Last Wednesday, rockstar astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the keynote address at a conference for the information security industry. I refer to him as a rockstar because he’s the only astrophysicist I know by name. I’d imagine I’m not alone.
The address was fairly lengthy and casual. Tyson wore jeans and joked about letters he got from ticked-off second graders after the revoking of Pluto’s planetary status.
The most interesting portion of Tyson’s spiel was when he called out the tech industry’s startup culture, saying “society has bigger problems than what can be solved with your next app.” Tyson was criticizing what he believes is a decline in American innovation.
We have an incredible amount of resources and potential, but we’re using it to create goat simulators and new nude-picture-sharing technologies rather than things that actually benefit society.
The fact is, we’re living in a period of incredible technological revolutions and innovations.
iPhones came out only seven years ago yet, for most of us, life without them is already wholly unimaginable.
This tremendous proliferation of information technology brings with it incredible potential, which we’ve mostly used so far to fulfill our desire for constant gratification and entertainment.
It makes sense that Tyson would give a speech lamenting the fact that technology isn’t doing as much as it can to improve society before a group of people dedicated to promoting technologies that serve society’s best interests.
Both Tyson and these technological innovators look at our advancements and see the capability to make even greater strides in health sciences, transportation and energy.
One thing Tyson didn’t elaborate on is the effect our developments could have on broader social issues, which information technology isn’t tackling at full capacity.
As any harping Journalism 2.0 advocate will eagerly tell you, social media is the biggest thing since the Gutenberg Bible.
Sure, social media was widely used to organize events from Ferguson to the Arab Spring to the Hong Kong protests. However, in none of these cases has real, lasting, positive change happened. Protests in St. Louis reignited last weekend, and the legacy of the Arab Spring so far has been a new crop of tyrants in Egypt and chaos in the Middle East so menacing that our military is getting involved yet again.
Even when technology is used this way, the goals are often superficial and anticlimactic. The truth campaign intends to use viral technology to mobilize our generation to stamp out cigarette smoking forever. It’s a cool idea, but are there no other worthy causes? Smoking is horrible for you, but there isn’t a single person over the age of 5 in this country who doesn’t already know that. Surely we can set higher goals for ourselves.
With our vast resources and our ability to access and disseminate enormous amounts of information, we stand at an important point in history.
We are the ones who get to decide how these amazing technologies will be used. We get to help decide how today’s kids and every generation after will interact with, understand and perceive their world.
With that, I’m going to go watch Netflix for the next dozen hours or so.
Alec Carver is a UF journalism sophomore. His columns appear on Thursdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 10/16/2014]
