Framework

Jackie

What do you think of the idea that progress is always good?

Tracy

Have you read Sapiens?

Jackie

No, I haven't!

Tracy

My recollection of the book is not that good, but there's one thing he's talking about in terms of the Agricultural Revolution where I think now most people think, "Whoa, the Agricultural Revolution was such a great thing—like, we can now support much larger populations, specialization of work, not everyone has to be out hunting and gathering all the time." But he actually makes a very interesting statement, too, that once the Agricultural Revolution happened, we were now tethered to the land. Like, we had to be there, tilling the soil, planting, being there to harvest. And there's a lot less diversity in our diets. Once we started farming things, we would produce all of this one crop and then most of your diet then becomes based on a few staple crops. Whereas in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you get much more diversity of diet, and you're healthier because you just go out, run around, whatever. And, actually, working the land for agriculture was much more backbreaking work, so in some ways, we were domesticated by these plants that we thought we domesticated.

So it's an interesting way to think about it—are our lifestyles better because of the Agricultural Revolution? I think people would still argue yes, but it's interesting to have that assumption examined. I think even when the answer is yes, I feel like it's definitely—

Jackie

It's kind of interesting how ideas take hold and then you can't remember a time when you didn't think this way. I was reading about the Cartesian view of the mind and the body and whatever and just this assumption that everything that makes you you is your mind, basically. So all of these people in tech who are like, "Someday people will be uploaded," and whatever, and just basically assuming that nothing is lost if the pattern of your mind and whatever is copied onto a server somewhere. It's just super interesting. So—I guess kind of going off what you were saying before, about how technology isn't always a good thing. Do you think there's sort of a framework for determining what it is and what it isn't, maybe? What are the kinds of things you would look at to sort of make that determination?

Tracy

That's an interesting question, I don't think I've thought about framework-level. One way to think about it is what is it giving and then what is it taking away. And one interesting pattern of a lot of tech services that have come up in the last few years on the consumer side is that they're all free to use, but...

Jackie

There's a hidden cost?

Tracy

Yeah, I forget the exact saying, but it's like—if you're not paying, then you're not the product? You're paying in terms of your attention, and your attention is what's being monetized. So that's what ads are, basically, right? You get to use Facebook, Twitter, whatever, for free, but they're making money off of you because they're selling your attention.

Jackie

I guess that's one thing I'm thinking about. It's very hard to tell—for instance, with Google. Obviously, lots of great services, but it's really hard to tell what exactly is being given on my part when I'm using it. Like, to which companies is my data being sold?

Tracy

Yeah. And how much of your privacy are you giving up? Because for them to build the best ads modeling and serve you the most relevant ads—they're tracking all of your history, so you're giving up privacy in exchange for better targeted ads. And for some of these new services that are coming up, they just have these really interesting impacts on communities. Like, Uber and the laundry on-demand services are really interesting. They are currently now heavily VC-subsidized, so you get to use these really cool, very convenient service that's not actually economically viable or sustainable on its own but that has market impacts elsewhere.

So, let's take the laundry example. There are laundry on-demand services, and I've heard anecdotally what has happened in some places is that people in a community who used to go to a local laundromat down the street to do laundry now just call the laundry on-demand services, which are cheaper than they should be because they're subsidized by investor money. But then some of those laundry on-demand services folded because they just weren't sustainable. But by that point, the local laundromats had already closed because they lost business. So there are already cascading impacts through the community. At that point, everybody is screwed because local businesses are out, and now the people who are in these communities don't have a way to do laundry. There are costs to engaging in these services.

One thing I worry about with these car service companies is not just the loss of jobs that will eventually happen—it's bad that we're recruiting all these people to become Uber and Lyft drivers and then they may potentially lose their jobs, but—if investments in kind of a very broad sense of communities in the private sector for these car service companies then reduces the investment in public transit, that's bad for communities. And it's also a little bit funny in a sad way to see a lot of these car service companies rediscover the idea of public transit. It's like, "Oh, we're going to have this service where there are predefined routes and people can get on and get off!" Okay, it's just like, you rediscovered bus routes and shuttles.

