In the Spotlight: Tim O’Brien

We highlight a public interest technologist in every newsletter. This week, we talked to Tim O’Brien, General Manager of AI Programs at Microsoft.

A BETTER TECH: What does Public Interest Technology mean to you?

TIM O’BRIEN: I’ve always viewed public interest generally as a means of advancing societal good. But the increasing pervasiveness of technology in virtually all aspects of our daily lives has created an ever-widening gap between accelerating tech adoption and real consideration of its resultant impact. To that end, public interest technology needs to become an advocacy discipline embedded within industry to convert understanding and mitigation of harmful effects from an after-the-fact consideration to a core component of a technology’s value proposition, deeply intertwined with mission and purpose.

ABT: What does your work look like, and what have you been working on lately?

TIM: I spend time on two primary areas: talking to enterprise customers & partners across various sectors about how to operationalize ethical tech, and outbound advocacy to the market broadly, via speaking and writing. The industry is in an awkward adolescent phase of converting ethical tech principles (the easy part) into operating procedures, core product lifecycle changes, and governance (the hard part). To the extent we’re only as successful as our customer/partner ecosystem, we’re sharing what we’ve learned over the last couple of years to help bring the ecosystem along on a maturity curve that doesn’t entail them spending time learning what we already know or repeating our mistakes.

ABT: If students are interested in pursuing a career in public interest technology, where might they start?

TIM: As it exists today, this domain’s most endearing attribute is its multi-disciplinary nature: it doesn’t matter if your point of entry is computer/data science, law/policy, research, or social science/STS … you can have an impact by building on any one of these foundations (and/or others not listed here). Survey where the intersection resides between your current strength and where you want to go deeper, then seek out the myriad free, publicly available resources that reflect that intersection. You will not only find artifacts that inform the current state of public interest technology & ethical tech, but (more importantly) you will find like-minded people in the communities that are essential to advancing this discipline.

We profile a public interest technologist every other week in our newsletter. Want to be the first to read these profiles? Subscribe to our newsletter!