David Auerbach: Is Big Tech Out of Control?

Today's guest is David Auerbach, a former engineer at both Microsoft and Google and now a technologist, writer and author of two books – Bitwise: A Life in Code and his most recent book, Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. Today, we talk about David’s background in software engineering and what it was like to work at Microsoft on MSN Messenger and then at Google in the relatively early days of the tech giant’s gargantuan growth. We also discuss his latest book – he explains the meganets term that he coined and how As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: an ever-changing systems that operates beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them. But before we get into the conversation, a quick word about today’s sponsor. Vowel.com is a game changing AI powered video conferencing platform that has an in-built AI powered meeting summary software that records all your meetings and automatically generates useful summaries at the end! I use it for all my meetings now and have found it so invaluable that I’m also using it for the podcast too to summarise the top takeaways from each episode. If you want to try it, sign up at Vowel.com using my code “daniellecode” for 3 months free of Vowel. Be quick though as this offer expires in 7 days. Enjoy! David on Twitter / Website / Buy Meganets here  Danielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnham  / Newsletter here