Humans in the room: how to build tech that won’t kill us

In this talk, Alexis Wichowski, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for New York City and long-serving public servant, professor, and author of the 2020 book The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights and Transforms Our World (HarperCollins), asks why we continue to build tech that harms us and explores ways to course correct and design more humane tech that serves the whole human experience. 

She will share research and historical data on how early technologists’ focus on augmenting cognition created products and services that inadvertently undermined our experience as physical beings and how this poses an existential crisis for our species. From this foundation, she offers concrete steps that technologists, policymakers, investors and everyday users can take to cut back on tech that diminishes us and advance new tech that connects us: with ourselves and with each other, in both virtual and IRL rooms, restoring tech’s intended role to serve and support our better selves.