All posts tagged: Google

The Ever-Shrinking Transistor and the Invention of Google

Published by Matt Ridley

Innovators are often unreasonable people: restless, quarrelsome, unsatisfied, and ambitious. Often, they are immigrants, especially on the west coast of America. Not always, though. Sometimes they can be quiet, unassuming, modest, and sensible stay-at-home types. The person whose career and insights best capture the extraordinary evolution of the computer between 1950 and 2000 was one such. Gordon Moore was at the centre of the industry throughout this period and he understood and explained better than most that it was an evolution, not a revolution. Apart from graduate school at Caltech and a couple of unhappy years out east, he barely left the Bay Area, let alone California. Unusually for a Californian, he was a native, who grew up in the small town of Pescadero on the Pacific coast just over the hills from what is now called Silicon Valley, going to San Jose State College for undergraduate studies. There he met and married a fellow student, Betty Whitaker. As a child, Moore had been taciturn to the point that his teachers worried about it. Throughout …

Facebook Has a Right to Block ‘Hate Speech’—But Here’s Why It Shouldn’t

Published by Brian Amerige

The article that follows is the first instalment of “Who Controls the Platform?”—a multi-part Quillette series authored by social-media insiders. Our editors invite submissions to this series, which may be directed to pitch@quillette.com. In late August, I wrote a note to my then-colleagues at Facebook about the issues I saw with political diversity inside the company. You may have read it, because someone leaked the memo to the New York Times, and it spread outward rapidly from there. Since then, a lot has happened, including my departure from Facebook. I never intended my memos to leak publicly—they were written for an internal corporate audience. But now that I’ve left the company, there’s a lot more I can say about how I got involved, how Facebook’s draconian content policy evolved, and what I think should be done to fix it. *     *     * My job at Facebook never had anything to do with politics, speech, or content policy—not officially. I was hired as a software engineer, and I eventually led a number of product teams, …

Inside a Google Summit on Diversity and Inclusion

Published by Joseph Klein

How could any reasonable person oppose diversity and inclusion in the workplace? Answer: Because “diversity and inclusion” in the work context is actually a euphemism for something else. During an October 30 summit held by Google, attendees listened to a panel discussion titled, “Beyond Hype, How Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace Maximizes Your Bottom Line.” The panelists’ comments amounted to a very irregular definition of “diversity and inclusion:” A desire for equal outcomes among all identity groups, and disadvantaging individuals in overrepresented demographic categories. Adam Berlew, head of Americas Marketing for Google Cloud, moderated the panel, which featured guests Joanna Dees, VP of educational programs at Women in Cable Telecommunications; Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of the USA Today Network; Tom Kazmierczak Jr., head of diversity and inclusion at T. Rowe Price Associates; and Lori Rosenkopf, vice dean and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, undergraduate division. All participants advocated for changing workplace policies to increase the representation of women, people of color, and LGBT communities in the corporate world. There’s nothing wrong with increased representation of these groups. …