The Tech News and Trends That Shaped 2024
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Here's an incredible fact about the world we live in now. Seven tech companies, all of them founded on the West Coast, five within 30 miles of where I'm sitting, were responsible for more than half of the S&P 500's total returns this year.

As tech goes, so goes a huge chunk of the national economy. And what's true for America is even more true for the Bay Area. So today we talk about the year in our hometown industry, with which I know most of us have a complicated relationship, especially after this year. That's all coming up next after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. You know, many of you know I cut my teeth reporting on science and technology, and I do innately find myself interested in the long-term project of building new minds and understanding the mechanics of living things and making new human experiences possible.

But boy, it's been hard to focus on the most intellectually exciting components of the tech world amidst the mess of this year. Most prominently, the hard right turn taken by several high-profile Silicon Valley bosses, most notably Elon Musk, but also the founding partners of Andreessen Horowitz, among others,

The Valley has always had conservatives, was birthed by old school Republicans, in fact. But this pivot has been different. Reactionary, often mean spirited, even grotesque, not to mention just weird and out of step with a lot of the rank and file tech workers.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence's new forms, the big models, LLMs that can generate or play with text or symbols of any kind, and other models that can create images, they burst out of early adopter status and into mainstreamed products. They still don't work consistently, they have copyright and long-term issues, and yet there they are in the world.

And I also find myself thinking about how big and expensive this AI revolution is. Two people in a garage with a computer are not getting very far in this environment. An industry that used to be defined by a glorious ecosystem of small companies is now defined by seven companies. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla. Are startups as the key engine of our region ever going to come back?

Great to be here, Alexis.

We're also joined by Liza Dwoskin, who's Silicon Valley correspondent for The Washington Post. Welcome, Liza. Hey, Alexis. Thanks for having me. And Louise Matsakis, who is senior business editor at Wired. Welcome. Hey, thanks for having me.

So, Louise, let's start with you. You know, let's just talk about the different ways that people may have encountered AI in the wild. Like, how is it sort of infiltrated or been foisted upon, depending on your point of view, people's lives?

Well, I think this was definitely the year that tech companies sort of threw everything at the wall and we don't know what will stick yet. It's in every app, every platform, including both the apps that we all use in our jobs every day. Like I'm using Zoom right now and I can see that at the bottom of the screen there is an AI companion button. I don't know exactly what that does, but when I look at the notifications on my iPhone, I get notifications.

these AI summaries that are done by Apple Intelligence. So depressing. So depressing. I know. They're really one of the worst features. But you see all sorts of these generative AI features, applications that are kind of shoved into, I think, all of the apps that we already know and love or hate. But right now, I feel like it's really everywhere. And a lot of people are annoyed by this stuff. Some people think it's useful. But I think right now, it just really hasn't shaken out yet. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, every time I read those AI summaries of my text messages, I just think, wow, this is just the prosaic nature of life. Every human interesting thing about the text has been just sanded off. And it's just like the bare facts of being like, can you pick up the kids? You know, what's happening? You know, this it's an interesting question to think about. And maybe, Liz, I'll bring this one to you. Just that.

AI has been around for a long time and even these new models have been around for a little while but it did feel like there was a qualitative change this year in sort of their wide stream availability

Yeah, and I think that that was one of the predictions was sort of like at the end of the year. I remember last year it was Sam Altman was we did this big profile at the end of the year of Sam Altman. It was like the world was coming to know him. I mean, 2023 was really the year when the public started to have some awareness of these technologies coming on the scene. And as Louis said, 2024 is where you see them starting to bleed into everything.

from Google searches to, you know, there was a lot of concern about would it be used in the 2024 election. In fact, it was, but it wasn't the avalanche people expected. So sort of like coming into our lives, I would say not in ways that

knock us off of our feet and change the way we work yet and change the way we vote yet or run elections yet. But you can still feel that a lot of it's on the cusp, change our entire nature, our entire sense of what's true and what's not true generationally.

which certainly that's the real fear. There will be no sense of what comes from a machine, what comes from a human, and it will no longer matter to people. And I don't quite think we're there yet for a variety of reasons. You know, Margaret, setting aside, and Lizzo was getting to the stuff of it right here, setting aside the sort of practical bits for a minute,

How do you see the moral and ethical arguments around AI? I mean, I know there are corners of this world that truly hate the new machine learning models, but I also know that there are other people who don't see anything wrong with them. Yeah, well, every next-gen technology has been met with a combination of fascination and fear, and AI is no different. I mean, we saw this at the beginning of the age of digital computing, and we've seen this with every successive generations, but certainly AI

The scale and the scope and the speed is something that is kind of bewildering and dizzying. And I think one of the things that really 2024 made clear is that the AI revolution, at least for now, is making big tech even bigger and kind of entrenching power structures. As you noted at the top, it requires, you know, you need to have great scale and money to spend for the talent and the compute to make it work.

