Maybe Everything Isn’t Tech’s Fault
Tech is a frequent scapegoat for society’s ills. Publishers have churned out countless books and articles from anti-tech voices blaming social media for causing depression, smartphones for causing obesity, and targeted ads for causing negative body image—ignoring the fact that problems like depression, obesity, and negative body image long preceded the digital age. Two recent headlines show that critics will go to absurd lengths to condemn tech, and policymakers should be wary of the potential consequences of so much misplaced blame.
In the first example, many news outlets have reported that a lawyer is suing Google on behalf of the family of a man who drowned after driving off a collapsed bridge while following directions from Google Maps. The loss of life is clearly a tragedy, but spotlighting the lawsuit that attributes fault to a navigation system—as opposed to the owner of the road (it was a private road, not a public one) or the driver himself—is an unusual step that is only receiving such widespread media coverage because it involves a well-known tech company. After all, plenty of paper roadmaps contain out-of-date information, but nobody blames those mapmakers because drivers are ultimately responsible for their own safety. Whether a driver uses a map or not, they must exercise caution, stay aware of their surroundings, and make good judgment. Even the best navigation systems will not be able to predict all potential hazards, such as a stopped vehicle or emergency repair, and they rely on third-party data that may be incomplete or incorrect. Indeed, Google bluntly reminds users in its terms of service that “actual conditions differ from the map results” and warns them to “exercise your independent judgment and use Google Maps/Google Earth at your own risk.”
By misplacing the blame, critics allow those truly at fault to evade responsibility—especially in the eyes of public opinion. For example, anti-tech advocates routinely blame social media for spreading misinformation, rather than attributing misinformation to its source, such as hostile foreign governments. As a result, much of the policy debate centers around how to impose costs and consequences on social media platforms, rather than punishing those foreign governments interfering in domestic elections. Indeed, U.S. adversaries must be stunned at their success as they have both misused these digital platforms to harm American interests and weaponized public opinion against some of America’s most successful tech companies because of those same actions.
In the second example, multiple reporters have covered a lawsuit on behalf of a Black man who police wrongly arrested after a Louisiana sheriff’s office issued a warrant for a crime he did not commit. The sheriff’s office was investigating a man who used a stolen credit card to make an expensive purchase. The detective obtained an arrest warrant based only on a facial recognition match from surveillance video, something virtually every facial recognition vendor and expert has repeatedly instructed law enforcement not to do. Indeed, the man who was arrested was not even in the state at the time of the fraudulent transaction, and so if the sheriff’s office had properly used facial recognition as an investigative tool, this wrongful arrest would never have happened.
Rather than focus on the shoddy police work, the lawyer in this case, as well as reporters, have placed the blame on facial recognition technology. Focusing so much attention on technology presents a distorted image of the real issues. For example, wrongful arrests are a serious problem in the United States, and facial recognition technology is involved in only a tiny fraction of those cases. An investigation found that at least 500 people in Denver had been wrongly arrested over a seven-year period, with some people spending weeks in jail, because they had a similar name to someone who committed a crime or they had their identity stolen. Most of the people subject to wrongful arrests because of other careless police work will never receive much attention, especially if the media and policymakers only pay attention to cases involving facial recognition. And proposed solutions based on this misleading narrative that technology is the problem will not fix the bigger issues.
The tone of reporting about technology has become more negative in recent years, and it is unlikely that the media will change its bias against technology any time soon. That means that policymakers should retain a healthy skepticism when they pick up a newspaper and read about the latest headline about how technology is destroying democracy, creating an existential risk to humanity, or ruining men.
