Our Vision for a Responsible Tech Future

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

Daniel Bell, expert sociologist and writer on the information society

2. Digital tech is different. And yet, in many ways the same.

Most major tech revolutions have broad similarities, but the pervasiveness and unique characteristics of digital technology create distinct opportunities and challenges. We need to understand its singular attributes to better anticipate and plan for unintended consequences and new scenarios.

Certain elements make digital technology more challenging for society to manage than past technology revolutions:

• Digital technology’s speed and virality, lack of friction, scale, pervasiveness, and rapid evolutionary nature;
• AI’s distinct self-learning capabilities and its ability to replace thinking work and impersonate humans (e.g., bots, natural language processing, deepfakes);
• Web3 claims and aspirations from some quarters to operate outside the realm of government control;
• Digital distribution channels and networks that operate with near zero marginal costs, capitalizing on a massive installed, connected base that is increasingly controlled and centralized by few gatekeepers (increasingly in crypto/Web3);
• More than most other technologies, digital apps can be (and at times are) designed to hijack or manipulate our emotions and psychology; and
• Widespread lack of understanding about how complex technology works and what’s inside “the black box.”

These unique attributes may lull us into a deterministic sense that digital technology is exceptional and there is nothing we can do to influence its path. To achieve our vision for society, we must move beyond this narrative.

3. We need to build out the system.

By elevating the moral imagination of what’s possible, we can build a system that creates and encourages technology to serve the society we want to live in.

Society has a role in stewarding other technologies, setting ethical codes, bounding uses, and ensuring pro-social outcomes. It is time to reassert this role. As explained by Carlota Perez, after every technological revolution, society has had to work and adjust to build out new social structures, education regimes, and norms to support, accommodate, and channel the new realities wrought by technological disruption. This time should be no different. And, if done right, as Dr. Perez says, a “new golden age of technology” should be possible.

When people hear the term “system,” they tend to think of tech companies, start-ups, government, and perhaps academia. We define it more broadly, to include both the “hardware” and “software.” The hardware includes the companies, institutions, investors, laws, incentives, and policies that shape and drive the system. Shifts in our system’s software—mindsets, ethics and transparency norms, power relationships, and, ultimately, who participates— are just as critical, perhaps even more so.

Establishing a healthy digital technology system requires a holistic approach that considers six critical and deeply inter-related elements and pays attention to the entire system, rather than fragmented pieces of it:

Our primary focus is the United States, but with a global outlook. Silicon Valley continues to have a dominant influence over the digital technology world, and what happens in the US reverberates throughout the world. We say this without hubris, but rather a clear-eyed realization that to steer digital tech toward the common good, much needs to be done in our own backyard. Action must happen in the US (and Europe, and in many other countries), and the ideas will come from around the world. Technology is so ubiquitous that everyone has a stake.

We believe that successfully creating such a system will advance our society for good.

The majority of those participating in building and working on tech come to it sincerely, wanting to have a positive impact and do good. We must build on this impulse. But these intentions can sometimes be subverted elsewhere in the system, and tech still employs only a narrow subset of the broader community whose lives it so deeply shapes.

Representation matters profoundly, and it must permeate the five other elements of the system. Technology can instantly be more responsive and responsible by vastly expanding who finances, creates, governs, and delivers it.

Like many of the systems in the US today, as digital technologies began to take hold, they did so only accounting for a narrow set of voices, primarily straight white men. Women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and people with disabilities and special needs have consistently been under-represented, both as builders and as users. These tech workers and investors are the people who regularly make quiet tradeoffs between product features, usability, design, privacy, security, and beyond, that often place the interests of the product provider over the impact on end users. This fundamental flaw breeds distrust and inequities and must be addressed.

As a McKinsey study notes, diverse teams, including those with greater gender diversity, are on average more creative, innovative, and, ultimately, associated with greater profitability. The correlation between higher levels of employee diversity and stronger financial performance has been demonstrated consistently across sectors and geographies, and tech is no different. The current lack of diversity in the digital technology space is leaving many potential innovations, use cases, and markets on the table.