And so, you know, we already are kind of a decade into this conversation about is, you know, the bigness of tech OK or not. And and certainly that, you know, with the Trump election, there is this shift in the AI regulation conversation where, you know, we already have a world in which a handful of companies and people are really controlling the board, so to speak.

And we're coming into a world in which some of those individuals are going to have a hand in directing whatever regulation does or not does not come from Washington. So again, Silicon Valley and the tech industry generally are becoming more powerful in this. And I think that is also an important dimension. I mean, you're totally right that we have been in this bigness of tech conversation for a while, but it just seems like somehow it keeps getting worse.

More big. I was looking and just playing with some of the numbers just around market cap, Margaret. And if you add Broadcom, which is the eighth most valuable company in the United States, and which even in the Bay Area where the company is headquartered, many people don't know who they are, more valuable than Berkshire Hathaway or Walmart or whatever. So you take those eight.

their market value is equal to the next 80 largest U.S. companies. So not like 80 big companies, but the 80 largest by market cap companies. And I guess I just don't even know what to make of an economy that sees itself like that, that has investors believe that only those eight tech companies are that valuable and literally everything else is just worth a fraction as much.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, the way we're kind of in a Silicon Valley 2.0 or 3.0 that is utterly different than what it was before. You know, we can, you know, there's some comparisons that have been made to the dot-com boom, what's been going on the last several years with AI. And I think

one thing that's really different is that, you know, first of all, in the 90s, believe it or not, Silicon Valley and the tech industry was so much smaller. The money was so much smaller. I mean, Netscape, the first big IPO of the dot-com boom, was like a $2 billion IPO. And, you know, it's just, it's kind of, it's so tiny compared to what we're talking about now. And I think that, you know, the historical comp that this comp comes up

But here, to me, of course, as a history professor, is looking back at the turn of the 20th century and the Gilded Age and the age of the giant trusts and of railroad and steel. That's really the only historical parallel that compares, even though, again, there are so many important differences here. Yeah.

Luis, one of the things about the current realm of technology is that it seems like all the different fields are sort of doing some combination of like waiting and ducking for this AI wave or like trying to find a quote unquote AI strategy. So what are we hearing like in health care or, you know, mental health education about what AI might do in some of these other fields?

Sure. Let's take healthcare first. So I think there are some really promising applications, for example, using generative AI to take notes for doctors and to help them do some of their charting. You know, a lot of clinicians today spend a tremendous amount of time just filling out

filling out information about you and about your healthcare. So that's maybe a good area. A more dubious area is the idea of using generative AI for therapy. So I wrote a story last year, actually, about a few startups that were starting to do this in education. I think the biggest application right now, frankly, is cheating. But they're...

But there are a lot of, I think, positive applications for potentially things like tutoring or helping people do the sort of repetitive tasks that you need to master a skill. Like, you know, think about practicing a new language or something like that. So I think you really see that this technology is a double-edged sword, right? A lot of the early applications right now, I think, are things like spam, cheating, and

you know, flooding social networks with propaganda or sort of, you know, low level information. But these companies are betting and these really major sectors like health care and education are betting that on the horizon, there are ways to use this to improve everyone's lives. I think that's still a little bit to be seen, but that's sort of the hope here.

I think it's worth noting, too. I mean, there were two Nobel Prizes for AI researchers, both chemistry and physics. I mean, chemistry went to the Google DeepMind people for protein folding, and physics went to Jeff Hinton, formerly of Google, and also John Hopfield. So, I mean, stuff is getting done in these important realms with these technologies. It's just, as you noted, all the other things. We're looking back at major tech trends.

trends in 2024. We are joined by Luis Matzakis, who's senior business editor at Wired, Liz Adwoskin, who's Silicon Valley correspondent with The Washington Post, and the University of Washington's Margaret O'Meara, the author of The Code, Silicon Valley, and the Remaking of America. We want to hear from you. Yumi, we know there's more going on in tech than is captured in headlines. So what to you is the most important development in the tech world this year? Something we missed.

Give us a call, 866-733-6786 or email forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking tech in the year 2024. We're joined by University of Washington history professor Margaret O'Mara, who wrote the book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Luis Matsakis, senior business editor at Wired, and Liza Dwoskin, Silicon Valley correspondent for The Washington Post. Liza, we got to talk tech and politics this year.

