You can’t predict the future, but in Silicon Valley you can invent it. This is the mantra of a handful of companies that continue to serve up a series of digital delights, which are about to get far sweeter and more satisfying due to Big Data, the Internet of Things, robotics and ultimately, perhaps, true artificial intelligence.
But underneath the rhetoric of modernity, openness and progress there’s a problem that technology can’t fix. Relatively young white males overwhelmingly run Silicon Valley firms and they are stealing the future from everyone else.
The recent Facebook furore over its “trending topics” is a case in point. It was alleged that the supposedly impartial algorithms used to curate its list of trending news stories were being softly manipulated by people with a left-leaning libertarian agenda.
“So what?” you might say, but Facebook is more than a social hub. It has become an important centralising authority for news. More than 40% of Americans adults now rely on the social network to stay on top of the news according to PEW research. With great power comes great responsibility, so Facebook, and other large technology companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix need to be watched, critiqued and regulated if necessary, just like any other corporation or petulant adolescent.
Another example of Silicon Valley bias is the almost complete absence of the female perspective. The same might be said of other genders, geographies, races, income brackets, or ages.
This insularity is true of most large corporations, but it matters more in this case because these companies really are designing the future and they may get away with it. That’s unless the many can introduce the few to some more diverse perspectives about what’s useful or important. Such thinking might then challenge the idea that Silicon Valley always knows best, that regulation is evil or that efficiency and speed are really the only measures that matter.
There’s another related problem too, and it’s a big one.
Many of the men behind these hugely powerful corporations seem to know very little or care even less about other people. This is a bold claim, but it may have some basis in brain science. The novelist Douglas Coupland has written that “all tech people are slightly autistic.” Autism can be a useful trait if you are seeking technical brilliance, but it can become a hindrance if a general naiveté about human beings is translated directly into the design of the products and services used by billions of other people around the world.
How digital technologies enhance or diminish our humanity clearly depends a great deal upon how much the designers and developers of the technologies know or care about their fellow human beings.
Privacy is a good example. If internet culture is on the autism spectrum, this could explain how some companies can regard privacy as collateral damage. It may also explain how some companies constantly miss the small social cues coming from their customers. It would certainly explain how Facebook continually offends its users, and may explain how some technology companies can’t see that an open, connected and copyright-free world isn’t necessarily better for everyone.
Jonathan Franzen has said that the internet itself is “an incredibly elitist concentrator of wealth in the hands of the few while giving the appearance of voice and the appearance of democracy to people who are in fact being exploited by the technologies.”
But if you’re on the spectrum as a corporation you probably can’t see that “free” can come at a cost, that some level of privacy is fundamental to functioning government, that physical presence can matter or that some people don’t want to be online all the time or read everything on a screen.
No, you will think that you have a higher calling and that you are doing everyone on the planet a favour by making everything transparent and by making everyone accessible.
But not all is lost (or indeed stolen by cyber criminals or sitting on a remote server somewhere). Technology is a choice, not a destiny. We shape our future by the decisions that we all make today.
So we still have time to push things along in any direction we wish, commanding, altering and deleting technologies – and the companies behind them – as we see fit.
- As the comment thread to this piece demonstrates, it provoked strong reaction, especially about the reference to autism. Louise Milligan has responded. Readers may also be interested in the piece published 23 April 2016 by the Guardian’s own John Harris about the need to do more to improve understanding, not just ‘awareness’, of autism.