HBO held the season finale for its Silicon Valley show that has impeccably and hilariously skewered technology and all its eeriness. The show’s exec producers Alec Berg and Mike Judge said that it was perceptive and exciting. However, the last episode, Exit Event, pinned the essential point that the series and its assorted crew of nerds has made in its run. The point explains a lot about tech’s current state, where no safe internet can be built regardless of the efforts. The series’ punch line was the perfect allegory for today’s real digital scenery, Pied Piper. It’s an innovative AI platform that became possibly dangerous, and rats got initiated to end the creation.
Merely, many creators of the Internet’s wondrous parts have never felt insecure a day in their lives. These inventors never felt a wrench of anxiety boarding into a stranger’s vehicle. The pain of violated privacy has not occurred to them since they’ve rarely been hacked or doxed. They’ve never been attacked or zeroed out due to their race, sexual orientation, or gender. Having nearly no consequences of failure, they hardly think about making bad choices.
Tech stocks in the S&P 500 are up by more than 40% as the year closes. This is way above the general index. That’s despite election interference, hate speech, disinformation, screen addiction, and Trump’s toxic tweets. Amazon and Alphabet soared nearly 16% and 29%; Microsoft and Apple were gaining 50% and 70%, respectively. The social networking giant, Facebook, is up at 53%.
Towards the year’s end, only Uber’s shares fell since its IPO in May, after delivering its promise to reveal all its platform’s unsafe incidents openly. Uber last week’s report revealed over 3,000 sexual assault incidents of variable degrees in 2018. That’s a small number compared to the overall ride volume. Some problems resulted from cursory background checks.
In a New York Times interview last week, Tony West, Uber’s CLO, confirmed the reports and said that it reflected the society it serves. When things err, execs often point to the harsh world saying it’s not within their control how inventions are consumed. The faults began with Uber’s co-founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick by creating a market need. To date, Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO, is still cleaning Kalanick’s mess of hit-and-running over lots of stuff. Silicon Valley’s most inventions have never put safety as a priority over profits. Thanks to Uber for displaying the ugly parts of its face. Unfortunately, the damage is already done before they can think of it.
