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In what has become somewhat of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes a book A series of predictions For next year. It might be easy to think that this year’s predictions are all about artificial intelligence, but instead, Vogels focuses on how Millennials and Gen Z think about being part of the workforce, nuclear power, combating disinformation, open data for disaster preparedness, and the need for To intention-oriented technology.
Unlike his employer, whose keynotes this week focused almost exclusively on artificial intelligence, Vogels only mentioned it three times in his written forecasts “for 2025 and beyond.” And while AI is now a constant drone in the background, it seems to be more preoccupied with how technology in general is shaping the world at the moment.
The next generation of employees
“I was very interested in looking at companies that were interested in solving really hard humanitarian problems, really big problems, like economic equality, whether that was in food or health care globally,” he told me. “And with this whole ‘Now Go Build’ documentary series, we’ve touched on some of it. But one of the things I’ve noticed in the past, let’s say four or five years, is that there’s a new generation of workers who are actually willing to take a pay cut if they can Working for a company that keeps sustainability in mind – all of these issues.
He also said that he has heard from a number of NGOs that there has been a huge increase in the number of tech workers who want to volunteer for these organizations.
“Where, in the past, five or 10 years ago, you had to beg people to come in. Now people are knocking on the door,” he said. “The problem these companies face is how to manage them. In fact they don’t have people. An organization like Mercy Corps, for example, only has two people working in technology, right? Because this money goes to the area (where) it can actually have an impact. They don’t go into the technology aspect. …Now they have an engineer for two weeks. They have all these great ideas that they want to implement, and even companies come to them and say, “Oh, you can get our products for free.” “But they don’t have the people working on it.”
Vogels believes — and I think a lot of people will support him — that the next generation of workers will also bring this mentality to the companies they work for, and that those companies will have to adapt to it.
“That means, as employers, if you’re interested in hiring the best engineers out there, you better make sure you change your company culture to actually be able to attract those people. The question is no longer: Do I get the best laptop? Do I get the best monitor? I get two screens, right? But does my work really matter, because it’s no longer about the salary I get paid because I’m willing to give up some of it if the work I’m doing means something right to you? As an employer, you need to change that too.
When I asked him if this meant that Amazon itself might also have to change its vaunted collection Leadership principles (Those that new employees at Amazon essentially have to memorize), he noted, “With size and success comes broad responsibility” – last One of the 16 leadership principles. He stressed that Amazon also has an entire department focused on social responsibility and impact.
Who can you trust anymore?
In this context, he also noted that one of his predictions for the coming year relates to combating disinformation and – within this context – supporting open source intelligence. “We have rapidly moved from an era of long news cycles lasting weeks or months to a constant stream of updates that are interrupted at the speed of a click. Social media platforms have become a major source for disseminating and consuming news, and it has never been more difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is false.” Gone.
If technology brings us fake news, “it is also our responsibility as technology experts to go in the opposite direction to find solutions,” Lee said. He believes that solutions, such as browser sidebars, that display relevant context – and perhaps academic research – on a particular topic, could be useful, for example.
“Elon went at the right time to push the story that the media can’t be trusted,” Vogels said. “And since there are so many competing voices, can you trust the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times? Can you or can’t you? I mean, in the past, that was the source of the truth. There was no debate. If your article had been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Everyone in Germany would read it and know that this is the truth. But can we help with technology? Is there a general perception, at least during the recent American elections, that the public media can be trusted? There is at least one candidate pushing this story Strongly then we need to make sure there is context around those stories that shows which ones are telling the truth or not.
“If we look at
At the same time, he said that organizations doing open source intelligence work often do not use the most advanced technology. He believes that determining where a photo was taken, for example, should be automated using image recognition.
Likewise, he hopes that access to open data will help NGOs improve their disaster preparedness by allowing them to build better maps in areas where commercial mapping is not financially viable, for example, or by building new data sources in Real time wildfire tracking. .
Fighting technology addiction
Vogels also noted that one of the reasons technology has accelerated the spread of misinformation is that our devices and apps have become addictive. “We have a tremendous impact through the technology we have on people’s lives, not just in terms of whether we stand for the truth, but the amount of time we spend with technology,” he said. He said apps today are primarily designed to be sticky and addictive.
“We as adults might be able to handle that,” he said (although I’ll interject here because I’m not sure if adults are actually capable of that). “You know, if your four-year-old was sitting in the back of the car, and in the past, they would sing or whine, ‘Are we there?’ Are we there?’ But (what) parents do now is just give them an iPad. Four or five-year-olds know how to use YouTube, but that also means they get into a cycle of constant highs, constant highs, constant highs so the expectation is that these kids, and we’re already seeing that, are more susceptible to other types of addiction later on as well Because you constantly need to Getting that next level of euphoria whether it’s through drugs, food, drinking, sex, or anything else.
He believes people are now realizing this and starting to take action – perhaps it’s using a dumb phone or going offline for long periods. He pointed out that new regulations in Australia, which seek to prevent children under 16 from using social media, “are a very draconian approach, but they do point to a problem,” even if banning something for teenagers would make it more attractive, of course. . “After all, you know, in the Netherlands (where cannabis has long been tolerated), a significant (fewer) number of kids continue to smoke pot because it wasn’t cool.”
It is up to technologists to ensure that their applications are not addictive, perhaps by making the interfaces simpler, for example.
“I mean, maybe for TechCrunch, if someone reads one article, you want them to read more articles. After all, pageviews equal income. It’s a business. But you know how addictive your interfaces are, right “And yes, of course, as a company, you have a responsibility to shareholders to do that, but I think these days, we also have a social responsibility to make sure that our community is healthy enough that 10 or 20 years from now it can continue to function.”
The nuclear option
This year’s set of predictions is a bit scattered (all over the place) (Fogel’s words, not mine), and his next prediction revolves around the use of nuclear power. In Vogels’ view, the expansion of nuclear power and the growth of renewable energy “would lay the foundation for a future in which our energy infrastructure becomes a catalyst for innovation, not a barrier.”
“We know how to make small nuclear weapons,” he told me, referring to the reactors used to power military submarines, for example. “We never built them because they weren’t commercially interesting. Plus, society wouldn’t accept them being somewhere nearby. If your sub caught fire, well, sub, you made that choice. It’s a different story.” But we’ve also now reached a point where large companies aren’t allowed to build new facilities near cities like Amsterdam, where Vogels lives, because energy companies can no longer provide enough electricity for them — not because they can’t generate electricity. enough.
A few years ago, Vogels told me he wasn’t ready to retire yet. I don’t feel like anything has changed for him. He’s clearly still enjoying his role, even if his outlook this year is a little bleaker than usual.
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