Tech
Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates
Leah Feiger: Let’s invest.
Zoë Schiffer: They have that going for a while.
Leah Feiger: It wasn’t full Google, but it—
Zoë Schiffer: Somewhat there.
Leah Feiger: —had that vibe. To me, someone so on the outside of this in every single way, I know about these layoffs because they’ve been, A) so chaotic, but B) in some ways, needlessly so. Not to say that other tech companies aren’t firing scores of workers all the time. That feels like something we discuss on this podcast frequently, but this is happening with such a large runway and in a way that’s making employees feel so terrible about themselves.
Brian Barrett: Well, because it’s not just the layoffs, right? It’s also, even if you stay there, if you’re not culled from the herd, you are going to have to deal with this world in which you’ve got spyware on your laptops training AI to probably take your job at some point, right?
Zoë Schiffer: Explain that a little bit.
Brian Barrett: Meta announced, and this was more public, that they were going to put software on employee laptops that would monitor their keystrokes and how they move their cursors and basically how they do their job as Meta engineers and use that as training data for their own internal models to try to make their AI models better because they’re running out of other sources.
Zoë Schiffer: And could you opt out of that, Brian?
Brian Barrett: That’s a great question. I’m so glad you asked. You could not opt out.
Zoë Schiffer: I felt you didn’t know the answer to that one.
Brian Barrett: In fact, when an employee asked in a very public forum within Meta, “Hey, could we not do this?” Zoë, the response was?
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, absolutely you’re going to do this and shame on you for asking. And some of the employees who are staying, actually thousands of the employees who are staying, are getting drafted into the AI ranks. We published a piece today that was kind of about the morale inside the company, but also how there’s been this mad dash to use up perks and stipends that employees have. But one of the things that’s said at the end was that remaining employees are being asked to join AI teams. So whatever your job was previously, they’re internally getting drafted. You’re getting drafted into the AI ranks, now your job is going to look quite different.
Brian Barrett: That’s like 7,000 people.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes.
Leah Feiger: I’ve actually heard people use the word raptured.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh.
Leah Feiger: Isn’t that—
Zoë Schiffer: And I wish we had that in the story.
Leah Feiger: I’m so sorry, but raptured into other teams. All of a sudden one day they’ve just disappeared. After this layoff, has Zuckerberg and co proposed a sort of coherent leadership plan or proposal? What happens after this?
I’m torn on the price of the Movestyle, though. I love how affordable it is at $580, putting it within a more mainstream budget than I would have assumed. On the other hand, this is a very unique product, and I think higher-end specs might have been a better choice. This is a VA panel rather than IPS, and that means the color accuracy and saturation are OK, but not the best. Although it’s only rated for up to 250 nits of brightness, it topped out at 310 nits when measured against my colorimeter. But it’s not terribly bright, which could be a problem in a brightly-lit room. The display quality isn’t horrible, and this monitor isn’t made for professional video work.
And yet, in terms of the viewing experience, it doesn’t feel all that high-quality, either. For a similar price, you can get a more capable OLED monitor that’s brighter, faster, more colorful, and capable of HDR. But that doesn’t come with the adjustable, rolling stand. An even higher-end monitor would increase the price by at least a few hundred dollars. The lack of a touchscreen feels like a missed opportunity, too, especially since this could easily be used next to a desk or in a kitchen. There are just some cases where using your fingers is easier than using a remote.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Interestingly, Samsung does sell a more premium Movingstyle monitor that’s even touchscreen-enabled and has a higher refresh rate of 120 Hz for gaming. But it’s a smaller 27-inch panel, comes with a lower-resolution 1440p display, and costs significantly more at $1,200. Whew. Another handy feature of the pricier model is a built-in battery. That means when the cord is unplugged, it doesn’t just immediately die. Speaking of the length of the cord, that does end up being one of the limitations of this design as a whole.
In a lot of ways, that more expensive model feels like what a Movingstyle monitor should be. For my purposes, the larger 32-inch 4K panel matches my needs better.