This is one thing that really concerned me about San Francisco, which has really bad public transit. Like, okay, it makes sense that Uber and Lyft started in a place like San Francisco where the public transit is so bad and cabs are terrible, but just all the investments going into private sector instead of public sector... there's a reason why the public sector exists. It's pretty accessible at a price point that more people can engage with it. I think for a city like New York where it's much more democratic with the transit, where in a lot of cases it's actually faster to use the subway to get to where you want to go, it doesn't really matter your level of wealth—you will use public transit still in many cases. And so then you're much more invested, political capital-wise or whatever it is, in making sure public transit is good.

But imagine you're a wealthy person in San Francisco and just always take Uber everywhere because it's the fastest way to get anywhere—you would never take MUNI because it's terrible—then bonds come up to support MUNI or public transit development, you're like, "I don't want my money to go toward that because I never use it." Because you have your own rich-person alternatives to things. So I'm much more a fan of New York in terms of that, where you have wealthy people who are much more invested in public transit. Sometimes when I'm using these car service apps, I actually feel like I should be supporting public transit, giving more ridership to public transit. I don't want to be fueling something that ultimately may be harmful to a wider swath of society.

Jackie

It's like what you were saying about laundry—so many of the ridesharing services are also subsidized with VC money.

Tracy

Oh, they totally are! They're losing money on every ride.

Jackie

Like, Uber rides—they had that period when rides in San Francisco were $2.

Tracy

$2.25 to match the MUNI price, yeah.

Jackie

It's just ridiculous.

Tracy

I worry about those interims. In the short term, it's very easy to take things that are being given to you without critically examining what the cost is—and, you know, actually, this pretty interesting question has come up with Uber and people who are like, "Delete Uber, protest Uber." Do you want to give support to something that's convenient to you in the short term but really terrible in the long term? Hard to say.

Jackie

Cool. So what do you think can maybe change that? What do you think are the conditions that are making these things happen right now? I feel like with these laundry startups, it's kind of —do you think VCs thought they would be economically viable or something, or...?

Tracy

They must have believed it at some point, right? They believed that it would become a big business, make them money back. I think there's a few things at play here. One is a very capitalist society where we're just very driven by financial returns. And that causes a lot of people to turn a blind eye to potentially more ethical questions. And, again, this comes up a lot with Uber—why do we keep funding people who are terrible human beings? This came up a little bit with Parker Conrad, who was the CEO of Zenefits, who basically told people at his company to commit fraud and enabled that. And he just raised $7 million to do something else. There's just this willingness of people who have power and money to keep funding things that are ethically—people and businesses—that are ethically questionable because they think they'll make financial returns on it. I think there's a lot of other people who are not evil actors but not aware of the ethical considerations. Some of it's just a lack of humanities education and what we were talking about earlier—this unquestioning belief in technology being the right thing, the best thing—and just never being forced to examine those assumptions or to consider what the impact is or feeling like it's okay to do that if your day job is that you're being paid to do these things and then you can try to earn your ethics offset some other way. There was an interesting Medium article about this concept—you can't have ethics be your side hustle. I don't know if you saw this Medium post.

Jackie

No, I don't think so.

Tracy

You should look it up. I think it's just that ethics can't be your side hustle, and it calls out people who work on things like Uber or Facebook news feed in their day jobs and then try to earn ethics offsets by volunteering at a nonprofit on the weekends. And you can't do that! You need to make the core of what you do something that you can stand behind the values of. But yeah, I think a lot of people just don't really think about the implications of what they're working on, and the people who work on the news feed, for example, were not necessarily thinking in a broader sense about what they were enabling.

I worked on the news feed for Pinterest, so it was very similar in theory—we're building machine learning models to optimize engagement, and engagement will be defined by... repins, likes, clicks, whatever, that's for Pinterest. So we build these models to get people to repin and like and click more. And I'm sure Facebook is doing something very similar—they have some engagement metrics they're trying to optimize, but I'm sure in initial conversations they were not thinking about the propagation of fake news or things that reaffirm people's beliefs whether or not they are true. And then unfortunately that got very large in the election cycle. People starting to be self-segregated into their own little filter bubbles of news or fake news.

