Value Beyond Instrumentalization — Letters to a Young Technologist

We have a moral responsibility to shape the world with specific, defensible ideas that we believe in. Call it definite optimism, reclaiming agency, or finding your life's work. Building a great business, rallying a network, fostering a community – they all require redirecting collective attention. The technologist's job is not to redirect worship t... See more

And since technology is not value neutral, to be a technologist is to be inherently opinionated about how the world ought to be. Each act of creation is a statement about one particular means to an end being the best possible means. As Saffron Huang writes, “[b]ringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. As we hurtle al... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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if we want to be good founders and good technologists, I think one moral responsibility you have is the realization that whatever you build will affect people in unintended consequences.

How might you educate those leaders? How can you be the best steward of technology, but also be the best utilizer of technology?

The insincerity, the rampant performativity, the illusion of urgency, the obsession with constructing futures at the expense of the present – for better or worse, these are all things I associate with being a technologist. And when I speak to my technologist friends, most of them share the same inkling that something is amiss .

Far too many of us g... See more

what sounds very simple actually requires a very serious breaking away of an ideology – spread loudly by Silicon Valley over the last few decades – that claims that technology is the solution to it all, that we can engineer our way out of the world’s problems, and that the world, society, and humans are nothing more than just another machine that n... See more