Diversity also matters in the boardroom, as board members often have significant influence over corporate behavior. Yet, according to the Spencer Stuart Board Index, although 172 new directors were added to the top 200 US tech company boards in 2020 for a total of 1,805 current board seats, Black professionals hold just 55 seats (3% of the total seats available). This is another area that requires action, and not just among the technology companies themselves. A broader, more diverse range of participants from around the world and at all levels of the system—e.g., standards bodies, regulators, policymakers, international organizations—will ensure decisions made about the future of technology reflect the interests, needs, and input of all stakeholders.

This will require:

• Listening and deeply engaging with the communities that are most often left out of conversations about tech—and are the ones most frequently harmed.
• Building new and diverse talent pipelines into all levels and aspects of digital technology: computer science and coding, business, policy and regulations, entrepreneurs, civil society, movement leaders, executives and board members, and beyond.
• Assigning more attention to tech capabilities, judgment, and ethics in our education system to prepare a digitally literate generation. Continuing IT education often focuses more on technical skills than social ones.
• Creating networks of non-traditional founders and incumbent technology company workers and supporting them with the tools and community they need to succeed.
• Seeking out and funding start-ups outside the usual locales, communities, and education programs.
• Taking the same actions for tech workers and governors working outside the technology field (e.g., banking, health care, government).

Additionally, diverse and inclusive participation requires access. And access is still uneven, not surprisingly, along race, class, and geographic lines. According to Pew, at least 18 million Americans nationwide—and perhaps more than 42 million—lack access to high-speed internet service. And millions more cannot afford a broadband connection even if one is available. State and federal governments need to focus on bridging this divide by focusing on availability, affordability, and adoption of both access to high-speed internet service and the suite of devices and applications that allow for beneficial use, including digital public infrastructure that allows even the least connected citizens access to the modern digital economy.

A critical way to ensure future digital technologies serve society is to establish clear ethical codes and norms that are grounded in shared values. As Gene Kimmelman, former senior adviser to the Department of Justice and former president of Public Knowledge, said, “We are constantly trying to adapt market practices and regulations to fit the new technology into old norms and rules (e.g., crypto, fintech) instead of addressing whether the new technology has such profound ethical implications that we must first address whether such technology should be used at all. We simply have no ‘nuclear freeze’ or circuit breaker available to turn this process around.”

Society has built ethical frameworks guiding most other novel technologies in the 19th and 20th centuries: nuclear energy; biomedicine, genetics, and healthcare; and agriculture and genetically modified foods to name a few. Digital technology (across all applications, not just AI) should be no different.

Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.

Christian Lous Lange, historian, teacher, political scientist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner

Digital technology does not exist in a vacuum. It is subject to the same mindsets and beliefs that govern private markets, our culture, and even our government.

Given that digital technology came of age amidst peak neoliberal assumptions, the prevailing economic paradigm we’ve been living under in the US since the early 1980s is one of the deep root causes of technology’s challenges.

As a result, we still govern (or choose not to govern) our digital technology in the US with a deeply laissez-faire framework built on a naive Magna Carta for the Information Age that incorrectly said, “The coming of the Third Wave turns that equation inside-out. The complexity of Third Wave society is too great for any centrally planned bureaucracy to manage. Demassification, customization, individuality, freedom—these are the keys to success for Third Wave civilization.” Policies established decades ago, driven by misunderstanding and ideology, have harmed consumers, communities, and society.

Shareholder primacy is also a foundational problem, with tech sector profits often coming at the expense of workers, the public square and democracy, our social fabric, and the environment. Additionally, the current economic paradigm incentivizes privatizing the gains and socializing the harms, while avoiding any meaningful accountability. This all contributes to a general fatalism mindset about tech, its inevitability, and pessimism that it is too late to act.

As Omidyar Network articulated in “Our Call to Reimagine Capitalism,” we believe a new economic paradigm—one that is inclusive of the digital technology sector—must place individual, community, and societal well-being at the center, enabling everyone to meaningfully participate in our economy, democracy, and society. The digital technology system we aim to build must also focus on solutions that support a more equitable, inclusive, and resilient society, and take a multi-stakeholder view of tech companies’ obligations to do more than earn and maximize profits.

