"Tech" Responsibly: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibilities
Move fast and break things was never an excuse. Now it's even a bigger liability.
Technology stopped being a niche in the early 00s. Now it’s the infrastructure of everything — how we deliver healthcare, move money, educate children, run elections, communicate with each other. Tech builders are the architects of our civilization.
And with great power comes great responsibilities.
TL;DR:
Technology is the operating system of society, and every builder shares that responsibility — no hiding
The consequences are impossible to ignore now
Responsible and fast aren’t opposites — you just don’t drive a racecar downtown
Technology Is the Operating System of Society, and Every Builder Shares That Responsibility — No Hiding
Every technology has consequences we don’t anticipate. Nuclear energy powers cities and destroys them. Social media connects us and polarizes us. Autonomous vehicles move us and displace jobs, change real estate value.
The common thread isn’t any single technology. It’s that technology has become so powerful, so embedded, that small changes have big impacts. Some call this the butterfly effect. AI is accelerating this faster than anything before it — a self-driving car update shipped in the morning can be making decisions about real people by afternoon.
The speed matters. AI makes the pattern more visible, but the pattern predates it. If you write code that touches people’s lives — and at this point, almost all code does — you’re building the infrastructure of society. Whether you intended to be or not.
Like grown-ups do, we all need to own the consequences of our actions. That is what a civil society does.
The Consequences Are Impossible to Ignore Now
Silicon Valley’s “original sin” was the idea that speed and responsibility are at odds — that you can either move fast or be careful, but not both.
There’s a reason race cars only race on circuits and not in town.
The companies that “moved fast and broke things” didn’t break things by accident. They decided to make it someone else’s problem. Externalities, by definition, exist because someone drew a boundary and said “not mine.” The breaking was a business decision disguised as an engineering constraint.
When technology was a niche, the damage was contained. Annoyed users. Buggy software. Lost data. Painful but survivable. That era is over. When your product touches healthcare decisions, financial livelihoods, children’s development, and democratic processes, “we’ll fix it later” is negligence.
AI didn’t create this problem — but it supercharged it. The speed of deployment, the breadth of impact, the opacity of decision-making — AI takes every existing tension in responsible technology and amplifies it by orders of magnitude. If we couldn’t get it right with social media algorithms, the stakes are even higher with systems making clinical, legal, and financial decisions.
Responsible and Fast Aren’t Opposites — You Just Don’t Drive a Racecar Downtown
Doctors move fast in the ER. Pilots make split-second decisions at 30,000 feet. Structural engineers ship bridges that carry thousands of people a day. All of them move fast. All of them are accountable. Tech is the only profession that convinced itself speed and responsibility are in tension.
You earn your way up. Prove reliability, build evidence, expand scope when data supports it. Organizations are responsible for the technology they deploy. You don’t get to blame the model, the library, the platform.
Some are moving in the right direction. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI — teaching models to self-correct against explicit principles — and Google’s responsible AI deployment reviews show that speed and accountability can coexist when you design for both from the start. Not perfect, but proof it’s possible.
The obligation is to move fast and be accountable. To ship and catch what goes wrong. Every technology we’ve ever built has had consequences. The ones that served humanity well were the ones where accountability was built in from the start.
With great power comes great responsibilities. That’s not a limitation. It’s the job.
What’s Your Accountability Framework?
If your product made a wrong call about someone’s health, finances, or livelihood tomorrow — do you have a system to catch it? Not a policy doc. An actual mechanism that fires before the damage is done. If you don’t, you’re not moving fast — you’re just hoping. What does yours look like?
All views are my own.