LG has its own version of this that moves in that direction, the LG Smart Monitor Swing. It comes with a 4K panel, measures 32 inches, and has a screen that can handle touch inputs. At $1,000, it’s priced in between the two Movingstyle monitors. For Samsung, perhaps the solution would be to sell the adjustable stand separately, which would give you the ability to pair it with whatever monitor you want.
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An artificial intelligence (AI) research engineer is taking legal action against Google, claiming the company unlawfully dismissed them for internally raising concerns about its complicity in war crimes.
The engineer, who worked at Google DeepMind, used internal discussion forums, emails and flyers to question the company’s provision of cloud computing services and AI technologies to Israeli military forces, which have been credibly accused of committing genocide in Gaza.
After Google dropped its longstanding pledge to not develop AI-powered weapons and surveillance tools in February 2025, the engineer also signed a petition – alongside several hundred colleagues – calling for the company to reverse this decision.
Following this, the engineer was called into a meeting with Google’s human resources department, where they were “actively discouraged” from making any communications that either criticised the change to Google’s AI principles, or linked the company to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Following the engineer’s further dissemination of flyers and posters to colleagues, Google formally dismissed them in September 2025.
“Google fired me for stating the obvious: our work on AI was sold to facilitate genocide,” said the engineer, who is not sharing their name at this stage.
The legal claim – which alleges Google engaged in unfair dismissal, discrimination on grounds of belief and whistleblowing detriment – has been brought against the company in a UK employment tribunal.
Legal protections broken
The claim specifically states that the engineer was trying to raise the alarm about Google’s failure to comply with legal obligations around the prevention of genocide enshrined in international law, and that the company’s subsequent dismissal of them broke legal protections for whistleblowers.
It also claims that the engineer was discriminated against on the basis of their belief that no one should be complicit in war crimes.
Michael Newman, a lawyer at Leigh Day representing the engineer, said: “No one should go to work worried that they might be treated less favourably, let alone sacked, for saying that they should not be complicit in war crimes. This will be an important case in showing the protections employees are entitled to for speaking out about their employer’s actions, and use of their products by armies and countries involved in conflict.”
Computer Weekly contacted Google about the engineer’s treatment and subsequent legal challenge. “This account does not accurately reflect the facts, and we will not be commenting further at this time,” a Google DeepMind spokesperson told Computer Weekly.
They added that Google would not terminate an employee for sharing their opinions or engaging in constructive debate in line with their company policies.
In July 2025, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for the human rights situation in Palestine called for technology firms operating in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to immediately halt their activities, as part of a wider report about the role corporate entities have played in the Israeli state’s ongoing “crimes of apartheid and genocide”.
The report specifically highlighted how the “repression of Palestinians has become progressively automated” by the increasing supply of powerful military and surveillance technologies to Israel, including drones, AI-powered targeting systems, cloud computing infrastructure, data analytics tools, biometric databases and high-tech weaponry.
It added that if the companies supplying these technologies had conducted the proper human rights due diligence – including Google parent company Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Palantir – they would have divested “long ago” from involvement in Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
Union push
As part of efforts to end use of Google’s technology by the Israeli and US militaries, a significant number of Google DeepMind employees recently launched a unionisation bid.
On 5 May 2026, the UK-based employees – who are aiming to become the first frontier AI lab worldwide to unionise – sent a letter to management requesting recognition with the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite the Union. In a vote of CWU members at DeepMind, 98% backed the move.
“Google’s staff are right to raise the alarm about the firm’s involvement in conflict,” said Rosa Curling, co-executive director at tech-focused civil society group Foxglove. “Yet instead of listening to its employees, Google has sought to silence them.
“The engineer Foxglove is supporting tried to alert his colleagues to the terrible consequences of Google’s work for the IDF [Israeli Defence Force],” she said. “Together with others, he tried to restore the ethical policies on conflict and surveillance which Google abandoned last year.
