The Next Moonshot Won’t Come from Silicon Valley: ex-Google X’er Salima Bhimani on How to Invent Now

“If we continue to build for people and not with people, we won’t have a say in what this technology will look like or do in ten or twenty years.” — Salima Bhimani   Finally some inventive news in our summer of Luddite discontent. Salima Bhimani [https://bookshop.org/p/books/invent-now-the-next-leap-in-moonshots-salima-bhimani/9c6a20ee2f6efd91] spent six and a half years at Google X’s moonshot factory as its first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech. So thank her for the (responsible) magic of Alphabet’s Waymo, Wing, and DeepMind. In her new book, Invent Now [https://bookshop.org/p/books/invent-now-the-next-leap-in-moonshots-salima-bhimani/9c6a20ee2f6efd91], Bhimani provides a map for the next wave of moonshots. No, she speculates, they probably won’t come out of Silicon Valley. But, yes, they will come from somewhere.   Her invention was formed long before Silicon Valley. She remembers staring at the Toronto subway from her father’s magazine stall and wondering not where the trains went but “what is our relationship to this tube?” An ethnographer by training, Bhimani arrived at Google X from a world of government and nonprofits where “constraint was bread and butter.” At Alphabet, of course, she was spoilt with endless money and runway. Although that didn’t always guarantee moonshot success.   Moonshots fail, she explains, because they are always more than technologies. They are ecosystems, and they need the approval of regulators, communities, and consumers. Take, for example, the abortive Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s smart-city bet in her hometown of Toronto, which failed to recognize the practical realities of utopian city-planning.   So what will be the most dramatic moonshot of the twenty-first century? No, she says, it probably won’t be consumer rocketships to Mars or a cure for cancer. Instead, it will be about a post-labor society. What is human purpose when it’s not work? No wonder such an outrageous idea probably won’t come out of work-obsessed Silicon Valley.   Five Takeaways   •       A Nuanced Optimist. Bhimani isn’t surprised by the Luddite lurch: people feel “compressed by things they can’t control,” surrounded by technology doing things they don’t understand — and it’s hot out. But against thirty years of Silicon Valley boosterism she offers neither cheerleading nor despair: hold the tension. Technology surveils, and drones make war; technology also lets more people solve problems that were previously unsolvable. She refuses the binary of the moment — the abundance gospel of the Andreessens versus the scarcity warnings of James Crawford — predicting instead “abundance in some areas and scarcity in others”: your spreadsheet skills may become worthless precisely as your capacity to build becomes unprecedented. The task is holding both truths with what she calls a discerning eye, treating technology as a co-partner in a relationship where the friction stays alive. •       From the Toronto Subway to the Moonshot Factory. Her father ran a magazine stall in the Toronto subway, and young Salima stared at the trains asking an ethnographer’s question: not where are the people going, but “what is our relationship to this tube?” She came to Alphabet from government and nonprofits, where “constraint was bread and butter” — and met the opposite: endless money, endless runway, and audacity as the house style. As Alphabet’s first Chief Strategist for Responsible Tech, she sat with the CEOs of the Other Bets asking about trade-offs: “Are you willing to take on the potential that your drone could be used in nefarious ways — and how are you gonna ensure that doesn’t happen?” Now on her own — no Google badge to fly doors open — she finds leaving “opens up the aperture”: fifty-one years of experience, and both worlds, constraint and abundance, informi