Look at what technologists do, not what they say

The disconnect between what technologists say they are doing and the effects on society of what they in fact do has long been a rich source of fodder for social observers and technology critics. Katherine Boyle’s recent remarks on the family and technology offer yet another example of the practice.

In her efforts to craft a narrative of technology as potential handmaiden to the American family, she begins by contrasting the family with the state. This is an artful dodge, as her invocation of China suggests. She correctly notes China’s one-child policy as an example of draconian state interference with the family and tries to contrast that with the freedom she supposes technology will give American families if only it is allowed to unleash its dynamism.

To be sure, Boyle is correct to point out that in America, too, there have been moments of bureaucratic overreach regarding families; parents have not forgotten the policies enacted by local and state governments, as well as the federal government, during the Covid pandemic. Decisions to close schools and public spaces, including playgrounds in some jurisdictions, as well as unnecessarily restrictive masking policies for children, exacted enormous costs on the nation’s children.

But the challenge in the U.S. isn’t the state coercing families into having fewer children — a policy China itself abandoned a decade ago. It is the challenge posed by an unregulated market for technological goods that damage the social fabric, including families. The most dystopian reproductive schemes emerging in the U.S. these days don’t come from China or our federal government but from Silicon Valley, where “repro-tech” companies like Orchid Health and others promote neo-eugenic messaging to convince parents to pay for costly genetic scans and in vitro fertilization procedures with the promise that these tests will eliminate things like obesity and autism from their future children. The only “creative destruction” here is of the many human embryos deemed unfit by a class of parents eager to engineer their children.

Boyle’s suggested remedies for the challenges facing American families fall far short of the actual challenge at hand.

Consider the homegrown companies Boyle mentions as supportive of American families. In her remarks, she calls on the country to do more to support work-from-home options, especially for women, and uses Etsy and the “influencer economy” as positive examples of what technology can do for women who want to run a business while balancing their family responsibilities.

Again, optimistic rhetoric must confront reality: While it is true that nearly all of Etsy’s sellers work from home, and about 86 percent of its sellers are women, this is not the “American dynamism” utopia for working moms Boyle seems to suggest. The average seller on Etsy makes less than $3,000 per year from her digital storefront. Only 26 percent of Etsy shops could be considered successful full-time businesses, and 74 percent of them eventually fail.

As for online influencers as models of work-from-home flexibility, many of these women are selling their private lives for sponsorship and advertising revenue, often enlisting their children to be offered up as marketing fodder to the masses. Even the best-case Instagram scenario still sees technology encroaching on the private world of the home for the purposes of profit, or for the odd, performative mimicry of domestic life that is the “tradwife” trend.

In the worst cases, you have the horrifying behavior of mommy influencers like Ruby Franke, the mother of six whose profitable YouTube channel about family life hid the fact that she was abusing her children. The case prompted the state of Utah, where Franke lives and is now serving up to thirty years in prison, to pass legislation to protect children from parents who seek to exploit them on social media. Other states have passed similar legislation, recognizing the risk posed to children by this brand of technology-enabled entrepreneurialism. These platforms reward anyone who can capture and keep people’s attention, with no regard for whether this reflects healthy values for families.

Or consider how technology platforms pull children further into screen-based lives rather than real-world experiences, something we now know to be detrimental to their mental and physical development. In 2020, Andreessen Horowitz, where Boyle is a general partner, invested $150 million in Roblox, one of the most popular social video-gaming platforms for children and teens. Half of all Americans between ages 13 and 24 play or develop their own games on Roblox, yet, as The Guardian noted in an investigation of exploitation of children on the platform, “it is an empire built on the sale of virtual boots and hats and considering that almost half of its users are aged 13 or under, the creativity and labour of children.” Roblox habituates children into spending their free time online, rather than out in the real world engaged in physical activity; it teaches them to sell their virtual labor for digital currency (further habituating them to the future Silicon Valley wants — and will profit enormously from — with the rise of cryptocurrency); and it teaches them skills, like coding, that we are now being told will be replaced by AI bots.

Boyle is enthusiastic about bots, especially when it comes to their use in education. She argues that “artificial intelligence is on the verge of fundamentally transforming how our kids learn, and it should be utilized to build infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable tutors for every child in this country. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem, which tells us that one-on-one instruction is the best way to educate children, should now be the right of all children in America.”

But the one-on-one instruction model describes one human being instructing another, with the rich and complicated human interaction this kind of teaching implies. Swapping a human for a bot is not the same thing. The elision of this distinction is deliberate, and indicative of other values at work here. Many of Andreessen Horowitz’s recent investments are in AI startups that actively seek to replace human labor — such as Promise, a company that uses generative AI to make film and TV content. Why hire human writers and actors when you can use AI to make ones that will never need to rest or ever go on strike? Why pay a human teacher when you can outsource that job to an AI tutor-bot?

And what family values are encouraged to flourish when Andreessen Horowitz’s consumer technology analyst reconfigures Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to map onto social media apps, placing “Understood: AI Chatbots” at the top? “Does this mean our best friends of the future, the ones we share our deepest secrets, goals, and fears with, will be bots? It’s certainly possible,” the analyst writes.

In the end, the efforts by technologists like Boyle to connect the family to their vision of the future as a shared effort at creative destruction is misguided both morally and practically.

Healthy families are not an example of creative destruction but of its opposite: the difficult and patient act of building. The frequently invoked description of the family as the bedrock of society is a useful reminder that when the family changes radically, the shift has a tectonic impact on society at large. And when bedrock values are destroyed, it can be very difficult to resurrect them.

It’s nice that Silicon Valley companies like Andreessen Horowitz are sending thoughtful mothers like Katherine Boyle out into the world to talk about families. It’s condescending in the extreme to hear them tell American families that technologists know best, and to avoid any accountability for the products from which they profit that have already done a great deal of harm to families, children most of all. Look at what the technologists do, not what they say: many don’t let their own children use the products they create and invest in. Why should we trust them when they tell us we must embrace them in our own families to further the mission of “American dynamism?” Thus far, the “winners in this space,” as Silicon Valley likes to say, haven’t been families.

It is easy to talk about “the family” as an abstraction, a challenge that can be solved like other social problems, by the correct application of the right app or program. But the family is not an abstraction; it is a group of affiliated humans, ripe with contradictions, creativity, unquantifiable joys, and deeply felt needs.

Unless and until we center human values and human virtues at the center of discussions of technology and the family, we are not having the conversations that matter. I hear little about human values and human virtues in Boyle’s remarks, beyond her noting that families are important. The rest is just marketing.

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