And I'm sure the people who are working on the machine learning algorithms were not thinking about what impact it might have on the political environment, but there are a lot of broader ramifications, and it's just easy to be siloed in what you're working on and just think about the immediate boundaries of your problem, which is, "We have this much data, and we're trying to map this onto a machine learning problem, and we're trying to improve this end optimization target." But then I think without a stronger grounding in humanities and ethics and thinking about these questions, it's just very easy to pretend they don't exist.

Jackie

Do you think humanities education, then, is a potential sort of fix?

Tracy

I think so. My experience studying engineering in school is that I learned nothing about the humanities, and only much later after I was working did I discover all these things around feminism and social justice and privilege and theories of oppression and social change and... I wasn't trying to be ignorant of these things, I was just like, "I'm trying to get my degree, there are certain number of classes I need to take, just trying to get through them." So yeah, I wish I had had a more thorough grounding in humanities during the very formative educational period of college. I think if you leave those parts out of people's educations, then not that many people are going to go try to study these things in their free time, once they're out of that.

I've been frustrated trying to talk to people that I work with who are in the tech industry about really basic concepts, things that I feel like they should know as citizens of human society. I don't think they were malicious in any way; they just had never encountered these concepts. You know, this one person I talked to about social justice and criminal justice, and he was like, "Aren't they the same thing?" I was like, "Um, no, not exactly, and you should probably know the difference as a citizen, as a human being, kind of part of society." He was an Asian-American man, had grown up in America in a pretty privileged coastal area, and so had just never had to encounter the criminal justice system, really, or think about social justice.

If you're in a position of privilege... the whole definition is that you don't have to worry about it. You have the privilege of ignoring injustice. And so for a lot of these people, it's just really easy to ignore societal, systemic problems or the implications of what they're doing because they've never been confronted with these issues and have no real compunction to. So I think part of producing human beings that will be contributing members of society is making sure that the educations that we're instituting as standard include those parts around humanities and ethics.

Jackie

What about regulation, in terms of accounting for some of the negative externalities of what companies are doing? It seems like, the better technology gets, the fewer people are required to make decisions that impact billions of people, potentially.

Tracy

The tricky thing about regulation, especially around technology, is that it's so hard to know how to regulate correctly, and the whole point of the technology sector is that it's innovating and creating new things, so it's very hard to know what should be regulated. And it's changing so fast—the pace of politics is just not going to be anywhere near that. So I think tech has to be much more self-regulating, than depending on government as regulatory actor. And I also think that there's so much that's unknown about information technology. Before Facebook became what it is, no one knew what it would become, so it was hard to say, "Oh, this is how it should be regulated." There's new technology with CRISPR where you can edit genes—I don't know what the implications are going to be. I'm sure the government doesn't know, either, and it's really difficult to get lawmakers and people who set policy to be such deep technology experts. And also people who are going to try to predict the future and know what kinds of policies will make sense and there's so much that's going to be unknown about the effects of a policy. So I just find that regulation is hard in this space. I think when things have played out for a little bit longer, there's a role for government to ensure basic standards. But I think it's hard for government to be on the forefront of technology.

Jackie

So, kind of a pivot, I guess—what's your personal relationship with technology, just in your life on a daily basis?

Tracy

I use it way too much.

Jackie

Do you feel like that? Do you feel like it's too much and you would like to use it less?

Tracy

Yeah, for sure. I think—it's so addictive. I have the feeling that I'm constantly on my phone, checking Twitter, even though I don't need to be checking Twitter.

I had a really amusing conversation with someone about Twitter. So it was a friend who doesn't use Twitter very much, and someone else was trying to pitch him on why to use it and said, "You can get everything in real-time!" And he said, "I don't want to get the news in real-time! I don't want to get bombarded with terrible things happening. I just check in once a day to know what terrible things have happened. Why do I need it pushed to me? It's all so negative."

I think a lot of these consumer apps are designed in such a way that you feel this compulsion to check for notifications, you get the little badges like Bejeweled. You have this many notifications, you want to go check them. You get kind of this quick hit, like, "Oh, someone liked my thing," or responded to me. But it doesn't necessarily make me more satisfied in life? And I've actually found myself appreciating the times where I'm away from my phone and don't care to check it.

