People who work in technology are often incredibly smart. But
that doesn’t necessarily make them accurate forecasters of human and social
behavior.
اضافة اعلان
Airbnb’s chief executive said that he thought more people would
hop between multiple homes when the pandemic ends. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
talked about his vision of people using goggles that read their minds. A
co-founder of Stripe, the digital finance startup, spoke about a range of
things, including worker productivity metrics and the need for improved medical
technology.
These were thought-provoking ideas, and successful tech
executives have been right an awful lot.
But I am asking for a little more humility from technologists
and a little more skepticism from the rest of us. Being really smart and
overseeing products used by millions of people doesn’t make tech executives
oracles. (That’s true even for the tech company named Oracle.)
As tech has become more enmeshed in our lives and the economy —
and as tech founders have become red-carpet-worthy celebrities — people want to
know what technologists think about … everything: the future of cities,
education, health care, jobs and the environment. It makes sense. I want to
hear what they think, too.
Seeing the activity of millions or billions of people and
businesses gives technology companies insights that few others have. We want
powerful corporate leaders to be thoughtful about the world. And technologists
can turn their beliefs into our reality.
But like all of us, technologists have blind spots and biases.
They can misjudge or opine on topics that they don’t really understand. And
humans are not always good at understanding humans.
The problem, I fear, is that we too often associate running an
innovative company with an ability to predict the future. And that can have
real consequences if we build policy and our lives around what they say.
One of the most glaring examples was Uber’s proclamations that
it would help alleviate traffic and pollution in major metropolitan areas and
reduce the number of cars in the United States. In 2015, Uber’s co-founder,
Travis Kalanick, described the future of his company: “Fewer cars, less
congestion, more parking, less pollution and creating thousands of jobs.”
Research now shows that Uber and other on-demand ride services
largely did the opposite. They made traffic in many cities worse, contributed
to an increase in miles driven in the United States and pulled people from
shared transit to solo cars.
Perhaps Kalanick and others who backed Uber’s vision of a less
car-reliant country didn’t mean it. Maybe they just wanted to make Uber sound
virtuous.
But more likely, the lesson here is that technologists often don’t
foresee how people will respond to what they create. Zuckerberg now says that
he didn’t anticipate that Facebook would empower authoritarians and create
incentives for the most radical voices.
Some of the same promises that Uber was making a few years ago
are now coming from companies working on computer-driven cars, fast trains and
other transportation innovations. I’m excited about these ideas, but also
mindful what happened to the original hope of the ride services.
That track record calls not for cynicism but for healthy doubt
and self-criticism. We need more questions asked, both by the technology
companies and the rest of us. We could start with: What makes you think that?
What if you’re wrong? What might you be missing?
It might also help if technologists answered, “I don’t know,”
when someone asks them to weigh in on China’s gross domestic product.
Geopolitics under the sea
I wrote in a newsletter about the blurry line between countries’
desire for technology self-reliance and protectionism. Now I want to make the
connection to undersea cables. (As regular On Tech readers know, I love boring
technology.)
Most of us will never see the cables that run under oceans and
seas, but a few hundred of these pipelines move nearly all international
internet and telephone traffic around the world.
That makes the people and companies that control the undersea
cables the masters of the internet. They wield choke points that could be
abused to spy on what’s happening online or cut a country off from large
swathes of the internet.
With that kind of power, these dull clusters of glass fibers are
of great concern to governments.
You can see that in the tussle over a new undersea internet
cable called Peace that is snaking from China to Pakistan and then underwater
around Africa to France.
This cable is being built by Chinese companies, and US security officials worry that Peace could be used by China’s government for
sabotage or surveillance. France says the undersea link will help its economy,
and it’s stuck in the middle between its US allies and China.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that a group led by
Facebook dropped its plans to build a new internet cable between California and
Hong Kong after months of pressure from US national security officials.
Again, the officials’ concern is that a physical link to Hong Kong — and China’s
greater assertion of control over the island — could be a security risk.
The fights over undersea cables raise a messy question about
technology in a fractured world: Is there a way to connect people without
laying the foundation for security threats? Shared internet infrastructure has
been essential to link the world, but it doesn’t work if countries do not trust
one another.
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