It's difficult to even know what to say about this. You know, obviously, Elon Musk purchased what was then known as Twitter, now known as X. And then during the election, the presidential election, kind of drove it hard right and now has become a close advisor to the president, at least as far as we can know, these sorts of things. Talk to me about just how you see the arc for tech and politics this year.

Well, I'm glad we're diving into this. I think that one of the reasons that you're having the reaction of what does it all mean and how can I make sense of it is because it is it has happened dizzingly quickly. I mean, even as recently as April.

Elon Musk was saying or March, he said on Twitter and he told friends he didn't know if he would endorse a candidate. You know, there was this big question of whether he'd be involved in elections. And then he effectively became what we call the October surprise. And, you know, it wasn't Russian disinformation. It wasn't Trump claiming he won when he didn't. It was it was Elon Musk. What I'll point out two trends. You know, Margaret talked about the new Gilded Age that we're in.

And I think, you know, part of this is there's been there's been this development where as Silicon Valley got bigger, as it got richer for a while, we know that the generation of founders that created the Googles that, you know, the post dot com boom generation and recent. I mean, those people were largely apolitical that they're they're.

If they had any life ideology, I would say it was around a belief in innovation, which for them isn't just a business term or whatever. It's actually, I would say, an ideology for them, almost a religion. And so when...

But they weren't they were, you know, Mark Andreessen. He supported certainly not interested in electoral politics. Right. I mean, they were not they it was like Eric Schmidt would like go out to Washington, D.C., you know, and everyone else would be like, all right, Eric's going out there, you know, and we're not interested in like knowing politicians.

Yeah, exactly. That's that generation. I mean, I even remember, you know, when Trump came into office, I mean, that was a political awakening for a lot of people here, but they were totally shocked, even to the point where, you know, the example of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, you know, going to the SFO airport himself with his then girlfriend at the time. Yeah.

to protest Trump's Muslim ban, you're like, wow. I mean, it was a statement because he himself was a refugee, but you're also like, wow, these billionaires are so divorced from electoral politics that they have no channel to protest but going to SFL. I mean, obviously they were donors, et cetera, but the point is, is you're right. Eric Schmidt was a mega donor for Hillary and for Democrats,

And the rest of them were more divorced from it. But what you saw, what you've seen in the last eight years is that

companies like Amazon and Google have become the biggest lobbying forces in Washington. So you have this one effect where you have, I mean, I started eight years ago with the rise of Russian disinformation on social platforms. Washington sort of wakes up to, oh, tech is a big deal and it can influence our elections and we better crack down. And then you have privacy issues, et cetera. So basically the world sort of teens suicides on social media and the political world starts transgressing.

turning against the tech industry and realizing that it's this behemoth and it needs to be regulated. And so you have these crop of leaders who weren't used to being messed with, were probably the only mega industry in America that was able to operate with very, very little laws and very few laws and regulations compared to its counterparts in healthcare or banking. And they

They start to realize, okay, well, we better fight back with lobbying money. But that's the companies, okay? It wasn't as much the individuals. But you see this fight brewing between Washington and Silicon Valley and this question of how to regulate. Fast forward to the 2024 election.

You have the Biden administration is very concerned with regulating AI. They alienated a number of people in the tech world. They hired a lot of people to in the SEC. It's true that, you know, and Lena Kahn in the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, basically hired hired people who were more hostile to the tech industry.

And we're going to constrain it at this moment when Silicon Valley is looking-

Yes, but also hostile towards crypto, which is more nascent in terms of, I mean, it's massive in terms of its financial impact, but it's also nascent in the sense that it has big plans. AI too. AI is massive. There's tons of money going into it. There's an arms race for it, but it's also nascent in terms of what the technology can do. So these people don't want to be constrained. And as I said earlier,

if they believe in anything, if they have a politics, it's a belief around innovation should not be constrained. And so they see the Biden administration constraining them. And anyone who spent time with Silicon Valley players in the last year and a half knows that a lot of people who would never have voted for Trump and maybe even still didn't vote for Trump didn't like the Biden administration's approach to the tech industry and started to sour on it.

it. So then you have these people on the fence, these, you know, certain players on the fence, some on the right, some more in the middle who are on the fence, but they're getting hugely, hugely angry. And almost as a statement, they decide to throw their lot in with Trump, not necessarily because they love Trump. I'll remember a year ago before this, during the primary, I wrote a big story about how all these big people in Silicon Valley who were on the right were supporting DeSantis.

So just remember, they were all deported to supporting DeSantis. They didn't want Trump to be their man. But once he became the leader, they realized this is it was more of a statement against Biden and against the big tech regulation approach than for Trump, I think. Yeah. I mean, this is really interesting. Thank you so much for that, Liz.

