Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on fighting misinformation, tech addiction, and small nuclear reactors

In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes a series of predictions for the next year. It’d be easy to think that this year’s predictions are all about AI, but instead, Vogels focuses on how Millennials and Gen Z think about being part of the workforce, nuclear energy, combatting misinformation, open data for disaster preparedness, and the need for intention-driven technology.

Unlike his employer, whose keynotes this week focused almost exclusively on AI, Vogels only mentions it three times in his written predictions “for 2025 and beyond.” And while AI is now a steady drone in the background, he seems to be more preoccupied with how technology in general is shaping the world right now.

The next generation of employees

“I’ve been very much interested in looking at companies that are interested in solving really hard human problems, really big problems, like economic equality, whether it’s food, health care globally,” he told me. “And with that whole ‘Now Go Build’ documentary series, we’ve raised some of those. But one of the things that I’ve been noticing in the past, let’s say four or five years, is that there is a new generation of workers out there that are actually willing to take a pay cut if they can work for a company that has sustainability in mind — all these issues.”

He also said that he has heard from a number of NGOs that there is a massive increase in tech workers who would like to volunteer at these organizations.

“Where, in the past — five, ten years ago, you would have to beg for people to come. Now people knock on the door,” he said. “The problem that these companies have is how to manage them. They don’t actually have the people. An organization like Mercy Corps, for example, they only have two people that are in tech, right? Because that money goes to the area [where] they can actually have impact. They don’t go on the tech side….Now, they have an engineer for two weeks. They have all these great ideas that they want to do, and even companies that are coming to them saying: ‘Oh, you can have our products for free.’ But they do not have the people to work on this.”

Vogels believes — and I think a lot of people would back him up — that the next generation of workers will also bring this mindset to the companies they work for, and that these companies will have to adapt to them.

“That means as employers, if you’re interested in actually hiring the absolute best engineers, you better make sure that you change your company culture to actually be able to attract these people. It’s no longer: do I get the best laptop? Do I get the best screen? Do I get two screens, right? But does my work matter? And that’s a really big shift, because it’s no longer about what’s the salary I’m getting? Because I’m willing to give up some of it if the work I’m doing means something right. And that means that, as an employer, you need to change that as well.”

When I asked him if this means that Amazon itself may also have to change its vaunted set of leadership principles (the ones new employee at Amazon basically has to memorize), he noted that “with scale and success comes broad responsibility” — the final of the 16 leadership principles. Amazon, he stressed, also has a whole division focused on Social Responsibility and Impact.

Who can you even trust anymore?

In that context, he also noted that one of his predictions for next year is about fighting misinformation and — within that context — supporting open source intelligence. “We have rapidly shifted from an era of prolonged news cycles that lasted weeks or months to a constant stream of updates that break at the speed of a click. Social media platforms have become a primary source for disseminating and consuming news, and it’s never been harder to distinguish between what’s true and false,” he writes in his prediction blog post.

If technology brought us fake news, “then it’s also our responsibility as technologists to go the other way around to find solutions,” he told me. He believes that solutions like browser sidebars that display relevant context — and maybe academic research — about a given topic, could be helpful, for example.

“Elon is really good in time to push the story that media can’t be trusted,” Vogels said. “And since there’s many competing voices, can you trust the Washington Post and The New York Times and LA Times? Can you, or not? I mean, in the past, these used to be the source of truth. There was no discussion. If you were published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, everybody in Germany would read that and know that that’s the truth. But can we help with technology? Is there a general perception, at least during the US, recent US elections, that the general media can be trusted? At least one candidate is pushing that story very hard. Then we need to make sure that there is context around those stories that demonstrate which ones are telling the truth or not.”

“If we look at X and sort of the community notes, I’m not really sure whether the community notes are terribly useful, but [they] should be. And the question is, can we automate these kind of things?”

Meanwhile, the organizations doing open-source intelligence work, he said, are often not using the most advanced technology. He believes that locating where an image was taken, for example, should be automated by using image recognition.

Similarly, he hopes that access to open data will help NGOs to improve their disaster preparedness by allowing them to build better maps in areas where commercial mapping isn’t financially viable, for example, or by building new real-time data sources for tracking wildfires.

Fighting tech addiction

Vogels also noted that one of the reasons technology has been such an accelerant for the spread of misinformation is because our devices and apps have become so addictive. “We have tremendous impact with our technology on the lives of people, not only in terms of whether we advocate for what’s the truth, but the amount of time we spend with technology,” he said. Applications today, he said, are essentially built to be sticky and addictive.

“We as adults may be able to handle that,” he said (though I’ll interject here that I’m not sure if adults actually can). “You know, if your kid of four years old is sitting in the back of the car, and, you know, in the past, they will be singing or yammering: ‘Are we there? Are we there?’ But [what] parents now do is just give them an iPad. Kids at four or five years old know how to use YouTube, but it also means that they get on a cycle of continuous highs, continuous highs, continuous highs. So the expectation is that these kids, and we already see that, are more prone to other types of addiction later as well, because you need to continuously get this next high whether it’s drugs, food, drinking, sex, or whatever.”

People, he believes, are realizing this now and starting to take some action — maybe that’s using a dumb phone or going offline for extended periods. He noted that new regulations in Australia, which seek to ban kids under 16 from using social media, “is a pretty brute force approach, but it does signal a problem,” even if forbidding something to teenagers will make it more appealing, of course. “After all, you know, in the Netherlands [where cannabis has long been tolerated], a lot [fewer] kids continue to smoke weed because it wasn’t cool.”

It’s up to technologists to ensure that their applications aren’t addictive — maybe by making the interfaces simpler, for example.

“I mean, probably for TechCrunch, if somebody reads one article, you wanted them to read more articles. After all, pageviews equals income. It’s a business. But you know, how addictive do you make your interfaces, right? And yes, of course, as a company, you have a responsibility to shareholders to do that, but I think these days, we also have a social responsibility to make sure that our society is healthy enough in ten, twenty years from now that you can continue to be in business.”

The nuclear option

This year’s set of predictions is a bit of “all over the place” (Vogels’ words, not mine), and his next one is about the use of nuclear energy. In Vogels’ view, the expansion of nuclear energy and the growth of renewable energy “will lay the groundwork for a future where our energy infrastructure is a catalyst for innovation, not a constraint.”

“We know how to do small nuclear,” he told me — referring to the reactors used to power military submarines, for example. “We just never built them because they weren’t commercially interesting. Plus, society didn’t accept them as being [located] somewhere near them. If your submarine will go up in flame, fine, submarine, you chose for that. It’s a different story.” But we’ve now also reached a point where large businesses aren’t allowed to build new facilities near cities like Amsterdam, where Vogels lives, because the energy companies can’t deliver enough electricity to them anymore — not because they can’t generate enough.

A few years ago, Vogels told me that he wasn’t ready to retire yet. I don’t get the sense that anything has changed for him. He’s clearly still enjoying his role — even if his predictions this year are a bit darker than usual.