So if I'm in a workout class, I'm like, "Yes! My phone will be in my locker, not going to check it for the next hour because I'm working out." Or I'm with friends and I don't want to check my phone because I'm with people in person and I want to be fully engaged, and I don't feel the compulsion. I find myself appreciating those times much more.

But then when I'm not in those situations, I'm just stuck on my phone. Like, why am I engaging in this negative behavior? It would be so much better if I spent less time on Twitter, less time on Facebook, less time on my phone generally. I actually tried to reduce my time on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, by moving those icons away from my home screen top row into a folder, and then I keep moving the folder around so I'll lose the muscle memory. So I originally put them in a folder on the same page, then I moved them to the last page of all my apps, then then I moved them back to another page—I want to get rid of that muscle memory. So I've been trying to shuffle my apps on my phone just so I don't keep checking the same things over and over. I pretty actively want to spend less time on technology, but it's so addictive.

Jackie

Do you think there's a fix for that? Because it seems like there's kind of this fundamental conflict between what companies are optimizing for and what's actually good for people.

Tracy

Yeah. I think now, especially because the main thing that companies seem to have figured out how to monetize is attention, all they want is your attention. For the companies that monetize other things—so the difference, Amazon doesn't make money by you checking the Amazon app every second. They make money off of transactions, so they don't need you glued to their app. So it's fine. I think if companies figure out ways to monetize that are not solely dependent on attention, then it'll be different. I mean, this comes up a lot with media, journalism—right now, it's based on attention, and that's why everything is so clickbaity and reinforcing what you already believe. It's not around quality journalism. But no on has really figured out how to monetize quality journalism to the same extent as they've monetized eyeballs. And we operate in a capitalist society, so unless you can tie these other goals to the financial motivators, then it'll be really hard to change behavior.

Jackie

Do you think you interact differently with different platforms?

Tracy

Yeah, for sure.

Jackie

It's interesting how—it's hard to tell how conscious it is on the part of Twitter, for instance. Twitter puts me in such a specific sort of mindset, I guess, and mode of interaction with other people on Twitter. What are some of the ways that you experience that? Not necessarily with Twitter, anything. How the design shapes how you behave on it.

Tracy

For me, Twitter and Facebook are really interesting contrasts. Twitter is very real-time; things just keep happening and I feel like I want to keep dipping in to see what's going on. When I tweet, it will get responses, likes, retweets. And stuff that's happened in the past just kind of flows down, right? And it feels like constant engagement is really positive, to give me that quick hit.

On Facebook, which has the news feed algorithm and stuff doesn't move as quickly, I'm not as incentivized to post constantly to Facebook because only the best stuff gets surfaced, and it's actually kind of frustrating sometimes to post on Facebook. Things I find much more important never get the news feed attention. Photos get bumped up really fast, and certain types of contents do really well on Facebook, and others don't. And it's really annoying to me to feel that difference. On Twitter, it feels like everything is much more... equal? Every tweet I send out gets the same sort of prominence, just in the reverse chronological stream.

So I post a lot on Twitter and I post not that much on Facebook, but I post the most important things I want to give attention to. So if I post something significant on Facebook, I know I can get a few hundred likes on it. The things I post on Twitter rarely get more than a hundred. There are usually much fewer, but I have a pretty constant stream of stuff on Twitter, and so I'll reserve a couple of things I really care to post to Facebook. Like, oh, there's one article that I will share every couple of months onto Facebook. Whereas on Twitter there's twenty things a day.

Jackie

How conscious do you think Facebook is about that? Because I would think that they want people to post more, so it's interesting that their design kind of reflects more of the "big life updates once in a while" attitude.

Tracy

Well, I think they have enough content of all the people that are using it that they want the content quality to be higher. Since each person can only consume a certain amount of content per day. So if I were to 10x my volume of updates, that doesn't mean you want to see 10x of my stuff. You only see so much stuff per day, so unless the stuff I'm posting is that much better... You can probably think of it as that you might see one post from me a day. If by posting ten things, it means that the best thing is better and that improves your experience, then they want me to do that. Otherwise, I don't think they need me to be posting all the time, which is kind of just going into a void.

Jackie

How do you feel about stories? Or... what is it called, Messenger Day, Facebook Stories?

