Episode 276: Is Technology a Force for Good or Evil?

For the last 200 years, innovation and technology have produced dramatic increases in living standards and our quality of life. 

Yet today there is a widespread and growing belief that technology has become the root of all evils with all sorts of claims being made that it destroys privacy, spreads misinformation, undermines trust, and democracy, eliminates jobs, discriminates by race, and gender, increases inequality, rips off the consumer, harms children, and even threatens the human race.

This is quite a bill of indictment! But is any of this true? 

Bill's guests on this show, Rob Atkinson and David Moschella, believe this is mostly agenda driven bunk and have written a persuasive book to prove it.

"Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today's Innovation Economy"

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and author of many books including  "Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage" 

David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at ITIF and previously was head of worldwide research for IDC, the largest market analysis firm in the information technology industry.

"America's always flourished more than anybody else in the world," declares Atkinson, "because we have had this underlying faith in innovation, in the future, in taking risks, in going forward into the unknown. And now, that's really at risk. People are saying things like, 'Wait a minute, we shouldn't deploy facial recognition because it's racially biased' or that 'technology innovation has not improved the average worker's living standards.'"

"Well, both those statements are wrong. They are 100% myth."

"As someone who grew up in the Boston area in the 60s and 70s," says Moschella, "Massachusetts was considered a dead economy with no future. And then, this thing called the minicomputer was designed out of MIT, and created companies like Digital Equipment, and Prime, and Wang and all the others. And all of a sudden you had the so-called Massachusetts Miracle. People are forgetting these realities."

Some of the most damaging myths stem from a deep-seated rejection of the Western capitalist system. But to gain traction for this agenda, anti-capitalists must first convince voters that the current system is failing, and a top target is technology driven innovation. 

"Also, what's happened is that some of the legitimate criticism of globalization has morphed into criticism of automation," says Moschella.

"People didn't like globalization, but then said, 'Well, automation is really more the cause than globalization, and of course technology drives automation, so we can blame technology automation for the problems globalization has created.''"

"I've actually heard members of Congress say, 'The pace of change is so rapid and we have to slow it down,' worries Rob.

"Now think about that. When has America ever said that? That the average person can't handle change. That it's too fast. We've got to slow things down."

In this episode we also take on the myth that the pace of technological change is accelerating.

Compare current era to the early 20th century, which saw the introduction of transformative technologies like electricity, radio, automobiles, and airplanes. The perception of rapid change today is often skewed by the digital revolution's visibility, but in reality, the physical and infrastructural advancements of the past were probably more transformative.

America has shifted its focus from delivering technological wonders to preventing "harmful" change. Once widely seen as a savior of humanity, technology is increasingly used as a scapegoat for just about every societal ill.

But if we see innovation as a necessary force for good, with government's role as a constructive enabler, there will be thoughtful innovation policies and more innovation 

But if the dominant narrative is that technology is an out-of-control force for harm, there will be destructive policies and a stultifying future.

Agree or disagree, this conversation wanders into some interesting waters and challenges a lot of today's conventional wisdom about technology.