Member-only story
Say Goodbye to the Tech-First Era
The humanity-first movement is here and staying awhile
I’m loving this critical conversation around AI right now. People from the media to data practitioners are questioning the value of AI-dependent tech like ChatGPT, Jasper AI and every other AI-generated app. The concern over the tech industry’s direction and how it aligns with communities and cultures comes up often. No answers are provided but the growing swell of uneasiness indicates a pendulum shift in our society.
Even Big Tech is struggling to connect to their own missions. The haphazard design and deployment of apps, systems and platforms frustrate the public, the programmers and the policymakers. For example, Google has lost its top spot as the go-to online searching platform now that ChatGPT has arrived with much fanfare. Google’s online advertising and marketing also remains entangled in multiple lawsuits from the US Department of Justice. Big Tech is laying off, or preparing to lay off, thousands of tech workers because of a myriad of reasons like over-hiring in peak COVID times, under-innovations (release of useless tech), lack of leadership vision, lawsuits and settlements, rise of AI ethics, soured reputation, etc.
Big Tech is freaking out. And this battle royale amongst Silicon Valley stormtroopers is quite humorous. For decades, each tech company has pushed for tech solutionism — an idea that there’s an app that can fix most, if not all, problems. The last five years has revealed case after case after case of the limitations of tech along with the harms introduced by algorithmic design decisions. Their tech-first solution fixes have backfired. Data privacy, digital civil rights, bias mitigation and data quality concerns are center stage to the public, the tech industry’s programmers and state and national government agency’s policymakers. The tech industry, and particularly Big Tech, doesn’t have firm control the narrative anymore as to how, when and where tech is applied. The hilarious part is that this domination is what the tech giants, e.g., the Silicon Valley stormtroopers, wanted: tech everywhere. They natively assumed that their control would be maintained. Oh how wrong they were.
Tech solutionism has become taboo. The re-branding of tech solution is now called effective altruism…
