On a gray day in San Francisco I saw who will drive the taxis of the future: nobody. That’s right. No one will drive us to workat a tourist destination, at the station or at the airport. The steering wheel will move by itself. Just like the one in the car Waymo on which I climbed, the first European journalist to take a ride in the self-driving car that promises to revolutionize our travels. What we will do with fewer cars, shared and safer.
Welcome to the future. Welcome to a named journey “Hello, Silicon Valley”. A webseries: me and my camcorder on the streets of San Francisco and the “Silicon Valley”. To tell who moves the world.
The tech giants, of course, da Google a Applewith their iconic headquarters constituting the lungs of the digital age economy. In the land where the desktop of the future is made. Where thanks to an enormous concentration of talent and capital (but also a few more ingredients that we will talk about) many of the ideas, apps, technologies and professions that aim to improve our future are given shape.
The first episode of “Ciao, Silicon Valley”, available on demand on all Gedi magazines from February 2, tells the autonomous driving of Waymo, the company of the Alphabet group (Google). Its driverless taxis sound like science fiction but on the streets of San Francisco they are already bookable with a click. They will only come to us in the futureexactly, and who knows in how much.
Then? And then the crisis that Big Tech is going through, Certain. I have been under the seat of Twittere di Meta, to look closely at the faces and transformations of this world. The layoffs that are shaking him. But also the idea that it is a moment of transition after an anomalous growth of the market, a moment that will actually release energies and new ideas, previously engulfed by large companies.
In “Hello, Silicon Valley” I tell these big companies, to understand how people who work for the tech giants live and how much they earn.
With one of the most critical US voices on the “big tech” world, Biden’s New Technology Advisor Jim Steyer, let’s touch on the “political” theme: because “something in this world has to change – explains Steyer – It’s a turning point, we need tougher rules on privacy and freedom of speech. Elon Musk and his fellow entrepreneurs have the most powerful companies in history in their hands, we cannot let them get rich at the expense of democracies, transforming “free speech” into “free rich”, or freedom of speech, through disinformation, into freedom of enrichment”.
After current events, places. “Stay hungry”, said Steve Jobs. And I’ve been to special places in Silicon Valley where food goes hand in hand with chips. I had breakfast at Buck’s, one of the most extravagant places on the West Coast, where Steve Jobs was at home, where startuppers and investors have always met and contracts are drafted on the placemats, so much so that, for example, table 40 is called “Tesla ”.
I ate at the Alpine Inn, the country ale house where in 1976 the team that received the first email in history was based. In front of a beer. L’ americano (but they also do well with espresso, a rarity in these parts) at Caffè Trieste in San Francisco, in a kind of journey through history that takes us back to the cradle of the beat generation, the counterculture that has also given so much to development of technology.
To get over it, a walk through the streets without lighting – “because Silicon Valley is a place where cellphones often don’t work or the streets are dark to see the stars, there is a very strong attention to the environment”, as he says the former Apple designer Leandro Agrò – and for Atherton, the country where the average value of a house is 8 million dollars (the highest in the United States), up to the Montessori kindergarten in Palo Alto with its fees of three thousand dollars a month, passing through streets with the caravans of those who cannot afford a house. Symbols of the contradictions of a complex, fascinating and ruthless world, with costs of living inaccessible to most.
All right, but the ideas? Where are they going?
In the episode dedicated to innovation, I’ll tell you about innovative faces and ideas. Eyes and voices of Italians who here truly shape the future, design, biotechnologies and satellites. And Amazon at the Nasa. Stories of space miners, robotic arms that will change the pharmacist’s job, of artificial intelligences that will discover medicines or will act as interior designers and make-up artists. Up to a story that goes against the trend, that technology keeps it, so to speak, at a distance. Because we live on technology: but what if the future taught us to tame it, to make it smarter and less invasive at the same time? What if the walls understood us, and we could free ourselves from the slavery of screens?
And then “Hello, Silicon Valley”. And thanks for the future.