Don't Expect Tech to Care About Your Problems

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are undoubtedly finding many ways to make the world a better place -- with tunnels, flying cars, interplanetary travel. Yet I can’t help noticing a growing divide between the problems people have and the problems tech companies are willing or able to solve.

This divide has two sources. The first is related to inequality: When people live in an elite bubble, they don’t experience the everyday frictions of normal life. So they focus on issues that would barely register for the rest of us workaday saps. That’s how you get Juicero, or for that matter Theranos, which was supposed to solve the problem of people who don’t like getting blood drawn. Even as someone who regularly faints at the doctor’s office, and whose veins are tricky to find, I don't think that rises to the level of a real problem.