Tracy

Oh my god. I'm not super into it. I think it's just too many things to check. I do kind of buy their argument that it's almost like news feed. Like, before Facebook did news feed, that was not a format that people consumed information in from these consumer sites, and then once news feed came out, it became standard. Every new site builds a news feed of some form, so I kind of buy their argument that Stories is just a new format of consuming. But to me, it's just too much. I don't really need to check any more Stories. I don't need any more places to check.

I think one thing that's a little bit different in the news feed and the Stories analogy is a mode of consumption. So news feed—there's different content on every site. So I like that when I see Twitter, there's a certain set of content that's been organized in some way. On Facebook, there's certain content. All the other sites that have news feeds, it's similar. It's just a way of organizing the things I want to see when I'm on these services.

A lot of new products that Stories are on, I have the same social graph on most of them, or very much overlapping, so I'm just not that interested in seeing very similar content. I think sometimes people don't really know where to post right now, so they'll post same content on different sites. I don't need to see it on Snapchat and on Instagram and on Facebook!

Jackie

Yeah. So, kind of shifting gears again, this is super random, but I thought about this—what are your thoughts on, for instance, Peter Thiel's interest in young blood, or basically people in tech who kind of want to use tech as a means toward immortality or something close to immortality?

Tracy

I find it very strange, kind of weird. I don't have very well-fleshed-out thoughts on this. I personally don't care very much for immortality, so I don't really get why people are so into it?

I think, for me, on a more systemic level, I care about improving quality of life for everyone instead of quantity. So this whole focus on extension of life is not particularly meaningful to me unless we also can figure out quality of life.

And some of these questions around even the future of work and how are people going to have incomes to sustain their lifestyles—right now it's just like, "Okay, people will live longer, get to work longer, but there are not necessarily jobs that are good for people at an older age." And so I'm a little bit skeptical that we're going to be able to solve quality of life problems and issues like unemployment or future of work and other things. We have a bunch of people living longer, like, okay, so we have more people who are alive for a long time, populations are not going down.

It's kind of interesting to look at the population breakdowns in different countries. Some of them have bulges in population at older ages, and those are less sustainable because those people are going to move toward retirement age, and there's not enough workers to sustain the growth of the economy. And so there are certain governments that are really concerned about this and they're trying to get their citizens to have more kids.

Jackie

Yeah, yeah, like in Japan.

Tracy

Singapore. In Singapore, they're actually giving out pamphlets, kind of a joke, I don't know how serious they were, but pamphlets on how to go on dates.

Jackie

Oh, wow.

Tracy

They were like, "Oh, you should brush your teeth before you go on a date! You know, if they seem interested, you can hold their hand!" It was kind of hilarious but also to encourage people to reproduce, basically. But yeah, the way your population looks—if you have a very large bulge in the older population but not enough younger people to support that, it's problematic. China has a bunch of issues around this because of the one-child policy. In some cases, you'll have—there's a bunch of gendered stuff going on, too, but—a man who has to support his wife, who may not work, and his parents and her parents. It's like, it just doesn't work very well. So obviously they've stopped the one-child policy, but there are these ramifications from the 1970s or whatever onwards. The population just looks a very particular way and it's hard to adjust.

Jackie

What are some less sexy problems that you think are important and that need more attention? Because there's definitely radical life extension and there's Elon Musk trying to go Mars, but there are a lot of much more mundane problems that kind of aren't getting as much attention.

Tracy

Yeah. I mean, the sector that I'm working in now is govtech—just trying to improve basic digital services for government institutions that are intended to serve the people but are not very good at it because they have really broken technology.

So I worked in the US Digital Service a couple years ago in the federal government. You just look at government's inability to provide basic services it intends to, like with Healthcare.gov, which is what inspired the creation of the US Digital Service. They had this big healthcare reform, they wanted to roll it out, and then it was almost completely derailed by the technological failures.

The process for applying for immigration—still super paper-based. Federal government spends, like, $300 million a year on postage internally for shipping immigration paperwork around. Like, oh, that doesn't seem like it should be necessary, why are we spending so much on shipping paper among processing centers? And it's inefficient.

