Isabel Hardman, Charlotte Jee, Editor of Techworld, and Professor Martin Conway, head of psychology at City University. On the podcast, Lara tells Isabel: ‘I do think it’s having an effect on me

Google isn’t racist – but it is filthy

Is Google racist?  That is the charge made in a short video in which someone types ‘three white teenagers’ and ‘three black teenagers’ into the Google images and finds that while the former brings up images of happy, smiling students, the latter brings up what appear to be police mugshots. Given that Google searches do to a certain extent reflect a user’s own past search history, I am not entirely sure what the video, which has gone viral, is supposed to prove. When I repeated the experiment it pulled up some mugshots of black teenagers – though no obviously police images – but it also brought up a large number