You know, politicians in D.C. were saying, no, no, no. Politicians in D.C. were saying, you know, tech is a big deal and can influence our elections. And then it feels like tech people, in particular Elon Musk, but a variety of them said, oh, yeah, that is a good point. We should totally influence elections. Is that is that how you read it, Luis? And essentially, like they they realized that there was a a market opening to use their influence in U.S. national elections.

I think the way that I see it is that the last few months are sort of the culmination of an eight-year-long epic failure, right? Eight years ago, we started saying exactly what you just mentioned, right? That, oh, these platforms are really powerful. We need to regulate them in some way. You know, they can influence everything.

elections. They can influence people's emotions. We need to do something about this. And frankly, there was a lot of activity and a lot of activity that I think angered Silicon Valley. There was investigations open. There were antitrust lawsuits filed. But essentially, I think regulators accomplished very little. Right. And what ended up happening is that the richest man in the world took over one of the largest social media platforms in the world that's particularly favored by politicians, lawmakers, journalists.

you know, people who have a lot of influence. He took it over, used it for his own purposes and got Trump reelected. I don't think, of course, that's not the only factor, but it certainly helped. And there was nothing that could be done to stop him or to pull in Musk's power. And here we are eight years later in a much worse place in terms of the social media ecosystem. And also, we still don't have a national privacy law.

So even after all of that, you know, people's privacy is not protected. And I think the landscape of information on the Internet is much more toxic and much more difficult to navigate. And I think you're also in a position where the other platforms are looking at what's going on with Twitter and saying, hey, if they're not going to do anything, then we're going to pull back our content moderation efforts as well. We're going to stop, you know, police. Which they wanted to do anyway. Yeah.

Totally. I mean, it's a budget line, right? It's not something I don't think that these companies like YouTube, Facebook, they don't want to be the arbiters of truth on the Internet. They want to just sell ads and, you know, develop these AI products. They don't want to they don't want to be involved in this. They don't want to be, you know, dragged before Congress again. And if they can avoid it, you know, all the better. And so I

I think that all of that circus of sort of, you know, having Zuckerberg testify over and over again, it resulted in very little. And I hope that this is a learning lesson for lawmakers that like winning points is not as valuable as actually sort of, you know, passing legislation and trying to get things done here. Hmm.

You know, Margaret, one of the interesting things for me in thinking about sort of like the politics of Silicon Valley is that there's always been this kind of uneasy relationship between workers in Silicon Valley who are relatively speaking more empowered than workers in a lot of other fields. And then their bosses who are some of the richest people in the world. I mean, I think

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer had this great line where he said, you know, when the right is talking about tech, they're talking about the employees who they see as too far left. And when the left, they're talking about the bosses. How do you see the sort of that other dimension of sort of Silicon Valley politics? That is to say, the differences within the industry itself?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And really up until the last decade or so, or even the last five years or so, the bosses and the workers were more aligned than not. In fact, that certainly is the way that

the companies kind of structured themselves as these flat hierarchies, these all-hands meetings where, you know, you're getting a one-on-one, you're getting to, you know, talk to the CEO on a weekly basis. These employee forums like Google famously had, you know, where everyone can kind of, there's transparency within the company. And as the companies got bigger and as these political headwinds that Liz and

Louise, our detailing start getting fiercer, those interests no longer align. I mean, part of this is, you know, at the end of the day, these are all businesses. And even though Silicon Valley in particular, from the get-go, from Bill and Dave walking around Hewlett-Packard in the 50s, have kind of presented themselves as kinder, gentler, more high-minded capitalisms,

At the end of the day, it's about business. And what has happened in the last five years is that employees have pushed back on what their companies are doing when they didn't see that in alignment with their values, whether it be Google doing work with the Defense Department and employees writing an open letter to protest

that or the various, you know, Me Too scandals that erupted in the Valley or during COVID when employees at, you know, famously collegial companies like Apple, where no one really stepped out of line, were kind of pushing back publicly against the leadership about how they were doing things.

And I think in the last couple of years, particularly as the kind of super, super flush high growth days of the high pandemic slowed down and layoffs started coming into the industry, the people running companies were like, OK, we're tired of this. We are going to get back to business. So one dimension of this right return is also that's kind of, you know, as people like Elon Musk would put it, kind of the anti-woke.

going against the quote-unquote woke mind virus. And there's a social politics to it that I think is connected to this employee activism, to the pressure for more diversity in the industry. And there's been a lot of blowback on that over the past year. Are you going to write about that? I'd love to. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to read most things about anything about that, but I would totally read you on that.

