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In April 1998, Two Stanford University graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin demonstrated an algorithm called PageRank at a conference in Australia. A month later, a war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, triggering a two-year border conflict and killing tens of thousands of people. The first event established Google’s dominance on the Internet. The second group, 15-year-old Timnit Gebru, is working for the large-scale enterprise of the future.
At that time, Gebru and her economist mother lived in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Her father was an electrical engineer with a doctorate and died when she was very young. Gebru likes to go to school and to hang out in cafes because she and her friends can make up enough pocket money. But the war changed everything. Gebru’s family is Eritrean, and some of her relatives were deported to Eritrea and drafted into the army to fight their homeland.
Gebru’s mother holds a US visa, and Gebru’s sisters are engineers like their father and have lived there for many years. But when Gebru applied for a visa, she was rejected. So she moved to Ireland, with one of her sisters, where she temporarily worked, and her mother went to the United States alone.
Arriving in Ireland may have saved Gebru’s life, but it also shattered it. She called her mother and asked to be sent back to Ethiopia. “I don’t care if it is safe. I can’t live here,” she said. Her new school, culture, and even the weather have become alienated. The rainy season in Addis Ababa is intermittent, with downpours mixed with sunlight. In Ireland, the rain lasted for a week. When she accepted the challenge of the new curriculum and bullying teenagers, greater worries were suppressed. “Will I be reunited with my family? What if the paperwork is unsuccessful?” she recalled. “I feel unwelcome.”
The following year, Gebru was approved to come to the United States as a refugee. She was reunited with her mother in Somerville, Massachusetts, a white-majority suburb of Boston, where she attended a local public high school and attended a crash course in American racism.
Gebru discovered that some of her teachers seemed unable or unwilling to accept that African refugees might be top students in mathematics and science. Other white Americans think it is appropriate to confide to her their belief that African immigrants work harder than African Americans, and they think African Americans are lazy. The history class tells an inspiring story about the civil rights movement’s resolution of racial differences in the United States, but the story sounds hollow. “I don’t think it can be true because I saw it in school,” Gebru said.
The piano lesson provided her with a breathing space. Gebru also responded by turning to mathematics, physics, and her family. She likes technical work not only because of its beauty, but also because it is an area that is out of touch with personal politics or worries about war in her hometown. This division became part of Gebru’s way of exploring the world. “What I can control is that I can go to class and focus on work,” she said.
Gebru’s dedication paid off. In September 2001, she attended Stanford University. Naturally, she chose a family major, electrical engineering, and soon her development trajectory began to reflect the Silicon Valley prototype of immigrant pioneers. In a course of her junior year, Gebru made an experimental electronic piano key to help her get an internship opportunity at Apple to make audio circuits for Mac computers and other products. In the second year, while continuing her studies at Stanford University, she worked full-time for the company.
At Apple, Gebru thrives. When her manager Niel Warren needed someone to study delta-sigma modulators (a type of analog-to-digital converter), Gebru offered to investigate whether the technology was applicable to the iPhone. “As an electrical engineer, she is fearless,” Warren said. He found that his new hardware expert is very popular, ready to embrace at any time, and make up his mind after work. In 2008, Gebru withdrew from one of her classes because she spent too much time canvassing for Barack Obama in Nevada and Colorado, where many doors were hit in her face.
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