Alex Woods once expected the Silicon Valley technology industry and its world-changing innovations to lift up everyone in the Bay Area. Lately, though, as the region’s cost of living has soared, traffic has worsened, and homelessness and blight have spread, the 38-year-old customer-service representative’s views have changed.
RELATED: 7 in 10 residents say the region’s quality of life is getting worse
“I felt like the tech industry would bring a lot of jobs and resources to the Bay Area as a whole,” said Woods, of East Palo Alto, who responded to the survey. “I thought they would do a lot more than they have done.”
Despite being the region’s economic engine, a new Bay Area poll by the Bay Area News Group and Joint Venture Silicon Valley found the tech industry is widely mistrusted, with hefty majorities of respondents believing major Silicon Valley companies wield too much power, are largely responsible for the region’s sky-high costs of housing and have lost their ability to tell right from wrong.
Among registered voters, 80% of those responding to the poll blamed Silicon Valley’s tech industry for driving up housing and living costs, and 75% said the industry had too much power and influence. Sixty-nine percent said Silicon Valley had lost its moral compass.
“I was surprised,” said Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to regional urban policy research. “I didn’t think the percentages would be so high.”
Additionally, Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing, artificial intelligence, is broadly viewed with concern and skepticism.
“I don’t feel comfortable about it,” said Ladasha Wheeler, an MRI scheduler from Pittsburg. “We’re playing with things like we’re playing God. Sometimes I think we just need to lay off a little bit.”
Ladasha Wheeler an MRI scheduler from Pittsburg, outside her work in Walnut Creek. Wheeler is not comfortable with the influence and power of the tech industry in the Bay Area . (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Silicon Valley is the nation’s largest and most prominent technology hub, employing hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Bay Area. But only 40% of registered voters responding to the survey said the industry’s success delivered benefits for everyone in the region, with 75% worried about a growing income disparity between tech and non-tech workers.
“People have finally woken up and are saying, ‘This doesn’t feel like something that contributes to the region and my personal life.’ And it doesn’t — it mostly contributes to people who have invested, or run the companies,” said Steve Blank, a long-time Silicon Valley startup guru and an adjunct professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, of the poll findings.
The telephone poll, which surveyed more than 1,650 registered voters in Santa Clara, Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties, indicated mixed views on tech, revealing pervasive disenchantment with an industry seen as imposing significant social and economic costs on people also beholden to its products and services.
Dorian Márquez, a marketing manager for AI Partnerships Corporation, a startup based in Toronto, …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
