Too Much Of A Good Thing is Rarely A Good Thing
The juxtaposition of these two headlines back-to-back on the scroll was full of irony. Another article the next day well-articulated what’s going on and compared these two behemoths and the early battle with generative AI, cloud, and search. A must read and I’m sure there are others out there equally detailed. Once again, the technocrats are leading the way with the technology dogfood we all must eat — automatic upgrades, AI embedded in our lives or at least 365 or our search bar that is part of our day-to-day lives. Unless of course we’ve migrated to DuckDuck Go.
I was thinking about being spoon-fed — no make that force-fed — technology, all the way down to Apple removing the drive from laptops without ever asking. Not saying I miss it, but what struck me is how Apple knew best and functionality we came to rely on went out the window. It happens with the iPhone all the time and our lives are run around the ecosystems we operate in and on. SaaS providers keep jacking up prices as if we have no power to switch. Knowing we are loathe to migrate history, certainly not lose it, or change the habits we’ve become accustomed to whether in our accounting package or our CRM.
How did it get to be that every customer ‘service’ app now puts the onus on the customer to do all the work? Whether double-authentication, tokens for banking, or filing insurance claims for a car, pet, or our own bodies. I sound like I’m fighting progress. I’m not. I just can’t stand when it’s thrust on us and there is no choice in the matter.
Try being a soccer parent, or getting a kid through K-12, and not want to be on Facebook or any of the other META offerings. Impossible. We are forced into solutions we don’t want but told there is no other way to operate. Slowly we are sucked into the Borg or the matrix or whatever metaphor you want to use. It’ll only happen more and faster with next gen technologies on our doorstep seeping into our lives. Face recognition to determine our best dating partner regardless of whether the person whose face is being analyzed is a deep fake! It’s crazy.
I thought about this the other day when I visited some friends from Stanford who were all out in Cali for an alum reunion. They were talking about the interim President at Stanford and the unceremonious resignation of the last one whose research office and its integrity came into question. The general consensus — this was an easy way to take out a leader who had created a lot of problems and whose departure would have been ugly otherwise. The interim leader spoke of problems at the university and when I started to ask buddies who were closer to the situation what the situ was an earful ensued. Problems with the sports program. Problems with handling of COVID.
Problems with social engineering that is coming home to roost in a lot of ivy leagues these days — disenchanted alum, major donors pulling out. Problems with housing and complete upheaval of the way ‘neighborhoods were constructed’ with little sense of place among cohorts especially the freshman class whose bonding is around where they live that first year — bonds that literally last a lifetime. There were also problems with too much tech — Stanford became a tech/engineering/computer science school with x percent of the students majoring in hard-core STEM wanting the fast buck and dreams of being the next billionaire. Humanities went out the window.
But how can we be good technologists if we aren’t thinking about ethics, integrity, and the soft skills that enable and support the hard ones. Stanford leaned either/or and into the land of tech. I was struck how much the school didn’t resemble itself and how much changed and not so much for the better. My friends even told me there is a saying now on campus. Where fun goes to die. So not the Stanford I attended or remember.
Make no mistake the university was always at the forefront of engineering, computer science, the semiconductor industry, computing, and so much amazing change. But when the pendulum swings too far it’s rarely a good thing and the blend and spirit that made the university great is now being referred to as a ‘turnaround’ for the next university president recruited to run it.
And then it dawned on me that what happened to Stanford happened to San Francisco — it’s just different versions of the story. The city became enamored with technology and the hubris that went with it. From a million uber rides and google buses clogging the streets to tech towers that now lie empty while high rents have given way to an empty down-town, small businesses eviscerated, and the sponsor of Dreamforce, threatening its departure unless the city can get its act together with filth, drugs, homelessness, and crime.
There is a saying too much of a good thing is rarely a good thing. And it happens with tech when it’s left without a balance. Our tech industry has done a lot of amazing, good. I just wish the region hadn’t become a one-industry town, like autos in Detroit — or entertainment to Hollywood and Stanford hadn’t become a university version of that.