Okay. Assignment taken. Yes, thank you. We are talking tech in the year 2024. We are joined by Margaret O'Meara, who is professor of American history at the University of Washington, author of the book The Code, Silicon Valley, and the Remaking of America. We're also joined by Liz Adwoskin, Silicon Valley correspondent with The Washington Post, and Luis Metzakis, who's senior business editor at Wired.com.

We would love to know how you have maybe incorporated or kept AI out of your life. Maybe you know something about the tech world and you've been tracking an important development we haven't mentioned yet. Give us a call. Let us know what it is. The number is 866-733-7333.

6786, [email protected]. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're @kqedforum. And of course, we've got the Discord community as well. I did want to, before I get to some calls and comments, I did want to talk a little bit about the fate of TikTok.

For people who haven't been paying attention to this, and honestly, I kind of count myself among them in part because I just was like, we're never going to ban TikTok, right? But now we might actually ban TikTok. So can you give us a little bit of a rundown there? Sure. Did you say me? Did you say Louise or Lizza? Oh, Lizza. Sorry, Lizza. Lizza, sorry. Sorry, I thought you said Louise too. No, we, let's see, the rundown, I mean, it's been...

I mean, Trump, you know, initially indicated in his presidency that he was going to ban TikTok. It's been such a roller coaster. Louise actually might be a bit better to speak on it because I haven't reported on the latest. But yeah, I mean, it looks like, you know, that the ban is looking like

It's looking like it could be effectuated despite the fact that you're like, wow, this app is used by literally daily millions and millions and millions of teenagers and all the politicians who claim that it's destroying American lives are literally on it as well and used it. But it's looking... I mean, many of the people... I wrote a profile this year of one of the Silicon Valley leaders, Jacob Helberg, who is...

was leading the charge to ban TikTok and he became, you know, a very large Trump donor, kind of put all his eggs in that basket. And I think for a number of them who are anti-China, this is the horse they're going to ride in on and they're very serious about it. So, yeah. Yeah.

Louise, I mean, this is so interesting because at least as I understood the TikTok ban, it was basically because it is in fact owned by a Chinese company, like most Chinese companies, has a tight relationship with the Chinese national government.

And so we have this kind of situation here where American data, instead of just being used for surveillance capitalism, as with the other apps, also may be being used for this other kind of surveillance as well. But in your take on this topic and in the way that Congress is actually kind of looking at TikTok, it's not just about China, right? I mean, they have a broad set of concerns about TikTok.

Absolutely. I think it's important to step back and just look at how astonishing it is that the U.S. government, you know, which is the first amendment, right? The beginning of our constitution is about free speech, that lawmakers may choose to turn off a platform that is used by 170 million Americans. And it is a Chinese-owned platform, but for the most part, people are viewing very,

videos posted by other Americans or people in other parts of the world, right? That would be a tremendous decision. And while the hypothetical data security risks are very real, I'm often frustrated that

Instead of targeting a single app, lawmakers are not choosing to pass broad protections that would ensure Americans' data is safeguarded regardless of what application they're using, right? You know, at the top of this hour, you know, one of the NPR news reporters was talking about another devastating hack by Chinese hackers who got into the Treasury Department, who intelligence officials say are, you know,

They've infiltrated our entire telecom networks. They're listening in on wiretaps, potentially. They're reading SMS text messages. And yet that doesn't seem to spark the same sort of concerns from the people who want to ban TikTok. So that's where I worry that this is not a very productive

principled discussion. But just to talk about the specifics, the next step is that on January 10th, the Supreme Court will hear this case in an expedited trial to decide whether it is actually constitutional to ban TikTok through this law that was passed and signed by Biden in the fall. So fascinating. I mean, that is just going to be such a such a turning point moment if, in fact, the ban happens.

One listener writes, "I'm wondering why this concentration of intelligence, both human and artificial, cannot be focused on real problems. I don't need AI tech to summarize my mother-in-law's emails, but I would like tech to help figure out cures to cancer and Alzheimer's, or tech that brings resources to people who need it most. I want tech that helps us understand space, not take billionaires on suborbital missions for their egos. Basically, I want what Google said it would do: tech that does good, not evil."

We're looking back on the major things in technology in 2024 with Luis Matsakis, who's senior business editor at Wired, Liz Zadwaskin, Silicon Valley correspondent with The Washington Post, and Margaret O'Meara, professor of American history at the University of Washington. We're also taking your calls and your comments about the state of the technology industry in 2024. 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're looking back at

at tech news and trends in 2024, kind of the big things that really happened in our hometown industry here. Joined by Luis Matsakis, who's Senior Business Editor at Wired, Lizzy Dwoskin, Silicon Valley correspondent with The Washington Post, and Margaret O'Meara, who's Professor of American History at the University of Washington. You may have heard her on the show before. She's also the author of The Code, Silicon Valley, and The Remaking of America.

