Salesforce’s Bret Taylor on ethical technology, product design and unintended consequences of tools that perpetuate inequality
- Ex-Google and Facebook employee Taylor says ethicists work with engineers at Salesforce to guide product design when working with tech like AI
- He says that thinking of the unintended consequences of emerging tech and its impact on society should be a part of the product-design process
Salesforce president and chief operating officer Bret Taylor has a front-row seat to the industry-wide trust crisis that Silicon Valley is facing – and has implemented his own changes to the product-design process.
A former Facebook chief technology officer, Taylor co-created Google Maps with former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer when they both worked for the search giant. He also created the “like” button for a social network that would be acquired by Facebook. Back then, Taylor says, technology companies were held less accountable for the products they built.
“When I worked at Facebook, the main complaint I got was that everyone wanted a dislike button,” Taylor said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday. “Obviously, since I’ve left, that’s changed.”
One of the most fiery critics of the consumer tech industry’s practices is Taylor’s new boss, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. And by building the like button for Facebook, Taylor has directly played a role in developing one of the objects of Benioff’s fiery criticism. “Facebook is the new cigarettes. It’s addictive, it’s not good for you, there’s people trying to get you to use that even [though] you don’t understand what’s going on,” Benioff said in November 2018.
But, chuckling slightly at the Benioff anecdote, Taylor said that the shift in his philosophy had more to do with his own personal reflections.
“Technology applied blindly isn’t going to necessarily improve or save the world,” he said. “I think that’s changed my philosophy on how we develop technology.”