The SV Forum Visionary Awards used to be my favorite Silicon Valley summer event. These were small outdoor gatherings maybe 150 to 200 people, and usually held in the substantial backyard of some fabulous Woodside mansion — but always with incredible iconic names standing just a few feet away.

For example, the above photo shows the four (male) Visionary Award winners from eight years ago: Far right is Elon Musk, next top VC Jim Breyer; technology journalist David Kirkpatrick, and educator Salman Khan. The legendary VC Ann Winblad, is far left.

The casual atmosphere of the awards ceremony made for some excellent off-the-record conversations and excellent contact building for future on-the-record news stories.

Strangely, there was always very little press at this exclusive event — which I never understood because the access to key Silicon Valley figures was always off the charts.

And the backyard-casualness of the event was always a welcome break compared with the massive Silicon Valley trade shows and conferences during the rest of the year.

Sales Needs Contacts

Certainly, in the post-COVID world outdoor events will return faster than indoor conferences but both types of gatherings are off-the-table for an unknown length of time. This is very bad news for sales. Silicon Valley depends on shows and conferences for face-to-face meetings and for making new contacts. Enterprise IT sales take 18 months to two years on average to complete. This will be a tough for young companies that need to get their names out and don’t have many contacts of their own.

Silicon Valley Village

The casual nature of the Visionary Awards made it feel that Silicon Valley is really just a small village with a small population but under a global microscope. Here, we quickly get used to seeing people that in the rest of the world are considered unapproachable icons or geniuses — with great influence.

The Silicon Valley region deserves its reputation for innovation and as the home for many visionaries, it is a global engine of innovation. In recent years it’s shifting more into the global engine for scaling a business.

Sprint To Scale

Scaling is becoming the most important Silicon Valley specialty because you companies have a first-to-scale chance to dominate a sector because in online markets there’s usually very little room for large competitors to co-exist.

Bricks and clicks used to be a viable strategy but no longer. Bricks took years to build out a business which meant incumbent companies had time to adjust to any successful competitor and get a strategy.

Clicks allow you to scale in minutes… on demand. Expanding into new regions is easy without bricks and so it means that the best business model wins and wins quickly and dominates a sector. In the bricks world many competitors can co-exist for years even with bad business models.

The COVID-19 crisis has compressed this e-commerce trend as hundreds of millions of new users have flooded into online services of all types. It has had similar effects on the use of other technologies such as video-conferencing. The future is coming at us much faster than in the days pre-COVID-19. But this also means that all the societal problems associated with the future are rushing at us — and we have less time to fix them.

Future Problems Here

We used to think that we would have many years to deal with serious issues such as:

• How do we deal with mass unemployment from tech-related job losses for no fault of the workers?
• What is fair GIG economy legislation?
• How do we deal with rising inequality?
• How do we offer universal healthcare that can stop the spread of virus outbreaks?
• How do we safeguard against fake news and hate speech while preserving fundamental rights?
• How to do we protect democracy from abuses of tageted advertising data?
• How do we pay for professional journalism when ads and subscriptions are not enough?
• What are our privacy rights in contact tracing apps versus community safety? 

And many more questions need to be resolved if we are to transition into what is an inevitable and hopefully enviable future where we all share in the abundance created by our technologies. But we nead a new culture and lexicon because the future will be nothing like the world today. 

Virtual reality pioneer and author Jaron Lanier asked “Who owns the Future?" in his excellent book of the same name. But the way the future will turn out is more about who has a say — not just ownership. I don’t own my apartment but I have a say in how I live in it. We all share the same future. And that means shared responsibility for how we will live in that future.

Rather than getting out of the way of technology so it can find its own level in the economy — as many tech boosters have suggested — we have to make sure everyone shares in the benefits of technology.

There is no good reason for not doing this because fortunately, technology driven markets are deflationary — everything gets cheaper and can be offered at very low costs. (Jeff Booth describes technology’s deflationary effect in his groundbreaking recent book “The Price of Tomorrow” — review coming.)

Who Is Driving?

Our relationship to technology has been skewed by our language and how we write about it. We often describe inanimate technology as “the driver” of a particular trend. But an engine doesn’t drive a car. Humans drive and decide on the destination.

Our technologies are tools that will enable a fabulous future of our own design — as long as we know where we are going — which we don’t just yet.

The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis are boosting the use of new technologies across every industry and resulting in big organizational changes; all pushing us ever faster into a highly automated future.

Yet we still haven’t figured out how we will live in that future, and the legislation, culture, and economic structures that we will need to prosper. This is going to be a big but necessary discussion.

I wish us all luck in this endeavor because we’ll need it. Our societies change slowly — no matter how fast the world turns.

Knowledge workers work such short hours on their actual jobs (three--ish hours) that tech has a very narrow window of application in people's day thus limiting the productivity benefits that can be delivered by such short useage. Tech cannot eliminate terrible business processes and pointless meetings.

This might explain the productivity paradox -- it's a work management problem first.

Global spending on IT will pass $5 trillion this year (IDC) yet there’s shockingly little evidence that higher technology spending improves business productivity — it often has the opposite effect and hinders productivity. The reasons for this productivity paradox are not clear and have perplexed economists for decades.