One thing I want to talk about, Louise, kind of quickly, is kind of the state of the jobs market in tech. I mean, there were a ton of layoffs since kind of the, as Margaret put it, kind of the peak of profit making during the pandemic. And it doesn't seem to me like things have really recovered. Is that accurate?

That's totally accurate. I think one of the reasons that we've seen a decrease in employee activism in Silicon Valley is that a lot more people are simply worried about their jobs. You know, there was this incredible hiring spree during the pandemic. And then you saw a lot of companies like Google, Facebook, Facebook.

uh, sort of shed a lot of those workers that they took on. I think, honestly, I think a lot of these leaders are looking at Musk and saying, okay, well, if you can, you know, I, I don't remember the exact figures, but get rid of, you know, the vast majority of Twitter staff and still have a website that at least kind of works, then, you know, maybe we should look at our own, uh,

employee roles and see where we can trim hiring, right? I think it's gotten a lot harder to get one of these jobs and the types of jobs that are available are things like machine learning researchers or, you know, the sort of top level PhD designers

type of job at a company like Anthropic, which is an AI startup or OpenAI, right? Like, those are really hard jobs to get that not that many people are qualified for, you know, not sort of your average computer science graduate. So yeah, it's definitely, I think, a really tough market. Luis, I was also kind of blown away, though, because I was also reading a blog post by, you know, PhD lab leader who was saying all of his PhD students are disappointed with the

Who are AI and machine learning specialists, PhD graduate students who are disappointed with the job market that they're graduating into, too. So even at the top end, people are kind of thinking like, wait, I thought this was a booming industry. And so it's it's tricky, especially in the Bay Area, for sure. Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about a slightly different topic here. Liz, let's come to you on this. You know, there is a lot of political talk about tariffs in a forthcoming Trump administration now very, very soon to be upon us.

could we actually see changes in the way that tech products come into the U.S.? Or will there be loopholes for, you know, all the people who go have dinner in Mar-a-Lago while the rest of the companies have to suffer through the tariffs? Like, how do how are you hearing people talk about this? OK, that's a great question. I want to jump in very quickly on the layoffs, though, because I want to say that on the last conversation we had just with Margaret, which is that

A lot of this talk of AI is disguised. All this money that's going into AI is disguising the fact that things aren't as good in Silicon Valley as they once were. And one of the reasons that we I think one of the other underlying reasons that we're seeing a lot of tech people jump on the Trump bandwagon, which we haven't discussed is.

is because they see defense technologies and putting money into defense tech and resources and contracts with the Pentagon as one of the potential bright spots for AI and for the technologies that they've built. And if you look at a lot of the people in Silicon Valley who are surrounding Trump,

They have missions around getting big contracts. And we're talking the Palantirs, the Andral. And you have a president who is going to essentially take some of the reins off of the caution that the Pentagon has shown around AI and adopting AI tools. So I have to jump in and say that is a really big theme that relates to how the economy is actually doing here. And yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to come back on terrorism because Margaret, I want to hear, I mean, a big chunk of the code.

Your book is about the defense origins of Silicon Valley and then how how Silicon Valley kind of detached from that at a certain point, kind of through the 1980s and beyond. What do you make of this kind of return of the Silicon Valley defense industrial complex? Everything old is new again. Yes. Silicon Valley's roots are in defense tech.

And that is an absolutely critical part of, you know, why is electronics in the Santa Clara Valley? Mainly because of the Cold War. And that really jumpstarted the entire electronics industry, which, you know, was devastating.

defense-centered for a while. Like, you know, through the 1960s, most of the business was defense, and the Valley continued and continues to have a major chunk of defense business to this day. The biggest employer in the Valley through the end of the Cold War at

the end of the 80s was Lockheed Missiles and Space down in Sunnyvale. Like that had more employees than everybody else. So, you know, that's a huge, huge part of the story. Just as we're pivoting back to hardware with the digital,

and all that's been in the news this last several years, we're going back to defense. And Liz is exactly right. This is, you know, when we try to understand the right return, we have to think about all of these Silicon Valley leaders as leaders of businesses, investors in businesses. They are thinking about what is going to be good for our business.

And it's really striking thinking about the contrast between after this election this year and what happened eight years ago in terms of how tech leaders reacted. Remember, after 2016, there was a lot of silence. There were kind of half serious, oh, maybe California should secede elections.

