> I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.
Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.
I don't think that objecting to your company's AI work for DoD or plans to comply with Chinese internet search regulations fall under any of them.
What did the "Open Research Group" at Google actually build?
Have you made any effort to investigate who Meredith Whittaker is on your own?
Her work on AI ethics was much appreciated and celebrated precisely because she was a distinguished contributor. The cultural aversion to building weapons is not novel thing in that culture.
Typically when you see someone engaged in "technology ethics" their professional career is based on limiting or stopping the technology, rather than building or advancing the technology. See, for example, stem cell ethics. Companies don't typically set up adversarial organizations within themselves. A more usual approach is to set up temporary "red teams" to address specific issues.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/compliancedepartment.as...
Another organization is the quality control department of a manufacturer. They also tend to report independently to top management, and they function similarly.