We used to get excited about technology. What happened?

Something is missing from our lives, and from our technology. The goal of consumer tech development used to be pretty simple: design and build something of value to people, giving them a reason to buy it. There has been a sea change in the entire model for innovation and the incentives that drive it. Why settle for a single profit-taking transaction for the company when you can instead design a product that will extract a monetizable data stream from every buyer, returning revenue to the company for years? Once you’ve captured that data stream, you’ll protect it, even to the disadvantage of your customer. It’s not just consumer tech and social media platforms that have made this shift. The large ag-tech brand John Deere, for example, formerly beloved by its customers, is fighting a “right to repair” movement driven by farmers angry at being forbidden to fix their own machines, lest they disturb the proprietary software sending high-value data on the farmers’ land and crops back to the manufacturer. In tech, we are the product, not the prime beneficiary. The mechanical devices that used to be the product are increasingly just the middlemen. The fact is, the visible focus of tech culture is no longer on expanding the frontiers of humane innovation—innovation that serves us all. The danger is not only that modern technology fails to be directed to our most urgent civilizational needs. It’s that technologists’ apparent loss of interest in humane innovation is depleting our collective faith in our own powers of invention. 

[Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor of Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute.]