And like the economic paradigm, we see similar challenges with the prevailing data paradigm. Most current business models treat data as property that can be traded away with a simple initial click. If data is property, others (and typically not the data subject) can profit greatly from the recombination of that data and the insights it generates. It is a lopsided value proposition that underscores the concentration of power that corporations and governments hold over our data. Consent, cookies, and privacy policies do not solve this challenge. Anyone who opts out is excluded from participating in the modern world, making the system deceptive, coercive, and extractive.

We need a new mindset—and accompanying new business models that are not extractive—to recharacterize data and guide how its economic value is derived and shared. Foundationally, this new mindset should be grounded in fairness and contribution. Instead of individual (or corporate) property, data should be used in the public interest and have a greater benefit for society. This intersects with the imperative for transparency noted above. Currently, what happens to one’s data is a mystery.

Ensuring that digital tech lives up to its promise and holding it to account requires a strengthened set of competencies, institutions, standards, and statutory authorities.

Across numerous sectors, including government, civil society, media, the academy, and within tech itself, we need stronger and better institutional capabilities to monitor, manage, and implement new and updated frameworks that will address technology’s effects on:

• Markets and competition,
• Business models,
• Transparency and disclosure considerations, and
• Remedy of harms.

Today in the US, we have inadequate oversight and weak regulation. As noted above, this is partly because digital technologies came of age in an era of laissez-faire neoliberal deregulation. It can also be credited to too many government policymakers who choose to not properly understand technology and its advances, and/or are financially beholden to or overly influenced by tech lobbying efforts. Adding to the challenge, dominant companies intentionally misdirect policymakers, and our governing institutions lack the capacity to conduct robust oversight. This must change. A lack of meaningful competition policy has resulted in a world where five big tech firms had an August 2022 market cap of almost $8.5tr, larger than the sovereign economies of Germany or Japan.

Competition policy is important, but requires other values—such as redundancy, resiliency, localism, and diversity—to play an equal role to counteract a tendency toward monopoly or oligopoly.

A healthy digital technology system requires experimentation, variety, participation, volume, and financing. After all, a primary way technology improves is by someone inventing a superior new technology and business model.

Major technological revolutions usually come with their own accompanying financial revolutions, and the US now has a deep and well-established set of investors, systems, and incentives to develop and advance digital technology. Financing, by far the most established and dominant part of our tech system, has fostered a culture and engine of innovation and investment that frequently anchors and drives the digital technology system. There is much to be proud of.

Nonetheless, our current dominant new tech financing model and culture creates a premium for exponential growth at all costs, irrespective of societal consequences, which VCs have no incentive to consider. Moreover, the prevailing VC model puts a premium on acquiring users. It then subsidizes any losses, undermining competing companies that finance their growth capital from operating revenues and profits. This model makes VC-backed companies more accountable to their investors than they are to users, communities, workers and contractors, or markets.

New private financing models with longer horizons are urgently needed, and some VCs are already moving away from 2-and-20 structures. Limited Partners, as they invest more in VCs, can use their significant leverage to encourage VCs to take more responsible approaches. Many already represent broader public interests as worker pension funds, university endowments, and sovereign wealth funds.

More patient funding models will support technologists who embody different values, such as safeguarding rights, promoting justice, and building tech for social good. Financing is starting to see new innovations in revenue models, ownership structures, and the allocation of returns and dividends. These are steps in the right direction, but we would like to see even bigger leaps, as these remain notable exceptions.

Corporate R&D also has an important role to play, but the model is trending toward the pharma model of innovation by acquisition, rather than organic innovation. Tech companies themselves spend a tremendous amount on R&D. In 2020, for example, Amazon spent nearly $43 billion and was granted 2,244 patents.

We also cannot overlook the substantial role the government plays in spurring and subtly directing innovation in digital technology, via its deep investments in R&D that annually spend billions on developing new tech.

An influx of government funding of tech innovation, especially during the earliest stage, will undoubtedly lead to civilian (by)products as it has in the past (e.g., facial recognition, microchips, touch screens, GPS). As such, government must not only serve as a regulator and enforcer, but also set design standards and priorities for the kind of technology we want to create and support in service of the public good. Additionally, we need to reconsider how to manage the returns from government’s significant early-stage investments in tech—where the losses are socialized and the gains accrue solely to the individual founders and their investors—or how government procurement can be a lever for better tech.

