Ash Carter and Kara Swisher Discuss Pressing Tech Challenges

In a JFK Jr. Forum conversation with Belfer Center Director Ash Carter on tech issues, Recode Editor-at-Large Kara Swisher underscored the need to consider possible negative as well as positive impacts when technologies are first being developed. Using social media as an example, Swisher said at Tuesday’s forum it is deeply problematic that we have allowed private tech companies to become society’s public square, and now rely on these platforms for everything from general discourse to news. 

“The public square is now owned by private billionaires” who have created “cities” that are unregulated and often used for ill rather than good, Swisher said. And, she added, the owners have “no ability or compunction to fix the situation.”

Swisher’s wide-ranging JFK Jr. conversation with Carter, recorded for an upcoming episode of her podcast, “Recode Decode,” concluded a day-long series of events hosted by the Belfer Center. Earlier in the day, she participated in the Boston Tech Hub Faculty Working Group, a monthly convening of faculty from across Harvard and MIT, for a discussion on potential global norms for technologies such as cyber, artificial intelligence, and human germline editing. She also presented at the Belfer Board of Directors lunch about some of her more recent coverage of current challenges posed by tech companies, and she met with a number of Harvard Kennedy School students interested in tech policy.

Throughout these engagements, Swisher highlighted several critical issues and questions that the tech industry has either created or exacerbated. Providing insights into the mindset and ethos of the Silicon Valley leaders she knows and reports on, she emphasized the lack of responsibility that tech leaders feel for the problems they have created and expressed her pessimism for the possibility of self-regulation or norm creation as viable tools for altering the behavior of tech companies. Compounding these issues, she believes, is the lack of widespread understanding among federal legislators of issues created by tech. She noted that she perceives members of Congress as having abrogated their role to regulate and oversee these issues.

The themes that Swisher raised throughout the day are aligned with the challenges that Carter’s  Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Project at the Belfer Center seeks to address. In several of the events of the day, including the public Forum (which you can watch here), she and Carter discussed potential solutions to some of the challenges she raised, including legislative and regulatory options, as well as solutions developed by the tech sector itself.