| Hello there, A couple of weeks ago Eric Mongeon, our chief creative officer, sent me his sketch for the cover of the July/August issue: a big X slashed across the page, effacing even our logo. He appended a terse explanation: "You X out the magazine itself." That got my attention. Provocative, sure, but it conveys the harsh message of this issue of MIT Technology Review: The tech industry has let us down. Silicon Valley didn't equip the US with the infrastructure and technology it needed to fight the covid-19 pandemic. It hasn't provided many solutions to climate change. Its gig-economy platforms contribute to weakening labor protections, and its social-media sites spread misinformation that weakens democracy.
Even "tech for good" has often been a disappointment: while police brutality against black people has been documented countless times on cell phones and police bodycams in the past few years, the death toll has stayed perfectly steady. The extraordinary protests of the past couple of weeks, though triggered by police violence, were fueled as much as anything by the disproportionate impact on black and brown people of the pandemic and the economic crisis—again, owing in part to the unequal benefits of the tech boom. The latest issue of MIT Technology Review looks at why we have the tech industry we have, and what can be done to make it better for everyone. The problem, we argue, is with a society that gives markets, and therefore the rich and powerful, too much say over which technologies are built and how they are used. Venture capital, Elizabeth MacBride writes, funnels money from people who have it (customers) to people who have even more of it (investors), leaving those who have none of it with no say in one of the main driving forces of American innovation. This isn't a call for socialism: free markets are essential to innovation. But the technology prowess that gave birth to Silicon Valley owed much to government funding and direction, both of which have declined over the decades, as David Rotman and Ilan Gur explain. More muscular policy and regulation could also help with the post-covid recovery, writes Nathan Schneider, by creating incentives and support for local entrepreneurs to build technological solutions for their own communities. For signs of hope, reports Brian Barth, one might look abroad to Canada, where the tech hub of Toronto is trying to be a sort of gentler, kinder Silicon Valley. But look, too, at individual entrepreneurs with ambitious, idealistic goals. As we do every year, we've assembled a global and—importantly—diverse group of leading young innovators, and interviewed some of the past years' winners about what they've learned along their journeys. Their examples, we hope, can serve to inspire funders, policymakers, and other technologists with a reminder of the good technology can do when it is directed at helping everyone—not just the moneyed and powerful. Best wishes, and I hope you're staying safe. Gideon Lichfield
Editor in chief
MIT Technology Review
P.S. You can get paywall free access to this issue of the magazine, and support our technology journalism, by subscribing today.
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اللباس التقليدي الحضرمي للرجال مرحبا بكم في سلسلة اللباس التقليدي الحضرمي .. لنتعرف معا على تراثنا ...وربما أن بعض هذه الملابس لم تعد مس...
الغرف برس / خاص عقد قسم البرامج التعليمية بجمعية السبيل الاجتماعية الخيرية يوم الأحد 18 فبراير 2018 م لقاءا بأئمة المساجد المكفولين...
