The Technology of 2018
It was a year of disruption, innovation, and increasing skepticism for the technology world.
It has been a year of reckoning for the once-beloved titans of Silicon Valley. Last January as I reflected on 2017 I wrote Technology’s Broken Promises where I explored why I believed the tides of favor were turning against the tech world. I concluded that article by saying 2018 would be the year to “admit that the investors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, as a class, have failed us. But it’s also time for engineers, product managers, designers, and other highly compensated employees to take a hard look at our own impact in the world and start asking ourselves hard questions.” I believe that in 2018, that happened. Tech workers got political and there was strong pushback on the idea that the future should be built primarily by technologists.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all saw employees start to organize in opposition to the questionable business practices of their employers. Machine learning experts condemned the use of AI for government surveillance and military operations. Google employees organized to oppose Project Dragonfly and the complicity of Google with government censorship. Amazon and Microsoft employees organized to oppose the JEDI military contract, and the selling of Amazon’s Rekognition to the…
