from What Happened In 2017 – AVC:
The Tech Backlash:
Although I did not get much right in my 2017 predictions, I got this one right. It was easy. You could see it coming from miles away. Tech is the new Wall Street, full of ultra rich out of touch people who have too much power and not enough empathy. Erin Griffith nailed it in her Wired piece from a few weeks ago.
Add to that context the fact that the big tech platforms, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, were used to hack the 2016 election, and you get the backlash. I think we are seeing the start of something that has a lot of legs. Human beings don’t want to be controlled by machines. And we are increasingly being controlled by machines. We are addicted to our phones, fed information by algorithms we don’t understand, at risk of losing our jobs to robots. This is likely to be the narrative of the next thirty years.
How do we cope with this? My platform would be:
- Computer literacy for everyone. That means making sure that everyone is able to go into GitHub and read the code that increasingly controls our lives and understand what it does and how it works.
- Open source vs closed source software so we can see how the algorithms that control our lives work.
- Personal data sovereignty so that we control our data and provision it via API keys, etc to the digital services we use.
- A social safety net that includes health care for everyone that allows for a peaceful radical transformation of what work is in the 21st century.