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...
Just looking at the titles I expect something similar in quality to articles debunked here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09866
Another organization is the quality control department of a manufacturer. They also tend to report independently to top management, and they function similarly.
I'm reluctant to engage further because it seems like an absurd line of reasoning.
I clicked on the second one with her name, and the main conclusion was that AI needs more government regulation, labor unionization, and yes, you guessed correctly, workplace diversity.
I begin to feel that AI is only a red herring here.
You've said that she didn't just leave Google instead of protesting because she didn't 'want to see the thing you [she] worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"'.
You was asked what she actually did at Google and you've come up with 'her work on AI ethics was much appreciated and celebrated' as a response.
Looks like she was not working 'so hard' on anything that can be of any use for building 'killer robots and war "minds"'. In fact, for building anything.
This looks like you've subtly dodged the complaint I raised by trying to insinuate that she doesn't have a right to express opinions aboht functions of Google she herself did not personally participate in. This leverages the information asymmetry in disclosure; we can't publicly discuss the bulk of her work and therefore you can suggest that there was none.
I find this to be no different from suggesting that she has no right to protest and therefore deserves to be run out. You're just trying to run the standard "she wasn't that important and therefore doesn't have credibility" playbook. Gross.
But despite the disingenuous argument, I'll accept it head on. I challenge the entire premise. I certainly can and do express opinions about my employer's involvement in weapons development and I am glad they are not doing it. I'd fight to avoid doing any more of it, and I'd be willing to resign over it. I don't work in AI, but my work supports any such system at Google and therefore I'd feel responsible to help prevent building killer robots in any capacity.
I, like many such employees, am both a shareholder and an employee in a company that claims to have an interest in a transparent and egalitarian corporate culture. This practice will naturally introduce friction between different parties and I expect us to work through them as fairly as possible. So I will not simply eject at the first sign of something I don't like. But if I feel that there is a line crossed while I was there strenuously objecting to that line and I haven't been given adequate reason to change my mind, I won't hesitate to resign.
I make these facts clear to folks when they hire me. If they don't like it, they shouldn't hire me. Hopefully you respect your own agency and intellect enough to give yourself similar license in your own life.