Joe Weisenthal had an interesting Tweet recently, where he observed that most of the rhetoric from the tech industry in recent years is pitched at investors, not users or the general public. This is why we get the grandiose, alienating sci-fi rhetoric. What a (usually male) wealthy tech investor cares about will just be radially different than what ordinary users care about. So you get a lot of rhetoric around AI that frames it as something that will replace people rather than augment them. You get “adapt or die” instead of a sales pitch and trainings designed for regular people. You have rhetoric that almost seems to celebrate artists being replaced.
This is why they’re aping Andreesen rather than MADD rhetorically. They need money from investors more than they want people to use the products more (which, maybe, indicates we’re in a bubble).
It seems like more and more, but especially in the tech industry, users/consumers are viewed as some combination of the product and/or a resource to be exploited, rather than the customer to be served. That observation seems like exactly what you would expect to see if that were the case.
This is great! I would argue also that the onus is not just on women and the culture to embrace technology, but also for technology company developers and investors to consider the needs of women. If there's one thing Silicon Valley is great at building, it's the "private taxi for my burrito" type of company - ways to reduce social friction that actually (I think) promote loneliness. I heard the quip somewhere that the prototypical Silicon Valley founder is a bachelor who just wants to replace the things his mom used to do for him (drive him around, bring him food, pick out his clothes). Jessica Winter wrote a great New Yorker piece a decade or so ago, asking 'why hasn't Silicon Valley built a better breast pump' - given how many hours women spend extracting milk, that's a great example of a technology that is long overdue for innovation. Besides getting more women in investor positions, I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like there's a ton of untapped potential in tech to build better products for women.
Hang on, what about the Elvie Pump?! I don’t know if it was literally “built by Silicon Valley” but it is recent, it is great, and it visibly has Silicon Valley aesthetics. Bad example.
Also as a mom, “replacing stuff my mom used to do for me” so I have time to deal with the kids is also exactly what I need!
Yes- like I mentioned, the NYer piece was from about a decade ago! So there has been more innovation in this sector since then. But the fact that it took so long to get new innovation in the breastfeeding space is surprising given how many millions of women struggle with pumping. Another example: about a third of women over 40 suffer from bladder leaks, but there has not been as much innovation in this sector either (there are a few devices and products but not what you might expect given the market share of women this represents). Compare it to erectile dysfunction or hair growth products and I think there's a lot less energy around women's health.
I would argue that overall Silicon Valley has done a better job of solving private problems vs public problems and the layers of VCs & investors has historically been extremely male dominated which has led to priorities that aren't always geared towards women's interest.
I don’t really associate erectile dysfunction or hair growth products with Silicon Valley either. Maybe medical investment has been skewed but I don’t really think of that as the tech sector at all. “Drive me around, bring me food, pick out my clothes” is closer to the mark but again, I think I’m more desperate for that than any young bachelor is—he’s not the one who physically can’t do that stuff himself because there are small children climbing on top of him!
Thanks for this article, it’s good to see a thoughtful rebuttal to Aporia.
FYI, I wouldn’t use German high-speed rail as an example of excellent infrastructure, since their trains for some reason are always late! France and Italy are doing better. Switzerland and Japan have top notch public transport! 🇨🇭🇯🇵
Germany doesn’t even really have true high speed rail! They have a few segments on their intercity lines that are at or slightly above Amtrak top speeds, but I don’t think they have any city to city routes that average better than 80 mph. France, Spain, Italy, and Japan, Taiwan, China of course do.
Love the article, Jerusalem, especially your first footnote! Cheers to small independent journalism!
I understand there are a ton of theories and concrete reasons why high-speed rail hasn't taken off in America, but it is truly sad that if these types of infrastructure projects would create numerous jobs and create an alternative to air travel (which I hate).
Also, in regards to renewable energy, it's truly sad that our current administration hates wind power. America has thousands of miles of coastline where offshore wind farms could be built to supply clean, renewable energy to local communities.
My day job is geothermal policy, so I loved the mentions of geothermal in this piece! Not-so-fun fact... I'm wrapping up some polling work on support for geothermal energy among US voters and found a similar gender pattern to what y'all found for autonomous cars, with women less supportive than men. There's a lot underneath that about perceptions of risk, some of it geothermal-specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if general risk-aversion is stronger among women (and other people whose lived experiences have made risks/bad outcomes more salient than they are for privileged folks). Maybe that's something to test in future polling? It would be really interesting to try to figure out what the underlying psychology is here and what types of messaging approaches are effective at reducing concern. For the geothermal work, I developed a framework for different types of responses to concerns -- focusing on technical information about risks and mitigation, historical data on outcomes at past projects, the incentives of project developers, and government/external monitoring -- but I'm still waiting for crosstabs, so I won't know until next week if there were any gender differences in which types of messages resonated.
