He may only be a pretend tech insider on a hit HBO series, but that’s not going to stop Kumail Nanjiani from taking real-life Silicon Valley innovators to task for what he sees as an ethical failure of massive proportions. While representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified in front of Congress yesterday about how the Russian government may have used their platforms to influence the 2016 election, the Silicon Valley star took to Twitter to break down some of the systemic issues he’s been privileged to witness from the inside of these tech giants.
Nanjiani goes on to say that it’s not as if these innovators are simply unprepared to adequately address ethical concerns, but that those ethical concerns never even occurred to them in the first place.
In their eagerness to hook and retain users, these massive companies have put the proverbial cart before the horse and expect a safeguarding bandaid to come along further down the road. Nanjiani compares this lack of foresight to Facebook and Twitter’s recent attempts to address harassment. The creators of these social media empires built their systems with no concern for how to police this type of abuse and are now retroactively trying to fix it. The actor’s point is that the “Should we do this?” question is more important than “Can we do this?” and should have been asked long ago.
“You can’t put this stuff back in the box. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. And there are no guardians. It’s terrifying. The end,” wrote Nanjiani in his final despondent tweet of the afternoon. But hopefully, more attention can lead to those guardians coming, one way or the other.
[via The Daily Dot]