We are pleased to see that cybersecurity technology is receiving significant attention and funding, as it is often ranked as a major threat to national security. But the US government should expend the same level of effort in R&D as it does for national security to make other non-economic technologies feasible (as we know, markets will take care of technologies that are profitable to develop). With broader participation in the system, different incentives, and real competition, we expect to see more innovation.

Those questions need to turn into answers, and quickly. We are still in the early days and have an opportunity to create the next version of the internet in a way that works for society.

On first inspection, we are inclined to be skeptical of the “fadware” that characterizes most Web3 discussion. It is easy to see it as a jumble of unchecked financial speculation, artificial asset creation, technologies existing because they can and not because they need to, massive energy consumption, and dystopian libertarian dreams. And for all its promises of re-decentralization of the internet, it is stunningly concentrated even now, either via VC investment, consolidation of crypto and NFT holdings, or Chinese dominance of token mining. The crypto universe is even less diverse than the broader internet.

However, underneath all of this are two important impulses. The first is a dangerous one that too few have thought through. Web3 and crypto began as a response to the 2008 financial crisis and a deepening distrust of institutions both in banking and government, and increasingly against centralized tech giants, a sentiment we share. That distrust is well-earned, and we have opined elsewhere on the antecedents of that crisis (spoiler: neoliberalism and regulatory capture). However, taken to its extreme, the impulse under many crypto-currencies and decentralized finance, DAOs, and other related efforts is a deliberate bypass of existing institutions. This is dangerous and unwarranted, both in principle and in practice. In principle, there need to be checks anywhere concentrated power exists: in government, the private economy, or elsewhere, including Web3. How can there be checks on power when there are, by design, no accountable institutions? And in practice, when someone irrevocably writes a false, slanderous, or erroneous piece of data to the immutable blockchain, what recourse does the victim have? Where is the accountability? We would do better to fix the institutions in question and hold them to account.

The second is a more promising impulse, and one which—if we build the rest of the tech ecosystem well—could be the basis for a new settlement moving off our hyper-concentrated current Web 2.0 configuration. It is still very early in Web3 time, creating an opportunity to help it evolve and move in the right direction. But that work must capitalize on communitarian impulses rather than libertarian ones. We are starting to see progress on key issues like energy consumption. Our peers are funding bold experiments in more open-source, non-monetized social graphs built on Web3 technology. But on the current trajectory, if we do not adopt the broader elements of the framework in this document, then Web3 is likely to evolve into an even more extreme version of the outcomes we have seen from Web 2.0. However, if we get it right, we can ensure that the best of it works so that it truly serves all of society.

A focal point of the system must be an expanded role and understanding of the full range of consumers and communities in the design, deployment, and improvement of digital technology.

New legislation and regulations must center consumers and communities. The new data paradigm must not only consider what consumers have to offer to providers, but also what providers and technologies can offer to consumers.

To ensure new digital technology works best for consumers, and for society as a whole, makers and developers should purposefully engage a broad range of consumers and communities—in the US and across the globe—to understand their real needs and lived experiences. Serial tech entrepreneur Anil Dash writes, “Often times, tech creators have enough money funding them that they don’t even notice the negative effects of the flaws in their designs, especially if they’re isolated from the people affected by those flaws.”

Our efforts to promote Good ID and public digital infrastructure taught us a great deal about what individuals need to engage effectively, including:

• Genuine individual agency and meaningful user choice,
• Adequate safeguards,
• Real consent, opt-outs, and recourse – and clarity on who to hold to account,
• Privacy and anonymized code, and
• Transparency.

To improve how they do their work, technologists need more than the hard skills of coding, engineering, and data science. As noted in our discussion of ethics, schools and academia must teach the soft skills that will help young technologists learn to work with integrity, focus on consumers and communities, and create for social good, rather than maintain a narrow focus on products and profits.