There were a few muted, you know, muted applause. There was a meeting at Trump Tower where everyone kind of filed in and looked very grim and sat at the table with Trump. And then what happened in the intervening eight years? Silicon Valley got bigger and bigger and richer and richer and did really, really well. And so I think what we're seeing, not only from the people who were outward Trump backers during the campaign, but also people like

Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or formerly of Amazon, who are publicly coming out and, you know, commending Trump on his win and meeting with him. That is, it is about business and it is, and defense is, defense tech is a big part of it. And everyone should remember that defense tech, you know, is, this is seated all sorts of commercial and civilian tech. A lot of the tech we are using to have this conversation had its origins in defense projects. Yeah.

So coming back to tariffs, because it's all sort of related, right? I mean, I feel like you see tech being woven through kind of all these national security issues, which is one of the ways that I think the Trump administration folks see tariffs as like a tool in this broader kind of geopolitical game. So do we think tariffs are going to happen for real, Liza? And do we think they are going to have carve outs for the technology industry?

I think one thing we know about Trump is there's different warring camps within his administration. And the tech cohort, as close as they are, is just one powerful camp. I mean, there's even been reporting about how Elon has already fallen out of the

You know, the first buddy has already fallen out of favor with some Trump advisors and allies. And one of the biggest, I think, fissures in Trump world has always been how hard to go on the America, on actually turning the America first ideology into policy around things like tariffs. We also know that tariff law is really complicated. And so you can, you know, impose tariffs on a piece of one industry and not on another. Right.

um it's going to be i think a huge battle in washington with every industry trying to carve out some protections for themselves i think a lot about fashion too and retail not that retail has as much clout these days as tech but you know that affects americans pocketbooks immensely um there's been economists who have said you know mainstream economists and

Some of them, they're not the ones that have the ear of the Trump world, but mainstream economists have literally said this level of tariffs that they proposed would tank the economy. And that would, I mean, that's with no exaggeration. And so that is something that any of the business leaders in Trump's orbit don't.

As political as they are and as much as they want to see a correction happen and a shift on tariffs, like how far they're actually willing to go because it would hurt the economy is the biggest question. Yes, everyone will be fighting for carve outs for themselves. Yes, the law is complex enough and slow moving enough that they will. It'll probably be a long process and there'll be a lot that happens behind the scenes and people like us will be tracking that pretty hard. Mm hmm.

So interesting. Also, so obviously a place where like corruption is going to seep in through all the cracks. Um, Louise, I wanted to talk to you about something slightly different. Um, uh, Lizza mentioned e-commerce, uh, and, and kind of retail. Uh,

One of the fascinating trends that you've noted, and I think I'll just note it with the meme that is like the Temu version of something, which means kind of like the cheap knockoff version of something. It does feel like that particular site, maybe people aren't familiar with it so you could describe it, has kind of become the face of this like ultra discount, like the dollar store e-commerce site.

Yeah, totally. So Teemu and Shein are two ultra fast fashion or ultra cheap e-commerce sites that exploded over the last few years. Apple just said that Teemu was the most downloaded app on iPhones in the US this year. And I think last time I checked, it had been downloaded about 100 million times. So it's sort of like

Amazon on steroids. You can go on there and there's all sorts of like almost slot machine like features where you can spin a wheel and you get a discount and all of a sudden you get this thing for free. And it really sort of became a really big part of a lot of Americans lives this year. And it was sort of fascinating to watch the rise of Timu. As you said, it's sort of become this this

for the knockoff version. I think the winner of a recent Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest calls himself Timu Chalamet to give you a sense of how people are using this term. And it was sort of amazing to see. I think that...

Americans have a really incredible bottomless appetite for cheap stuff, right? And it in more and more quantities. And I think that Timu was able to provide that. And I think what was really...

And the moment that set off alarm bells for me was over the summer. I wrote about this for The Atlantic. Amazon is actually launching, and they just launched a few weeks ago, their own Timu knockoff. It's called Haul. And I think there's actually a button on the Haul app. Timu, Timu, you might call it. Yes, the Timu, Timu, the Amazon Timu. And I think there's a button in the center saying,

when you look at this interface, you can get it right within the Amazon app and it says like ultra low and they mean prices, right? So you click that button and it shows you things that are like a dollar. And I think that this is not going anywhere. And to connect this to the terrorist conversation, I think there's a

I think there's an incredible appetite in the Trump administration to introduce tariffs. However, I really think that even Trump and his administration is very concerned about cutting Americans off from the supply of cheap goods or increasing the prices. I think it's sort of a no-go zone in a lot of ways. Yeah.