(Also... hi Jeru! This is Ann, Yidi's novice from the BDU your senior year. Congrats on starting a wholeass magazine)
Why is it when people argue for nuclear energy - they never talk about what will be done with all that accumulated waste. I am all for progress as in solar and wind which are far less expensive to build.
Storing nuclear waste is basically a solved problem and modern reactors generate very little waste. Nuclear power generation is also much denser than solar or wind, meaning more energy generated in a smaller space, which is something you might want if your say, a city with limited space.
Solar and wind definitely have the price advantage, but they require a lot more land. Geothermal has other advantages compared to both. We really want to use all of these, each in the place where its particular downsides aren’t as much of a problem. (Hydrocarbons unfortunately have a downside that is bad as long as they are located inside earth’s atmosphere, and they can’t operate without a convenient source of oxygen, like earth’s atmosphere.)
I think there would be a difference too if there were a sense that regulation of new tech was possible. Eg I am ok with self driving cars if companies are honest about their problems and capabilities.
I enjoyed reading this, and I agree with your overall point about addressing the gender/technology gap.
I got a little hung up, though, on your case example of e-bikes. The notion of putting a motor on a two-wheeled bicycle was the impetus behind the development of the Daimler Petroleum Reitwagen in 1885. Many of these early motorcycles were built on bicycle frames and moved at speeds that are similar to e-bikes today.
When we consider then e-bikes as equalizer, to what degree are they an innovation. Even before the recent rise to prominence of e-bikes - which I would argue is largely an outgrowth of a sluggish physical infrastructure and an outdated licensing regime - the capability existed for you to travel on two wheels and end up at your destination sweat-free. What, then, was the barrier to you getting a motorcycle and ending up at your destination? I would argue it is largely cultural and un-related to either innovation or the ability of a motor-driven two-wheeler getting you to your destination safely.
All this is to say J - buy a motorcycle. Bike is life.
Internal combustion and electric motors have different advantages. An internal combustion engine is moderately heavy, and quite loud, no matter how little weight you want to move, but its fuel is dense enough that when you’re moving really big things like a plane or a train or a ship, the fuel weight starts getting negligible. An electric motor can be as small and quiet as you want, but the energy density of batteries is low enough that when you’re moving a big thing at high speeds, the battery becomes most of the weight.
As a result, internal combustion dominates at the heavy end (no one is doing battery planes or battery container ships, or battery freight trains) while electric motors dominate at the small end (no one made internal combustion quadcopters or razor scooters, and mopeds had a lot of issues, while motorcycles are just way too big and heavy to ever attempt to pedal by foot).
> If women’s liberation is why Americans can’t generate enough energy, then why is Iceland — which is renowned for integrating women into positions of power — a leader in geothermal energy and capable of developing innovative direct air capture technology the United States struggles to build?
I do not like this argument, Iceland is a leader in geothermal energy because geothermal energy is easily accessible due to its geography. Large scale buildouts in the US are conditional on new technologies making use of drilling techniques developed for fracking. It has direct air capture because its electricity is extremely cheap and low carbon due to said geothermal energy.
I also found it a bit weird to look at women’s absolute support for self driving cars in the west rather than looking at the gap with men. Exposure increasing support from everyone says little about what kind of arguments can change the delta.
It is absolutely true that women are large beneficiaries of technology, if anything historically women benefitted more as they received the same proportional income increase in addition to greatly increased reduced hours needed for household labor. It is underrated how much drudgery has been eliminating by washing machines and associated detergents, stoves and ovens, industrialized textiles, plumbing and preprocessed grains (hours could be spent a day grinding grain for food).
Ha, I just read about how bikes liberated women in Phillip Blom’s book about the early 20th century! Men were so concerned this newfound freedom could lead to sexual depravity!
Thank you for this great piece! I've always found the techno-optimist vs techno-pessimist distinction to be interesting.
Humans are good at simplifications like this. Most of them are useful, but I think that the way we flatten the breadth of human technological development into a single bucket called "progress" is a simplification that has outlived its usefulness, as is the techno-optimist/techno-pessimist dichotomy.
