Fear the technologists, not the technology? The rise of the tech baron

News in the international media lately seems strangely dominated by a new phenomenon – more stories are being written about technologists, than technologies.

With the impending inauguration of President Trump 2.0, the coterie of Silicon Valley types around him are providing a mixture of fascination, fear and fury from their public statements and private intentions. Inevitably, much of the focus is on the highest-profile personalities in Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – but the likes of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and their fellow billionaire “tech bros” also have the ear of Donald Trump.

There’s a growing perception that these Big Tech giants see Trump as their opportunity to impose radical tech-influenced economic concepts such as using cryptocurrencies to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) to replace vast swathes of public sector bureaucracy, or enabling virtual “network states” as an alternative governing principle to nation states.

Many of these concepts are worth debate – but these impatient multibillionaires have no time for that and the ego to believe they are right. They want to apply the tech entrepreneurs’ mantra of “move fast and break things” to the US, and by implication the global economy. The process of finding out could prove to be extremely painful, regardless of the eventual outcome.

But the tech bro oligarchy is simply a facet – by far the biggest and most impactful facet so far – of the inevitability of the digital revolution. Think how much the industrial revolution changed political, social, economic, cultural and personal lives in the countries it touched, over many decades. The scope of change from the digital revolution will be even bigger, affecting far more people. The question we have to deal with is the pace of that change – for the technologists around Trump, they want that pace to be quick and hang the consequences. Musk’s latest social media rants are just a distraction from that bigger question.

We hear a lot of discussion about whether AI is safe and if it might destroy jobs, industries, governments – even humanity. AI is not the worry – it’s the people pushing AI we should worry about. Technology is still only a tool – even if it’s an ever-more intelligent and capable tool. The people who control the tool and what they want to do with it – that’s the concern.

History since the industrial revolution has been dominated by first factory barons, then rail barons, oil barons, banking barons, and we have reached the age of the tech barons. The question of whether political leaders worldwide can use the tech barons’ knowledge and experience for the greater good, while also holding them accountable, will be a defining issue in the coming years.