“Instead of listening to his warnings, the firm hit back against this important act of internal whistleblowing by sacking him. It is little surprise that Google workers are seeking to unionise in the face of the firm’s callous hostility. Google must change course, listen to its employees, and end its support for military forces responsible for war crimes.”
Google recently agreed to let the US Department of Defense use its AI models for classified work, a move opposed by over 600 employees.
Google staff worry how the technology will be used given the deal could reportedly open the door to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of US citizens, red-line issues that previously saw the Pentagon impose restrictions on competitor Anthropic.
Google employees have long opposed the company’s sale of cloud technologies to the Israeli government. In September 2022, for example, Google workers and Palestinian rights activists called on the tech giant to end its involvement in the secretive Project Nimbus cloud computing contract, which involves the provision of AI and machine learning tools to the Israeli government.
Before this, workers from both Google and Amazon signed a letter in Ocotber 2021 condemning their involvement in Project Nimbus, which they claimed “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”.
The letter was signed by more than 90 Google and 300 Amazon workers, all anonymous, “because we fear retaliation”.
A Google spokesperson told Computer Weekly that the company respects every employee’s right to join a union, and that they do not treat employees differently if they do join one.
Numerous surveys show that businesses are failing to deliver a measurable return on their artificial intelligence (AI) investment. A big part of the problem, at least for Bernhard Schaffrik, principal analyst at Forrester, is that AI providers are failing to take into account the human impact of their technology.
“They completely ignored the human factor, and also the enterprise factor,” he told Computer Weekly during the CamundaCon 2026 conference in Amsterdam.
There is certainly a fear among employees that AI will take away their jobs. In its Building a pro-worker AI innovation strategy paper, published in 2025, the Trade Union Congress recommended that employers build a meaningful worker participation at every stage of the deployment of new AI technology to drive effectiveness of technology – from strategy development to problem definition, through to tender, application design and deployment.
While change management has always existed, Schaffrik points out that a big difference with AI – and specifically with generative AI – is that, because it’s so accessible, it usually starts as a boardroom discussion. “CEOs immediately understand the potential, so they have been pushing it even harder into their organisations,” he said.
In his experience, CEOs assume that people down the line who are in charge of change management, such as the human resources team, or the people in the business who are driving these transformation programmes, will handle change management. However, he said: “Since there is a direct implication on jobs, with job roles changing and people being displaced, the fear and concerns among employees increases exponentially.”
According to Schaffrik, not only are employees afraid and confused, those people who are supposed to implement the AI are also being impacted.
Along with a lack of addressing work relations effectively, he said that AI providers usually do not really consider the rigidity of enterprise technology frameworks and business processes. “Businesses don’t want to break the payroll process,” he said as an example, which means business leaders need to balance risk. “This is why AI providers are surprised when a deployment of their technology doesn’t work as intended. It’s a mix of human psychology and company inertia, as well as regulations and legal stuff.”
None of these things are new, but Schaffrik believes CEOs and other business decision-makers need to assess what AI is being used for in their organisation.
“If I were a CEO, I’d aspire to automate as much repetitive work as possible and I would be happy to deploy any enterprise-grade technology that allows this, such as workflow engines, robotic process automation, document processing – whatever technologies are available – and that also includes AI agents,” he said.
At the same time, he said business leaders should also strive to automate less repeatable processes that human workers find particularly challenging, such as making mistakes when comparing multi-page documents.
As Schaffrik points out, this can sometimes occur when someone in the legal team is asked to compare three versions of a large contract. “People make mistakes, but if you put hallucinations to one side, then AI is much better at doing these things,” he said.
As for handling AI hallucinations, this is where Schaffrik sees a need for having the human-in-the-loop. But to be a good checker of AI outputs and command a good salary for doing this job, he said that employees need to excel at the work the AI is taking over. In other words, a legal expert needs to be extremely proficient at analysing different versions of multi-page contracts.
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