This Stanford University computer science site Productivity Paradox discusses possible reasons for tech's mysterious failing performance in the workplace -- such as difficulties in choosing the right metrics. Unable to find more compliant metrics these experts conclude that they "would like to believe that 'IT does matter””.

The trillions of dollars spent on IT means there’s a lot of believers but why can’t we find the productivity data in this age of Big Data? It’s frustratingly counterintuitive that technology advances over the past two decades have done nothing to budge worker productivity.

The immense irony that our IT productivity technologies hinder workplace productivity is difficult to accept. But there’s some interesting statistics in a recent report commissioned by Workfront, an enterprise software project management platform based in Utah.

The State of Work: 2020 report collected responses from 3,750 knowledge workers across four countries: US (1,500), United Kingdom (1,000), Germany (750) and the Netherlands (500).

They were asked about many different subjects such as their use of technologies, workplace habits and how much time they spent on different activities.

By far the most interesting part of the report was how little time employees said they were able to work on the primary duties. UK workers spent the least time: 40% — three hours out of eight hours doing the job they were hired for — with an average of 43% across all four countries.

It revealed an enormous productivity gap. The respondents blamed too many hours in pointless meetings, answering too many emails and dealing with distractions from constant interruptions at work.

It’s easy to see that certain collaborative technologies can be sources of distraction but this is minor compared to what is by far the biggest reason for the technology productivity paradox: there’s shockingly little time to do primary work.

Technology investments can't compete with what can be gained from simply eliminating inefficient work practices. Tech productivity investments can only be applied during the times people are working on their primary duties — which averages slightly over 3 hours in an eight hour day. It’s essentially a two-day work week.

This nearly 60 percent productivity gap revealed by the Workfront survey cannot be solved by technology. Which is why the productivity paradox persists. Bad workplace practices hold back productivity.

In the global digital transformation of business the competitive battles will be won by the organizations with the most efficient workflows — and that’s when productivity technologies will prove their worth.

Google has been sued by a group of independent video producers for restricting their YouTube channels and not allowing them to buy advertising to promote their LGBTQ related content.

Eight plaintiffs representing the LGBTQ community -- a protected class under California laws -- claim Google is guilty of: "Discrimination, fraud, unfair and deceptive business practices, unlawful restraint of speech and breach of consumer contract."

"We've all tried repeatedly to communicate with Google/YouTube to treat us fairly and work with us to allow our voices to be heard and inspire systemic change," said Celso Dulay, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and host of GlitterBombTV.

"It's shameful that so many in the LGBTQ+ community on Google/YouTube are restricted, censored or blocked -- yet we're repeatedly being subjected to harassment by homophobic and racist hate-mongers who are free to post vile and obscene content."

Dulay said that he never had trouble buying Google Ads to promote GlitterBombTV until a hidden policy change blocked his ads just days before Christmas Day 2018. Dulay said that he recorded a conversation with a representative of Google Ads who explained there is a company policy against "the gay thing."

Google denies it discriminates against protected classes and says it focuses on limiting hate speech and shocking content and it does not filter out content based on any sexual orientation.

Foremski's Take: 

Four years ago Google quietly dropped its founders' motto: "Don't be evil" as Alphabet, Google's new holding company, adopted "Do the right thing."

How do you do the right thing? The answers are always in the data -- as long as you know where to look -- is the unspoken mantra of a software engineering culture.

But there’s a flaw in this approach and one that cannot be solved by more data or computational brute force.

Google certainly knows how to collect massive amounts of data and analyze it and use it to train its AI systems and algorithms.

By using its software to make key decisions on what to publish Google saves a ton of money compared to using human editors and human creators but more importantly, it is key to its protected legal status as a publishing platform unlike a newspaper which controls what it publishes and carries all responsibilities.

Avoiding using humans is a smart strategy but the trouble is that Google's algorithms are not that smart -- especially when it comes to cultural and political issues where they can't discriminate between legitimate and harmful content. The software has no understanding of what it is viewing.

It's not just LGBTQ content that is a problem for the software. Google cannot tell the difference between a well-researched YouTube history channel about the Second World War and an extreme hate speech channel -- and will demonetize and demonize them equally.

This problem in its operating strategy is ever more evident as Google gets larger: its dumb algorithms are making ever larger dumb decisions affecting more and more people.

It needs to make high-level executive decisions in an area that it knows little about: moral and ethical leadership. It is a minefield that has no machine-ready solution. Where’s the data to train machines about morals and ethics? For example: if you were to train a general AI system based on all human history it would likely conclude that violence, war and genocide are successful strategies.

Morality and ethics cannot be extrapolated from history but must be instructed -- usually by family and community. If you start instructing the software you become an editor and that means Google, Facebook and others could lose their legal protections as a platform and become legally responsible for everything they publish — just like a newspaper or magazine.

A lot of our problems with fake news and hate speech could be solved by using human editors. We didn’t have a problem with traditional media which was very good at keeping the public safe. But with machines we have a big problem. When Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify to Congress in 2018 he said it would be five years before AI was able to filter out fake news and hate speech.

Google's struggle in the coming decade will be about how a software engineering culture that depends on data to inform decisions figures out moral and ethical positions on some of society's most sensitive cultural and political issues.

Good luck with that.

(An earlier version of this column appears on ZDNET: Tom Foremski IMHO.)

Insert copy #2...

Add textblocks if needed.