So there's just so much that could be better about how we serve people. Taxes. The whole process of filing taxes is such a disaster in the US. In countries like the UK and Sweden, you don't have to file your taxes—they already know how much you're getting paid and how much you deducted for taxes. I think in Sweden, they'll just text you how much you get in returns or not.

There's so many ways that government could be better serving the people with better technology. There's a lot of reasons why government tech is hard—not in the technical aspects, but in the preparement and the bureaucracy you have to navigate through. I think there's a big space there.

There's a few other sectors that are getting more attention, and I think technology could be better, but I don't think technology is a primary blocker of better services for, like, healthcare and education. A decent number of startups and companies in those spaces, but I think fundamentally with healthcare it's not really the technology that's the problem; it's the whole really complicated employer-based insurance system, no single-payer, that stuff is more annoying. With education, a lot of it is more regulatory, bad education policy, that's more problematic than just the software.

What else? I mean, there's definitely underserved communities which are the ones that can't afford to pay as much. Oftentimes just overlaps with the governmental services. Yeah, I mean, it's more appealing if you're an entrepreneur if you can build a product for rich people that will pay you a lot of money for it, right?

Jackie

Are you, I guess, optimistic about kind of for government specifically adopting new technologies and getting more efficient?

Tracy

I think there's more good people that are working on it now. Just things like US Digital Service, Code for America, and then generally the socialization of this idea that tech people should do tours of duty in government.

So before US Digital Service, for example, and CFA, good tech people would not want to go anywhere near government. Stay away, don't touch with a ten-foot pole. Just very different from other sectors, like in law or finance—clerking for the Supreme Court is very prestigious—and finance, if you work for the Treasury—Sheryl Sandberg worked for the Treasury—it's a prestigious thing to be affiliated with those institutions. But for tech people, no way they're going anywhere near the federal government.

I think USDS has done a good job of changing that perception on the federal level. Code for America has been really good for that, more on the municipal level. I think people are getting more into the idea of serving the country. I think some of it is also accelerated by the changing political backdrop and people wanting to get more involved with the functioning of the country and doing good and giving back, so I think there's reason for optimism that there's more good people that want to get involved.

I think it will just be tricky, frustrating, annoying, to make that change because so much of government is very risk-averse, bureaucratic, things get ossified. It's just hard to make change. I think there's at least more attention on it now.

Jackie

What do you think of—there's USDS and other sort of organizations working kind of within the government, but then there's also sort of this kind of newer wave of tech efforts that are civic-oriented, but they're totally unrelated to the government. For instance, YC launched their—I forget what it's called, but it's basically just a repository of projects, apps and stuff, trying to organize immigration data and stuff like that.

Tracy

Yeah, I mean, I think there's reason to be encouraged by more attention on that. I think right now the civic tech space is trying to figure itself out a bunch because it's generally hard for those partners to get funding. They're not usually big moneymakers. And so if they're relying on volunteer crews, it's just harder. A lot of people want to start their own efforts but don't necessarily know the whole space, what's out there. I've felt that there's not always been a great connect between the people who are the builders on the tech side and the people who know what the problems really are, so I think there needs to be more collaboration between the different actors.

Yeah, but I think the civic tech space is interesting; it just feels less sustainable in a bunch of ways. When the primary goal is civic impact and not making money, there are—so I'm involved with the Arena Summit. It's something that a group of us got together to do after the election in November, and so the Arena Summit was the idea that we were convening people around the idea of running for office.

We've expanded the vision to also be supporting civic entrepreneurship and community-building, so we actually do a lot of these civic organizations as part of the Arena community, so Flippable is one of them. They try to find state and local races where they can be flipped to Democrat, and they try to focus attention from Flippable community on the state and local races that would otherwise be kind of unknown to people. And there's a lot of civil organizations like Swing Left, Sister District, Run For Something—there's a lot of new organizations that have popped up that are around this idea.

A lot of them are politically oriented, so they're looking for electoral ROI. And there's also a whole space of other civic tech organizations, so two of the YC people that have been working on some of their civic tech organizing stuff and the person who built that one page—they were at Arena Summit a couple weeks ago. So there's a whole space of people who are interested in working on this stuff, and part of what we're trying to do with Arena Summit is bring those people together so they can have those conversations and figure out where the synergies, how they can collaborate and not be competitive.