I am pro people and planet, and insofar as technology improves long term human fluorishing, I'm for it. Technological progress for its own sake is neither good nor bad. There is good progress and bad progress and we should treat them as distinct.
This is the crux for me: "I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress."
Fire, antibiotics, and nuclear power? Yes, please! Nuclear weapons, Twitter, and smartphones? No thank you. We ought to judge technologies on their merits. There is a difference between inventing a technology to satisfy a want, and that technology actually improving lives once it's in place. As anyone who has experienced addiction will know, desire and fluorishing don't necessarily go hand in hand. We get it wrong sometimes and we should be honest when that happens, but we shouldn't let that stop us from making progress that legitimately improves lives.
It's not always, or even usually, possible to separate good progress and bad progress. To use your own example - harnessing the atom led to the development of both nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. Progress is usually value neutral, and its harm or benefit is all in the application.
To take another example you provided, smartphones, I don't use social media and agree it's probably more inherently harmful that beneficial (although perhaps some algorithmic innovation, or better incentives, could change that). Nonetheless, I marvel at the quality of life improvements smartphones have delivered to my family every time I'm in the kitchen cooking a traditional recipe some food blogger wrangled out of their grandmother, or when my husband is hunched over some household appliance with his phone propped up next to him as an expert demonstrates how to fix it on YouTube.
What I appreciate most about this piece is captured in its subtitle - "Technology is about liberation". Freedom always has tradeoffs.
I agree that tradeoffs are unavoidable, and that no one has a crystal ball to tell them whether a particular research decision will lead down a positive or negative path, but I think that there are usually indications one way or the other. Intentions matter.
For example, I expect more positive research outcomes to come from a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine than somebody at YouTube or TikTok working to make their algorithm more addictive. Some things really are no brainers.
Joe Weisenthal had an interesting Tweet recently, where he observed that most of the rhetoric from the tech industry in recent years is pitched at investors, not users or the general public. This is why we get the grandiose, alienating sci-fi rhetoric. What a (usually male) wealthy tech investor cares about will just be radially different than what ordinary users care about. So you get a lot of rhetoric around AI that frames it as something that will replace people rather than augment them. You get “adapt or die” instead of a sales pitch and trainings designed for regular people. You have rhetoric that almost seems to celebrate artists being replaced.
This is why they’re aping Andreesen rather than MADD rhetorically. They need money from investors more than they want people to use the products more (which, maybe, indicates we’re in a bubble).
It seems like more and more, but especially in the tech industry, users/consumers are viewed as some combination of the product and/or a resource to be exploited, rather than the customer to be served. That observation seems like exactly what you would expect to see if that were the case.
This is great! I would argue also that the onus is not just on women and the culture to embrace technology, but also for technology company developers and investors to consider the needs of women. If there's one thing Silicon Valley is great at building, it's the "private taxi for my burrito" type of company - ways to reduce social friction that actually (I think) promote loneliness. I heard the quip somewhere that the prototypical Silicon Valley founder is a bachelor who just wants to replace the things his mom used to do for him (drive him around, bring him food, pick out his clothes). Jessica Winter wrote a great New Yorker piece a decade or so ago, asking 'why hasn't Silicon Valley built a better breast pump' - given how many hours women spend extracting milk, that's a great example of a technology that is long overdue for innovation. Besides getting more women in investor positions, I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like there's a ton of untapped potential in tech to build better products for women.
Hang on, what about the Elvie Pump?! I don’t know if it was literally “built by Silicon Valley” but it is recent, it is great, and it visibly has Silicon Valley aesthetics. Bad example.
Also as a mom, “replacing stuff my mom used to do for me” so I have time to deal with the kids is also exactly what I need!
Yes- like I mentioned, the NYer piece was from about a decade ago! So there has been more innovation in this sector since then. But the fact that it took so long to get new innovation in the breastfeeding space is surprising given how many millions of women struggle with pumping. Another example: about a third of women over 40 suffer from bladder leaks, but there has not been as much innovation in this sector either (there are a few devices and products but not what you might expect given the market share of women this represents). Compare it to erectile dysfunction or hair growth products and I think there's a lot less energy around women's health.
I would argue that overall Silicon Valley has done a better job of solving private problems vs public problems and the layers of VCs & investors has historically been extremely male dominated which has led to priorities that aren't always geared towards women's interest.
