"Stand for more than profits" – using tech for good in 2020 - VMware EMEA Blog

The technology sector has had some missteps over the last few years, leading to 2018 being dubbed the year of the Techlash by the Financial Times. On the surface, things don't seem to have changed since then. Barely a week into 2020, Facebook refused to either fact-check political ads or limit how they can be targeted; going back into 2019, a CEO was duped by an artificial intelligence program to fraudulently transfer over a quarter of a million dollars to an account run by criminals; a study published in December found that facial recognition software programs are consistently far less accurate at identifying African-American and Asian faces than they are with Caucasian. Yet there is a sense amongst those in the technology industry of wanting to, in the words of global inclusion strategist Debra Ruh, "stand for more than profits." In her eyes, "technology is a powerful equalizer for people. However, if the technology and communications are not accessible or inclusively designed, the digital divide widens, society loses."