Down the Rabbit Hole: Dear young Silicon Valley programmer

By chegs Chisholm

Dear young Silicon Valley programmer

I listened to a wonderful new podcast the other day – The Next Big Thing. In it the host and interviewees talked at length about the future of the tech industry. About how the lack of diversity in the programming world (which is apparently just Silicon Valley) was producing biased tech solutions infinitely more suited to meet the desires of young white man than any other cohort. And how this bias informs the direction of creative outputs and delivers a series of unintended consequences.

Young programmers who reinvented the taxi industry to bypass the cost of taxis for themselves, created opportunities for sleep deprived 20-somethings to profit from their own car but inadvertently put thousands of migrant families in financial hardship – their backstop job on arrival in the US gone. I hadn’t thought about that, neither I suspect had the programmers.

An extrapolation of these taxi apps allows you to secretly order, from the comfort of your couch, more food in one hit than you would ever dare to admit. A technological innovation that gives a whole segment of young singles and couples the option to save on time and dishes by ordering in three, four or five times a week without lifting a finger in the kitchen. An app that effectively reverses inter-generational food love. As Grandma’s hands and energy wither, so too does our collective knowledge of how to prepare and preserve fresh fruit and vegetables. I didn’t know this was an issue until I read the stats on the number of millennials regularly ordering in and the reasons why. I’m guessing the programmes realised the data but maybe hadn’t considered the contribution they were making to the demise of home cooking.

When for years your laundry has been picked up and returned on a weekly basis at the push of a button; when your groceries have been packed and delivered robotically to avoid human error; when the only images you have of yourself are filtered, touched up and refined … if all of this stops, if you can no longer afford to pay for all these apps, or your children want real time, not Daddy on the tablet time, what will you do? Actually, there are apps for managing children but seriously, what will you do?

Dear young Silicon Valley programmer, I don’t despise what you do. I love it. Your genius and imagination, your process-driven abilities far exceed mine. I am in awe. If the podcast I listened to is correct - and of course it is, for it was presented to me as a suggestion in a learning algorithm where bias is built in to ensure I feel satisfied with the recommendations presented – then it is not you we should be concerned by.

You are young. You live in a bubble. You know not what the impacts of your decisions will be – the unintended consequences of your enthusiasm. But the more aged, worldly and travelled venture capitalists that drive you to be more, sell more, do it faster, exponentially year on year, perhaps they are to blame. They should know that wisdom is collected, that diversity brings fresh perspectives, that speed to market is not the only definer of success. When your inventions are pushing the very direction of humankind - influencing what we watch and consume and how we interact – the speed of those decisions, made in a bubble, is the undoing of your work, not the work itself.

Dear young Silicon Valley programmer let us cherish what you bring but without the rose-tinted glasses and instead look at your work with the crispness and duality afforded by our stylish bifocals.

I got a lot out of that podcast. It was informative and interesting and just my cup of tea. The algorithm you wrote to create bias in my listening feed was bang on. And therein lies the rub, right? Bias when it suits and with the full knowledge of its existence is utterly wonderful. I could quote Alanis Morrisette’s Isn’t it Ironic, but you would only reply “who is Alanis Morrisette”.