I don’t really associate erectile dysfunction or hair growth products with Silicon Valley either. Maybe medical investment has been skewed but I don’t really think of that as the tech sector at all. “Drive me around, bring me food, pick out my clothes” is closer to the mark but again, I think I’m more desperate for that than any young bachelor is—he’s not the one who physically can’t do that stuff himself because there are small children climbing on top of him!
“I'm not sure what the solution is”
I can see Silicon Valley being like “I’ve got it! Pink Waymo cars!”
Thanks for this article, it’s good to see a thoughtful rebuttal to Aporia.
FYI, I wouldn’t use German high-speed rail as an example of excellent infrastructure, since their trains for some reason are always late! France and Italy are doing better. Switzerland and Japan have top notch public transport! 🇨🇭🇯🇵
Germany doesn’t even really have true high speed rail! They have a few segments on their intercity lines that are at or slightly above Amtrak top speeds, but I don’t think they have any city to city routes that average better than 80 mph. France, Spain, Italy, and Japan, Taiwan, China of course do.
I love that opening cartoon! The modern safety bicycle with equal wheels was a tool for equal rights!
Love the article, Jerusalem, especially your first footnote! Cheers to small independent journalism!
I understand there are a ton of theories and concrete reasons why high-speed rail hasn't taken off in America, but it is truly sad that if these types of infrastructure projects would create numerous jobs and create an alternative to air travel (which I hate).
Also, in regards to renewable energy, it's truly sad that our current administration hates wind power. America has thousands of miles of coastline where offshore wind farms could be built to supply clean, renewable energy to local communities.
My day job is geothermal policy, so I loved the mentions of geothermal in this piece! Not-so-fun fact... I'm wrapping up some polling work on support for geothermal energy among US voters and found a similar gender pattern to what y'all found for autonomous cars, with women less supportive than men. There's a lot underneath that about perceptions of risk, some of it geothermal-specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if general risk-aversion is stronger among women (and other people whose lived experiences have made risks/bad outcomes more salient than they are for privileged folks). Maybe that's something to test in future polling? It would be really interesting to try to figure out what the underlying psychology is here and what types of messaging approaches are effective at reducing concern. For the geothermal work, I developed a framework for different types of responses to concerns -- focusing on technical information about risks and mitigation, historical data on outcomes at past projects, the incentives of project developers, and government/external monitoring -- but I'm still waiting for crosstabs, so I won't know until next week if there were any gender differences in which types of messages resonated.
(Also... hi Jeru! This is Ann, Yidi's novice from the BDU your senior year. Congrats on starting a wholeass magazine)
Why is it when people argue for nuclear energy - they never talk about what will be done with all that accumulated waste. I am all for progress as in solar and wind which are far less expensive to build.
Storing nuclear waste is basically a solved problem and modern reactors generate very little waste. Nuclear power generation is also much denser than solar or wind, meaning more energy generated in a smaller space, which is something you might want if your say, a city with limited space.
Solar and wind definitely have the price advantage, but they require a lot more land. Geothermal has other advantages compared to both. We really want to use all of these, each in the place where its particular downsides aren’t as much of a problem. (Hydrocarbons unfortunately have a downside that is bad as long as they are located inside earth’s atmosphere, and they can’t operate without a convenient source of oxygen, like earth’s atmosphere.)
There are ways to build reactors that produce much less waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor?wprov=sfla1
Great point.
I think there would be a difference too if there were a sense that regulation of new tech was possible. Eg I am ok with self driving cars if companies are honest about their problems and capabilities.
“ Reactionaries point to China’s high-speed rail network while conveniently ignoring Italy’s, France’s, and Germany’s”
China negates our excuse that America is too big for rail. Europe’s density means they would be insane to not have it.
When you capitalize conservative is when it means stingy I guess.
A Brookings paper from two years ago argued that self-driving cars, and AI more broadly, could reduce the gendered division of labor by reducing disparities in the “mental load” — and broadly that self-driving cars will be good for women and families. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-gendered-division-of-household-labor-and-emerging-technologies/
I enjoyed reading this, and I agree with your overall point about addressing the gender/technology gap.
I got a little hung up, though, on your case example of e-bikes. The notion of putting a motor on a two-wheeled bicycle was the impetus behind the development of the Daimler Petroleum Reitwagen in 1885. Many of these early motorcycles were built on bicycle frames and moved at speeds that are similar to e-bikes today.
When we consider then e-bikes as equalizer, to what degree are they an innovation. Even before the recent rise to prominence of e-bikes - which I would argue is largely an outgrowth of a sluggish physical infrastructure and an outdated licensing regime - the capability existed for you to travel on two wheels and end up at your destination sweat-free. What, then, was the barrier to you getting a motorcycle and ending up at your destination? I would argue it is largely cultural and un-related to either innovation or the ability of a motor-driven two-wheeler getting you to your destination safely.
