It’s a long way from Silicon Valley, California, to the agricultural valleys of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Drive the wide boulevard of Sandhill Road, the ‘Wall Street’ of the US high-tech industry, and you are culturally and geographically thousands of miles from the lands and livelihoods that sustain most people. However, like Wall Street, what happens on Sandhill Road and in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley is becoming entangled with the futures of the poorest and most vulnerable. Here in the world’s richest valley, the watchword is ‘disruption’– that is exploiting the vast opportunities that lie in shaking up economies and social relationships. Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are placing multibillion-dollar bets on cutting-edge technologies to play such disruption to their advantage. As they place their chips, the effects are already starting to bear down on the peasants and workers of the Global South.
Forty years ago those chips were the actual computer chips that Silicon Valley was named after and made its billions on. It is now axiomatic that those personal computers, and the internet giants that followed, have transformed the world in far-reaching ways. Today, however, a new set of technologies are animating the high-tech investor crowd: synthetic biology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, gene editing, self-driving cars, flexible manufacturing, drone agriculture, robotics, lab-grown meat. Glancing over this smörgåsbord of disparate sci-fi technologies it looks as if a bunch of over-earning Star Trek nerds are trying to live out their dreams (and indeed there may be some of that); yet these different technologies are coalescing into a coherent and real new industrial platform whose influence will be far-reaching.
