In an era of rapid technological advances, who bears responsibility for the implications of our digital creations? It seems like everyone agrees that we need to ‘get it right’ this time, and yet, few actually take meaningful steps towards changing how tech innovates, operates, and scales.
Tech investor and philanthropy CEO Mike Kubzansky shared his take on what the next era of tech could look like if the thoughtful consideration to how we're funding, building, and deploying technology goes beyond a conversation and into action. Spoiler: It looks like more guardrails, investment, and diversity.
“There's a common trade-off that gets posited that you can have either innovation or regulation,” he said. “I want to reject that trade-off. There's this false narrative that innovation means deregulation.”
Kubzansky emphasized the need for both. Besides, all technologies that scale to impact our daily lives eventually get regulated. Kubzansky pointed to seatbelts in cars and laws that allow sheep to be cloned (RIP, Dolly), but not people. “Eventually, society puts a framework into place for how it wants to deal with [a technology]. Responsible tech ultimately requires an ecosystem that makes some intentional choices about what we want and what we don't want.”
Kubzansky explained that there is a variety of regulations—both proscriptions and prescriptions, as well as incentives and competition policy—that need to be determined to define the power balance in the tech sector. And right now, the more people who can get involved, the better. “One of the fascinating things—for those of you who followed the US Senate's passage of KOSA, the Kids' Online Safety Act—was the mobilization of moms and kids,” he said. “Most of the debates in Washington tend to be from the tech advocates and the politicians—people [on the] inside. And for the first time, what you had in Washington were moms, teenagers and kids coming in saying, ‘No, this is how this affects my life.’ It’s so much more powerful when we hear from these groups and voices.”
Retroactively wrangling in social media through government policy is the perfect example for Kubzansky’s case for regulating tech in tandem with its invention. “I think there's a lot of regret around social media that we didn't get it right,” he says. “We were not intentional up front, and we let the train leave the station without giving it much thought.”
Now, though, he argues, is not only the time to think, but act.
If not, technology may improve our daily lives but it won't live up to its potential to solve our world’s biggest problems. That's the best case. Worst case? It creates even bigger problems. Kubzansky pointed out during the conversation that while he is a happy customer of certain food delivery apps himself, we need to think “past” the simplistic applications and guide tech so that its power not only contributes to initiatives like medical research, clean energy and space exploration, but that it is designed in a way that everyone benefits from these gains. If we act now, he said, we can take advantage of AI technology so that it is augmentative to the work humans do, perhaps transforming $12-an-hour jobs into $18-an-hour jobs instead of replacing them outright.
He likened the potential to create tech that can act as “cranes, not looms.” This is a metaphor that came up over lunch with another attendee to describe technology that doesn’t just create efficiencies for tasks we can already accomplish, but instead makes new things (dare one say ‘reaching new heights’) possible.
The key to accomplishing this is timing. Kubzansky said that there’s a need to point AI to solve real problems—not incremental problems like customer service tools—but medical applications and weather forecasting before the data is fully baked. And that probably won’t happen without some guardrails in place. “The time has to be now because the AI is getting so sophisticated so quickly that it’s in danger of being buried into a bunch of other technologies because it's a general-purpose software.”
It’s not that tech companies have nefarious desires for their products. It’s more that the industry has a tendency to, in the scientific spirit, make observations before drawing conclusions. The problem is that we have enough experience with tech to recognize what we want AI to do — as well as what we don’t want to see repeated. “Right now, I would say both the government and companies have failed us, and the costs of not responsible tech are being borne by citizens, individual users, consumers, and the communities. After 40 years of the digital revolution, we would argue it is time to address that.”
So how do Kubzansky and the team at Omidyar Network plan to tangibly, truly do that and create an ecosystem for responsible tech? Investment, of course.
Namely, investing in companies and encouraging stakeholders to demand accountability, investing in nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups that bring new voices to the table, and investing in software that can add safety and assurance alongside unregulated technologies (like deepfake detection, for example) to act as the next generation of digital watchdogs. So far, Omidyar Network has invested nearly $2 billion to make responsible tech a reality. “We want to make sure the digital revolution works for us and not vice versa,” he said onstage. “I feel we are approaching a tipping point. I don't think that it's this week, but I would say it's on the horizon of the next five years. Without question.”
Whether you’re a philanthropist, investor, technologist, policymaker, or simply someone who cares about tech’s outsized role in our lives, Kubzansky wants to collaborate. As he said, it will take all of us to purposefully guide our digital future.
