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.”
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.
Poll respondent Dorian Marquez, 33, a married father with one child from San Jose and marketer for AI startups, said new enterprises are performing a valuable function in democratizing technology, but bad apples like Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes undercut progress, and major tech firms don’t always support growth across the tech industry.
“Sometimes these big corporations are almost anti-competition with some of the acquisitions they pursue,” Marquez said.
Woods noted that Silicon Valley workforces tend to lack diversity, a problem he believes starts in leadership suites and “trickles down to the bottom level.”
He holds the big companies responsible for gentrification and the region’s high cost of living, adding that many tech workers “have the wealth to live anywhere they want and they have access to things that normal people don’t have access to.”
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Woods said.
Only 41% of registered voters said their household finances improved when Silicon Valley was doing well.
The region’s tech industry attracts ambitious people and generates substantial tax revenue for cities, but because housing prices have skyrocketed from the influx and not enough new housing has been built, companies face public ire, said survey respondent Tyler Cooper, 35, a San Francisco marketing manager.
“We’ve created a zero-sum fight when you don’t build apartments and you don’t build homes,” Cooper said.
Meanwhile, most Big Tech firms are helmed by “oligarchs” who have created tremendous wealth for themselves. If uber-rich tech leaders contributed more to the communities where they operate, public sentiment could improve, Cooper said.
Lawyer, political consultant and poll respondent Rich Robinson, 65, pointed out that tech remains the Bay Area’s driving force, attracting massive capital, pushing technology forward, traditionally leading the way on environmental sustainability, and treating staff well.
But Robinson has difficulty reconciling the tech industry’s financial success with the Bay Area’s pervasive homelessness, housing-supply crisis and struggling mass transit systems.
“There’s always a push to put the taxes on the residents to build the infrastructure instead of utilizing some of their corporate profits to build the infrastructure that we need,” Robinson said.
Major tech companies face overwhelming pressure from shareholders “to make money at the expense of absolutely everything,” and what’s best for society and even their users may not lead to growth, respondent Olwen Puralena noted. But the health of millions of Americans’ retirement funds depends on the stock market successes of those companies, which complicates any moral judgments, she added.
Puralena, a former worker at Google and Facebook now employed as a user-experience researcher at a Mountain View online-education company, said she admires the problem-solving ethos of Silicon Valley. Tech users need to take responsibility for their own roles in molding Big Tech’s products and services, said Puralena, 34, a married mother of one from Sunnyvale.
“Facebook is the way it is because when people interact with it … they’re more likely to click on things that evoke distrust or anger or shock or horror,” Puralena said. “That’s a choice. We sometimes will blame technology … but it’s based on our cultural input. Tech companies hold responsibility. But they’re trying to create a sticky product, so you as a user have to decide, ‘How am I going to engage, and am I going to make it worse?’”
The industry’s latest big offering, the generative artificial intelligence software pioneered by San Francisco ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has generated a spectrum of worries. Nearly 90% of registered voters surveyed in August worried about realistic fake content, and almost as many had concerns about AI-generated misinformation as the election approaches in November.
Cooper sees AI causing “a lot of risk from the misinformation.”
“When I try to do a Google image search, a lot of the images that come back are fake,” Cooper said. “By giving you information that is inaccurate it makes you not believe the accurate information. It makes it feel like we lost something that we used to have. That makes me sad.”
If Bay Area residents worried about AI and aggravated by social media paid more attention to the region’s innovations in health care, space exploration and national security, they might have a more positive view of the tech sector, Stanford’s Blank said.
Hancock believes the Cambridge Analytica scandal — which saw a digital consultancy to the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign misuse millions of Facebook users’ data — plus scientific findings of harm from social media, election meddling by foreign powers via social media firms, and the sheer speed of technological development underlie negative sentiments toward tech.
Though the poll hadn’t before asked Silicon Valley residents about their feelings about tech, Hancock senses a loss of faith.
“The extent of it,” he said, “is deeper and broader than I would’ve imagined.”
This is the second story in a three-part series.
Part 1: Bay Area Poll: 7 in 10 residents say the region’s quality of life is getting worse
Coming Tuesday: Poll finds broad support for rolling back criminal justice reforms