COMPUTING PIONEERS GIVE SUPPORT TO BIDEN
Criticize Trump’s immigration policies as threat to research
Two dozen award-winning computer scientists, in a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said Friday that they were endorsing Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
The scientists — including John Hennessy, executive chair of Google’s parent company, Alphabet — are all winners of the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.
In a group interview, four of the scientists said the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration rules were a threat to computer research in the United States and could do long-term damage to the tech industry, which for decades has been one of the country’s economic engines.
“The most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students, but now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsewhere,” said one of the scientists who organized the endorsement, David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Turing winners are the latest members of the scientific community to find their political voice as the election nears. The research journal Scientific American also endorsed Biden this week, citing, among other criticisms, Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and his skepticism of climate change. It was the first time in its 175 years that the publication endorsed a presidential candidate.
The Turing winners’ endorsement — also a first for them — was made against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with the tech industry. Several federal agencies are investigating the business practices of tech’s biggest companies, and the Justice Department could bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month.
A number of large tech companies, including Google and Facebook, have often spoken out on immigration issues. A week after Trump’s inauguration, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined protests at San Francisco International Airport over the administration’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. Days later, Brin and Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, spoke at a similar protest by the company’s employees at its headquarters in Silicon Valley.
The collective statement by 24 of the 35 living American Turing winners, including senior scientists at Google, Facebook and Microsoft, lends considerable gravitas to industry concerns about Trump’s immigration polices. Among them are researchers who have invented technologies that became the building blocks of the global internet.
Vinton Cerf, for example, helped invent computer networking technology that is fundamental to how computers interact. Now a vice president at Google, he also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2005. Yann Lecun, the top artificial intelligence scientist at Facebook, helped develop techniques that power everything from the vision systems in self-driving cars to talking digital assistants like Siri. Ronald Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and Martin Hellman, a Stanford University professor emeritus, helped invent the encryption method used in ecommerce.
Patterson and Hennessy, who is also a former president of Stanford University, shared the 2017 Turing award for ideas that underpin 99 percent of all new computer chips.
All 35 American Turing winners were invited to join the endorsement. Some did not respond because of poor health, and some declined to participate, at least in part because they did not want to pull their employers — whether companies or universities — into a politically charged situation, Patterson said.
Metz writes for The New York Times.