Yeah, one way I've thought about Timu and a lot of these other things, just kind of like an alternative front end to the Chinese manufacturing sector. Essentially, we had all the big box stores, which allowed you to access that sort of manufacturing and that labor. And then you had Amazon, which did it a different way. And now you have these guys, which do it a different way. And every time someone finds a new way, it's like somehow the prices get lower and you know less about where everything came from.

One other issue to address, and Margaret, I think I'm going to throw this one to you, which is a listener says, you know, would love for your guests to address the issue of the industry's vast investment in AI data centers and their proposal for the implementation of nuclear fusion or the, I would just say, hopeful implementation of nuclear fusion as a way to, you know, as a way to generate enough power without using clean energy.

What do you think? I mean, this seems to be one of these huge, almost like economy guiding projections where people say like, well, if we keep using this much computation and it keeps increasing this much and we're going to need this much power. And then that requires all these other things to happen within the rest of the economy. I find that kind of projection pretty dangerous. But what do you think?

Yeah, well, what it reflects is that, you know, AI is not this ephemeral thing, just like the cloud isn't a cloud. It has a physical manifestation in these enormous data centers that are usually at such a remove from population centers that most people have never seen them. But all of the data that we use, all the data we consume, all of the, you know, every single Gmail message ever written

stored on data centers in, you know, the interior Pacific Northwest along the Columbia using the hydropower dams built in during the new deal there in rural Virginia using the, and suburban Virginia using outside DC using the infrastructure created for the national security state. It's all there and it's creating this extra, there was an extraordinary story in last week's New York times by a

by Karen Weiss, who covers Amazon and Microsoft about the spiking demand for electricians in the Pacific Northwest who are helping to build these massive data centers. They're doing, so there's all of these economic consequences, but, but,

Power is a huge thing. And big tech companies have made really bold climate pledges to go carbon neutral. They also, you know, it's expensive to use oil and gas. And so they are trying to find alternatives, whether it be hydro or wind or nuclear, as you mentioned. Microsoft is leading the pack on that. So this is a really big story. AI is an energy story. AI is a broader economy story. And it's something to watch. Yeah.

We have been looking back at tech in the year 2024. We have been joined by Margaret O'Meara, professor of American history at the University of Washington, author of a great book, The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Also joined by Liz Dwaskin, Silicon Valley correspondent with The Washington Post and Luis Matsakis, senior business editor at Wired. Thank you all so much for such a satisfying conversation. Thank you. Our pleasure.

Takes a lot of people to put together a daily show that's an hour long every day. This past year, the 9 o'clock hour forum was produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, Dan Zoll, Tessa Paoli, Dana Cronin, Emiko Oda, Jericho Reiniger, and Lakshmi Sara. Our interns include Brian Vo and Lauren Smith.

Jennifer Ng and Ashley Ng are our engagement producers. Francesca Fanzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell's lead producer. Danny Bringer, Brendan Willer, Jim Bennett, Christopher Beal, and Catherine Monaghan are our engineers. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our VP of News is Ethan Tobin-Lindsey, and our Chief Content Officer is Holly Kernan.

We're going to go out with a little reflection over the recording of Caught Up in My Head from Vallejo star LaRussell. This is from his live performance here on Forum. Had a bunch of standout music shows this year, and LaRussell was one of the best. So this is our last show of 2024, which has been a strange, difficult year.

Last decade has felt a little bit like lurching down a dark hallway. Our country's kind of crashing off walls as we make our way to an unseen staircase. But I've taken a lot of solace from the local winds in our area. Crime is way down in Oakland. Murders in San Francisco are at a 60-year low. And the fentanyl overdose wave appears to finally mercifully be receding.

The rains have delivered us electric green hillsides, the mountains look magical, and the cities and the cargo ships down in the bay are sharply outlined, almost like hyper real. Near my house, the elms are shedding their last bright red leaves, and I come upon these huge piles of the most amazing colors, just waiting there for anyone who wants to take a minute to look.

And we, the all of us of Forum, we're people who stop and ponder and look, whether that's at our local politics or our local flora. We're people who are thoughtful, who know things, who listen, who participate. I tell people that the glory of Forum is that our listeners are the civic backbone of this whole region, which is, I think I can say this without hyperbole, the most historically significant place of the early 21st century.

And you know, we also need to know where to get a good burrito, and who the mayor of San Francisco might be, and to listen to the glorious strange harmonies of Georgian choral music sung by your neighbors. What is it to live in a place? What is it to live in this place? You all help me, you help us answer that question every day. And I want to thank you for that, from all of us here. You enlarge us, you enlarge the us.

Have a great New Year's Eve. Talk with you in 2025. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Guy Marzorati. All the time. Yeah. You got me caught up in my head.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

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