Silicon Valley Should Practice What It Preaches

Does anybody else see the irony in the great technologists of Silicon Valley railing against the Trump Administration for hampering the economic prosperity of our youth, restricting immigration and diversity, and fostering income inequality. Their own companies employ sophisticated technologies to ensure that they can employ as few as possible, which allows them to pay their employees outlandish sums of money. The products and services they sell allow other companies to do the same. Over the decades those companies have done their best to reduce or even eliminate the world’s “blue collar jobs” and are now with their so-called Artificial Intelligence attempting to do the same to global “white collar” jobs. In fact, it is likely that the Trump administration will be unable to keep its promise to return the millions of manufacturing jobs that have moved offshore during the past 40 years, because many of those jobs have been replaced by computer operated machines.

How does any of that help today’s youth make their economic way in the world, or help middle class incomes keep pace with inflation or help immigrants assimilate into American culture? Additionally, if Silicon Valley gets it way, all jobs paying a living wage will require employees to possess sophisticated skills in some aspect of building and/or operating computer systems. That also hampers economic diversity if not ethnic diversity in today’s workforce. That may be progress, but it is not very “progressive.”

No one is arguing that improving technology is not a boon for the global economy or humanity at large; a favorite example is how Microsoft Windows transformed tasks that took me weeks to perform down to days and sometimes mere hours. And companies like Google, Amazon and many others continue to enhance and improve our lives daily. But many of the recent additions, like the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, one can easily argue have not only made our lives less productive and less secure, but have in some ways contributed to the “dumbing down” and social ineptitude, if not delinquency, of our children and young adults. The constant preoccupation with the internet, mobile gadgets, and “virtual reality” is leading many among us to opt out of “real world” reality. This “ear bud generation” seems less interested and aware of the mounting challenges of the increasingly dangerous world in which we live.

Today’s technologists would be well advised to reflect on their own complicity with what’s wrong with our world and think about “high tech” solutions for addressing those problems before opting for “low brow” criticism and cheap shots for those currently charged with meeting and overcoming the challenges that await us.