All this is to say J - buy a motorcycle. Bike is life.
Internal combustion and electric motors have different advantages. An internal combustion engine is moderately heavy, and quite loud, no matter how little weight you want to move, but its fuel is dense enough that when you’re moving really big things like a plane or a train or a ship, the fuel weight starts getting negligible. An electric motor can be as small and quiet as you want, but the energy density of batteries is low enough that when you’re moving a big thing at high speeds, the battery becomes most of the weight.
As a result, internal combustion dominates at the heavy end (no one is doing battery planes or battery container ships, or battery freight trains) while electric motors dominate at the small end (no one made internal combustion quadcopters or razor scooters, and mopeds had a lot of issues, while motorcycles are just way too big and heavy to ever attempt to pedal by foot).
> If women’s liberation is why Americans can’t generate enough energy, then why is Iceland — which is renowned for integrating women into positions of power — a leader in geothermal energy and capable of developing innovative direct air capture technology the United States struggles to build?
I do not like this argument, Iceland is a leader in geothermal energy because geothermal energy is easily accessible due to its geography. Large scale buildouts in the US are conditional on new technologies making use of drilling techniques developed for fracking. It has direct air capture because its electricity is extremely cheap and low carbon due to said geothermal energy.
I also found it a bit weird to look at women’s absolute support for self driving cars in the west rather than looking at the gap with men. Exposure increasing support from everyone says little about what kind of arguments can change the delta.
It is absolutely true that women are large beneficiaries of technology, if anything historically women benefitted more as they received the same proportional income increase in addition to greatly increased reduced hours needed for household labor. It is underrated how much drudgery has been eliminating by washing machines and associated detergents, stoves and ovens, industrialized textiles, plumbing and preprocessed grains (hours could be spent a day grinding grain for food).
Ha, I just read about how bikes liberated women in Phillip Blom’s book about the early 20th century! Men were so concerned this newfound freedom could lead to sexual depravity!
Surprised this hasn't come up yet, but what's your favorite irreducible representation? Metal complex?
Thank you for this great piece! I've always found the techno-optimist vs techno-pessimist distinction to be interesting.
Humans are good at simplifications like this. Most of them are useful, but I think that the way we flatten the breadth of human technological development into a single bucket called "progress" is a simplification that has outlived its usefulness, as is the techno-optimist/techno-pessimist dichotomy.
I am pro people and planet, and insofar as technology improves long term human fluorishing, I'm for it. Technological progress for its own sake is neither good nor bad. There is good progress and bad progress and we should treat them as distinct.
This is the crux for me: "I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress."
Fire, antibiotics, and nuclear power? Yes, please! Nuclear weapons, Twitter, and smartphones? No thank you. We ought to judge technologies on their merits. There is a difference between inventing a technology to satisfy a want, and that technology actually improving lives once it's in place. As anyone who has experienced addiction will know, desire and fluorishing don't necessarily go hand in hand. We get it wrong sometimes and we should be honest when that happens, but we shouldn't let that stop us from making progress that legitimately improves lives.
It's not always, or even usually, possible to separate good progress and bad progress. To use your own example - harnessing the atom led to the development of both nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. Progress is usually value neutral, and its harm or benefit is all in the application.
To take another example you provided, smartphones, I don't use social media and agree it's probably more inherently harmful that beneficial (although perhaps some algorithmic innovation, or better incentives, could change that). Nonetheless, I marvel at the quality of life improvements smartphones have delivered to my family every time I'm in the kitchen cooking a traditional recipe some food blogger wrangled out of their grandmother, or when my husband is hunched over some household appliance with his phone propped up next to him as an expert demonstrates how to fix it on YouTube.
What I appreciate most about this piece is captured in its subtitle - "Technology is about liberation". Freedom always has tradeoffs.
I agree that tradeoffs are unavoidable, and that no one has a crystal ball to tell them whether a particular research decision will lead down a positive or negative path, but I think that there are usually indications one way or the other. Intentions matter.
For example, I expect more positive research outcomes to come from a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine than somebody at YouTube or TikTok working to make their algorithm more addictive. Some things really are no brainers.
This is a quibble, but shouldn't "NET Want" be (the aggregate of want) - (the aggregate of not want), i.e. -26 if it's 63-37?