To move in this direction, consumers and communities have a role to play in advocating for and demanding better design. We are seeing a groundswell from digital natives and their parents who fought and won better protections on the social internet with efforts like the Age-Appropriate Design Bill in California. The Code requires companies to ask themselves, “What would you do differently if you knew your end user was a child?” With more than 600 million children online, tech makers must work harder to design their products with the safety and privacy of children in mind.

We typically think of tech companies as the primary makers and providers, but, as noted above, governments at all levels also play this role and require the same checks and accountability.

We applaud tech companies that have in-house ethicists and human-centered designers. Yet, most providers still do this through a narrow product lens rather than a broader frame about a given technology’s real-world effects. As we have learned from experiments like Ethical Explorer, broadening this lens is imperative for responsible technology to gain traction, but it is a long road.

A Greek term meaning “love of mankind,” philanthropy is an idea, event, or action done to better humanity. And because, as we note, digital technology and society are intertwined, all philanthropy should consider how best to support more responsible technology at the system level to help tilt the playing field toward pro-social outcomes. Every foundation that works to advance racial justice, equitable opportunity, jobs, and a healthy democracy has a stake in this.

Philanthropy is well positioned to do this because we can focus on systems-level change, take the long view, experiment, take risks, and bring people together across sectors and disciplines. Philanthropy can test new incentives and business models, engage policymakers and technologists, and provide a public interest counterweight to the many private incentives already in the system.

Additionally, philanthropy can support organizations that future-proof technology and ask the hard questions. It can expose the harms and hold tech accountable. It can help build and finance new kinds of responsible technology, and new financing models. It can support inclusive and diverse participation. And it can inform lawmakers about what is needed to ensure tech upholds our values.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web

We know it will not be quick nor easy. Some of us are focused on the immediate challenges and opportunities, such as addressing harms we are experiencing in real time, mis- and disinformation, bias, the future of AI, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in tech. Others are looking further into the future to explore the infinite opportunities surrounding what is possible. Both are needed, and both should be happening simultaneously. That said, for those working on the nearer-term and specific issues, we encourage you to examine how your efforts level up to the larger system we are ultimately trying to build. Consider how you can connect on a broader scale and with organizations and communities of practice that are working on other parts of the system so that we can learn from each other, build momentum, and create a digital technology system that benefits individuals, communities, and society.

Established by philanthropists Pam and Pierre Omidyar, Omidyar Network is a social change venture that has committed more than $1 billion to innovative for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations since 2004. Omidyar Network works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies in which individuals have the social, economic, and democratic power to thrive.

“Our Vision for a Responsible Tech Future” was completed in September 2022. Contributors include Omidyar Network staff members Anamitra Deb, Michele Lawrence Jawando, Beth Kanter, Mike Kubzansky, and Abiah Weaver.

We also benefited from the expertise of the following individuals:

• Eric Braverman, CEO, Schmidt Futures
• Ann Mei Chang, CEO, Candid
• Katherine Fulton, Strategic Advisor
• Don Gips, CEO, Skoll Foundation
• Gene Kimmelman, Former Deputy Associate Attorney General and Former President Public Knowledge
• Larry Kramer, President, Hewlett Foundation
• Tolga Kurtoglu, Former CEO of PARC
• Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO, Lumina Foundation
• Ali Noorani, Program Director, US Democracy, Hewlett Foundation
• Tim O’Reilly, CEO O’Reilly Media
• Carlota Perez, Honorary Professor at Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), UCL and at SPRU, University of Sussex, UK; Professor of Technology and Development, Nurkse Institute, Taltech, Estonia; Academic in Residence, Anthemis UK; International consultant and lecturer; Author of “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”
• Vivian Schiller, The Aspen Institute
• Eli Sugarman, Fellow, Schmidt Futures
• Tomicah Tillemann, Chief Policy Officer, Haun Ventures
• Nicole Taylor, President and CEO of Silicon Valley Community Foundation
• Nicole Tisdale, Former White House National Security Council; Advocacy Blueprints, LLC

We also wish to thank 16 other readers from philanthropy, the tech sector, nonprofit advocacy groups, and economics who read and provided essential comments to early drafts.

“Our Vision for a Responsible Tech Future” was designed and produced with support from Riveter Communications, Jaime Vazquez, Abiah Weaver, and numerous artists represented by Canva and iStock.