But I think there's still a lot of bridging work to be done—we just need to get to know what else is out there, what are the needs. Figure out how to work together. But yeah, a lot of it sounds like it's still volunteer efforts right now, which makes them a lot less scalable. People can only put in nights or weekends, fractions of your time, so it's harder. Some of them are trying to fundraise; it's hard to fundraise when you're not trying to drive financial ROI. It's a whole space of things right now.

Jackie

So what is—this is kind of random—what is something that—maybe one thing that you're concerned about (maybe it's an area or company or whatever) and then one thing that's exciting to you?

Tracy

I guess a couple areas of concern that slightly overlap. One's very obvious given all the work I do—diversity in tech. Which has implications for lack of perspective. It has implications for ethics and morality. But also just sheer lack of perspective. And I think this will play out in really interesting ways with some of the new technologies that are being developed, like AR, VR, AI, machine learning. So one interesting analysis on VR is that the way they try to simulate the virtual world is primarily geared toward men's perceptions and women are actually just biologically a bit different in how we perceive, so is it based on motion? I forget what the other things are. The ways that we simulate reality and how we trick the brain into believing that virtual reality is real will be different because of true biological differences, but if we're only building—the only people building and testing these new technologies are a certain population, then we'll have huge blind spots. And this is why women tend to get more nauseous using VR headsets.

Jackie

That's so interesting.

Tracy

So there's some things like that. I think on the AI front, using lots of data. There's a tendency for people to believe that algorithms are neutral and code is neutral, when, really, algorithms and machine learning models are just codifying the biases of the people who write them or the data that they're fed, and without enough perspective on what that means—and some of this just goes back to our earlier conversation on humanities education and thinking about the implications of what you're doing—without the contemplating all the biases that go in, it's very easy to use algorithms, like machine learning, AI, in a way that can actually be really harmful.

So there's a really interesting book called *Weapons of Math Destruction* that just came out, and the author talks a lot about how data can be used in these very bad ways. We build opaque models that actually just perpetuate bias.

So, for example, there's this tool that prosecutors or police were using to predict recidivism. And it basically just perpetuates all the racial and socioeconomic inequality that already exists in the system. And so most people treat the output of this recidivism predictor as fact. Black people tend to reoffend at a higher rate; let's just be harsher on them.

It creates a really bad cycle, and there's no—there's not a lot of thought paid to how do you build a negative feedback loop? So if you have a positive feedback loop, it just keeps reinforcing whatever signal it had originally instead of adjusting based on real world and correcting for bias, which I think the—increasing use of big data and these various data sets to be smarter in some way about things is highly risky, especially if we're not being careful about the ethics or biases that we're baking into them.

Jackie

And then maybe a thing that you're excited about?

Tracy

Right now, what am I excited about? I think generally still very excited about software and making the world more efficient. Which also comes with the flip side of automation. One thing that's kind of cool I think about more people understanding what software is, becoming more literate in coding. So they can start to see the ways that software can be beneficial.

A lot of people ask if coding is new literacy, and there's a few ways to parse that question. I don't think everybody has to code professionally or even write code most of the time. I think it's important for people to get how code works and why it's interesting and relevant and have the mental model for what code is, which is instructions for computers. And computers are very good at executing them very quickly in the same way every time.

I think as more people start to understand what software is and what code is and what new technological systems mean in their lives, they'll know how to interact with them better. I think you see this more with more people being nontechnical founders at tech companies where they understand enough of what technology and software is to have an idea for how software can make some problems better or work to solve some problem. And they don't necessarily need to be the ones coding, but if they understand, "This is what software is capable of doing," then they can recruit someone to help implement that.

I think as more people become software-literate if not necessarily actual coders, they'll see more opportunities for where software can materially improve a situation and I think also for most meaningful for the communities that are underrepresented in tech right now—a lot of what people in tech are doing is just looking at what problems they have in their own lives and solving them. But it means that there are certain populations that are not represented well in tech, then there are not as many people thinking about solving those problems. So I'm optimistic that there's more people at least becoming acquainted with software that they can think about ways that software can solve their problems because it's not just the current demographic in tech.