
Why can’t San Francisco’s tech culture solve the city’s social problems? - kome
https://www.ft.com/content/262e2b2c-d423-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9?accessToken=zwAAAWASwnjYkc8mLiss1CMR59OMmtnApcjVyQ.MEUCIQDMscHzO2P8OggpxtoqR95TAQlW64FNL1Tr84BxV-jvLAIgNdXcJ4EOzXDJKYHa57pCYt6FR7BEi7nFW1XBJ0kze5E&sharetype=giftZS1lbWFpbC1zZXJ2aWNlIn0~
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jamesmcintyre
If you view the societal impact of technology through the lens of systems
thinking one conclusion might be that it concentrates economic power. The
actors in society which have the means by which to create and leverage new
technologies (i.e. automation) will collect much more economic and political
power while those without the means will increasingly find themselves with
less leverage, less political and economic power.

If you can even partly agree that his is one effect of Silicon Valley's modus
operandi of relentless, and often ambivalent progress then should we not at
least attempt to counter-balance this effect?

Imagine you could take a god-like view of the evolution of the human species'
capacity for forms of civilization over a long span of time, from something
like feudalism to a more robust, modern democracy and then imagine observing
from this perspective the increasing anomalous occurrence of an entirely new
phenomenon which totally upheaves and restructures forms of order within these
budding civilizations. If you could imagine these phenomena, at first isolated
and only marginally impactful upon societal structures, becoming more and more
frequent only to eventually reveal that what lies in the wake of many of these
events is an increased clustering of those who benefit from these events and
separately the clustering of those who do not, would it not seem as though the
evolution of social order may be regressing? Falling back to a baser form?

Perhaps these events are "disruptive spikes" in an otherwise smooth, positive
trajectory and we should expect bumps along the way as there have always been
with progress. Or perhaps the sum total of our society's approach to
harnessing technology is surreptitiously eating away at the very core
structures of our evolved forms of fair and just society.

Shouldn't we err on the side of caution and at least, if only at first in our
intentions, set on a path towards consciously designing ways for technology to
better benefit all of society and not just the narrow aims which seem to
reverberate from the past?

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saas_co_de
While it isn't the responsibility of the tech industry to fix these problems,
per se, it certainly would be a great demonstration of the power of technology
if the tech community could use the tools they create to better organize
society, elect more effective politicians, enact better legislation, and
address the negative social impacts of income and wealth inequality.

It is also possible though that the progressive belief that poverty and
inequality are "solvable" problems is simply wrong. Maybe there aren't
"solutions" to these problems and it is a waste of time to even try.

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megamindbrian2
Because they all agree the problem existed before SV became tech capital, so
why is it their problem to solve?

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twright
_somewhere in 2038 AD_ "I didn't start this clock, so I clearly have nothing
to do with it and it won't affect me. It predates us, so why should we fix
it?"

This attitude would be well and good if everyone's actions or lack thereof
only affected themselves. Or if the whole point in life was to just constantly
screw each other over as much as possible, instead of maybe -and this is a
crazy idea- trying to make things a little better for everyone?

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VeronicaJJ123
Tech people are mostly useless to solve societal problems as the indoor only
geeks are not very smart at realizing the real world problems.

