Communications of the ACM
BBC Interviewer Found Himself on a Sticky Wicket With Google CEO
"As the show closed with the two sharing a friendly elbow bump, one could almost hear the Google PR team saying, 'Well, that went well, didn't it?'
A recent interview by the BBC's Amol Rajan with Google CEO Sundar Pichai was a classic mainstream media production. Rajan wanted to find out 'where technology is taking all of us.' He is thus a native speaker of the narrative of tech determinism—the view that technology drives history and the role of society is simply to mop up afterwards and adjust to the new reality.
It is also, incidentally, the narrative that the tech companies have assiduously cultivated from the very beginning, because it usefully diverts attention from awkward questions about human agency and whether democracies might have ideas about which kinds of technology are tolerable or beneficial and which not.
From The Guardian
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