Dear Innovators, Please Tech Better
Recently, I received a pitch from a company making a sensor for razor blades that automatically re-orders blades when it senses yours is dull. Really? Does the world need this?
I’m not the only one having these thoughts. It’s become commonplace to criticize Silicon Valley’s obsession with fixing things that aren’t broken and coming up with tech bandaids for complex problems. The best example I’ve come across in recent months is Shane Snow’s Soy Oculus thought-experiment. He muses that one might best address prison violence and the cost of incarceration by hooking up inmates with Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets and feeding them Soylent, a sci-fi meal substitute. Really?
In some ways, on-demand booze and other such startups are easy to malign and distract us from the bigger issue in tech today: the disruption mantra.
Don’t get me wrong, going fast and breaking things makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to reinvent food delivery. But what about when you’re providing information, education, health? Disruption in those cases is often like being a bull in a china shop. Large tech companies that are omnipresent in our lives need to think longer and harder about their civic externalities: the impact they have on real lives of real humans.
Here’s a starting point for those innovators hoping to tech better:
Build better algorithms
You might have seen this hilarious (and terrifying) video of an HP computer’s built-in webcam which only tracks white faces, not black ones.
Often though, problematic algorithms aren’t as obvious as the one in that video. Safiya Noble gave a wonderful and disturbing talk on black-box algorithms and their built-in biases at the Personal Democracy Forum this summer. Catherine O’Neil book Weapons of Math Destruction also does a fabulous job of laying out how big data is increasing inequality. And just last week, a report by Georgetown University revealed the facial recognition database that the police uses to identify suspects does a particular bad job for people with dark skin. I wish that were a surprise.
So what can be done?
Diversifying the people who build these algorithms is a place to start. If different kinds of people, not just young white men, train the algorithms that rule us, the resulting artificial intelligence will be better behaved.
But that’s not enough. It’s become incredibly difficult to study these algorithms because they are often protected as trade secrets and each one of us only ever sees the results tailored to who we are. Recently, the Washington Post had to have 4 different journalists checking Facebook every hour to try to parse how the company determines what topics are trending. This needs to change and I’d love to hear about efforts to do so.
Respect Our Time
You have probably heard of Tristan Harris’ quest for “Time Well Spent”. He and many others are seeking solutions to the current business model of the internet: the Attention Economy. Simply put, instead of asking users to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter directly, most companies on the internet are monetizing our attention indirectly via advertising. This is why scrolling my Facebook Feed is really addictive yet rarely rewarding and eerily similar to playing a slot machine.
I have considered getting a NoPhone: a brick of plastic shaped like an iPhone, which advertises “more real friends and no dead batteries or location tracking”, but am not quite ready for such a drastic solution…
Finding products and services that don’t manipulate us is hard. It’s also an amazing business opportunity for entrepreneurs seeking to solve real problems.
There are hardware and software opportunity to create devices that bring out our best selves, instead of tricking us through push notifications and red numbers telling us how far behind we are on email. There are content opportunities to provide us with the information we need in short, “finishable” formats. The Skimm has been taking advantage of this quite effectively for example.
But doing less bad is not enough, what might we do better?
Use Your Platform For Good
This spring, Facebook included a prompt to register to vote in California at the top of the Newsfeed of every Californian who was going to turn 18 by June 7th — the deadline for registering to vote in the primaries. It prompted 200,000 people to register to vote in only 2 days. A number unheard of by the Secretary of State.
Every platform we depend upon has a similar opportunity to increase civic engagement, reduce the spread of misinformation, nudge us to reduce our carbon footprint, and the list goes on. Many companies are starting to take advantage of this opportunity to do good but that’s not enough.
Can these platforms with their scale and pervasiveness help us better understand who we are?
Tech platforms have access to incredible data about us and how we behave. Can they better define and measure engagement online? Can they help us understand how we form and change our opinions? Can they find out how we decide to donate, volunteer or buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle? I would love for all the data that’s collected about me to amount to more than ads for Oculus and Soylent’s latest products (yep, those are the ads I’m getting this very second… I wish it was a surprise.).
I’m excited about technology that makes us all better. Let me know about inspiring examples you’ve come across in the comments below.
Thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have helped me with this piece. In particular, Christie George and Andrew Golis.
Update: Right after I hit publish on this article, I learned about CoinTent, an ad-blocker that distributes your $5/month subscription to the websites you spend the most time on so they don’t go out of business. They have a Kickstarter campaign underway and I’m supporting it.
