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What Tech Needs to Do Better in 2020, According to the People Who Build It
Voter registration, thoughtful regulation, replaceable batteries, and more — here are the solutions for a better tomorrow, today
At OneZero, we believe in a better tomorrow. Ahead of the new year, we asked leaders in the tech industry — engineers, activists, venture capitalists, and writers — one simple question: How can we make the world better in 2020?
Here are their answers.
Leslie Miley, Former CTO, Obama Foundation
“Tech needs to begin to take responsibility for the spread and amplification of demonstrable hateful and harmful content and work in a transparent way to eliminate it from their platforms.”
Jessica Powell, Former Google VP and Author of The Big Disruption
“Tech people aren’t wrong to think that the media is sometimes unfair. But that doesn’t mean that all negative stories are wrong or are driven by an anti-tech agenda. Instead of spending so much energy decrying media bias against tech — which seems to dominate a lot of my Twitter feed — we should do better as an industry and listen to people’s concerns.”
danah boyd, Founder and President of Data & Society and a Partner Researcher at Microsoft
“In the late 1700s and early 1800s, entirely new models of political self-governance emerged to create democracies as we know them. In the early 1900s, all sorts of global governance activities started to emerge, from the development of interoperable standards for weather data to the formation of the Red Cross to the geopolitical efforts culminating in the United Nations. These are but a few of the radical restructurings of governance. We’re on the precipice of another one. The governance of technology isn’t going to be as simple as a battle between free-market capitalism and nation-state regulation. We’re seeing the need for an entirely new way of conceptualizing governance, even if we don’t yet know what it looks like. The big open question is how ugly things will be as this gets worked out.”
