Highly recommended reading: Tim O'Reilly’s piece from last week, The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It, where he outlines the four trends that will likely end up shaping the future of tech. So much of it is worth highlighting; including this bit about our “fractured information landscape.”

I suspect that we will come to terms with machine learning-enabled science, just as we’ve come to terms with instruments that let us see far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. But without a better understanding of our machine helpers, we may set them down paths that take us to the edge of a cliff, much as we’ve done with social media and our fractured information landscape.

That fractured landscape is not what was predicted — internet pioneers expected freedom and the wisdom of crowds, not that we would all be under the thumb of giant corporations profiting from a market in disinformation. What we invented was not what we hoped for. The internet became the stuff of our nightmares rather than of our dreams. We can still recover, but at least so far, Silicon Valley appears to be part of the problem more than it is part of the solution.