With decades of nearly uninterrupted innovation flying out of Silicon Valley, it often seems as if the tech industry’s well-oiled machine will keep running for decades to come.

But that’s far from certain, according to longtime New York Times technology writer John Markoff (pictured). Markoff, who recently retired from the Times after 28 years, sees a series of threats to Silicon Valley’s dominance of the tech landscape. And those challenges, he worries, could slow the pace of technology advancement if they aren’t overcome.

“I don’t think it’s guaranteed that Silicon Valley will survive forever,” he said. “It’s really easy to kill the golden goose.”

Markoff, 67, shared his decades-long perspective covering technology on the Silicon Valley Friday Show with host John Furrier, co-chief executive of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. Over the years, the writer has caught trends close to their inception, from the early days of personal computers to the rise of the World Wide Web to the recent ascendance of artificial intelligence and robotics. Now, with the support the Computer History Museum, where he’s a historian, he’s writing a biography of Whole Earth Catalog creator and digital pioneer Stewart Brand and plans to write for a wider range of publications.

He and Furrier talked about the unique culture of the Valley, the difficult state of media and most of all the evolution of Silicon Valley and whether it can remain vibrant.

One of Markoff’s concerns when it comes to the Valley’s viability is the current anti-immigrant attitude in the country, particularly after a presidential election that turned on such issues as penalizing companies for not manufacturing in the U.S. and limiting immigration. Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg expressed concern Friday about President Trump’s recent executive orders regarding immigrants. Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai also slammed the orders.

“One of the key aspects of Silicon Valley is it was a magnet for the best and brightest from the entire world,” Markoff said. “If you basically block that, if people go to China or they go to Europe, the chemistry falls apart.”

Culture clash

Another key to the Valley’s chemistry is the multiple cultures and generations here, he said. That goes back to late 1960s and 1970s, during which the white-shirt, pocket-protector crowd in the semiconductor industry coexisted with the “long-haired culture” to the north focused on the personal computer. “Those cultures were separate, but they mingled together, and it’s still true about the Valley,” he said.

At the same time, Furrier noted that some people worry that culture may be changing. He cited the recent New Yorker article about ultra-rich tech executives preparing for a potential social apocalypse with luxury bunkers around the world. And Markoff touched on concerns that technologies such as artificial intelligence that, in augmenting human intelligence, also create an economy in which fewer people have the jobs they used to have.

But he remains optimistic that Valley leaders aren’t blindly forging ahead without taking into consideration the employment disruption AI could cause. “A lot of the big companies in Silicon Valley are actually thinking seriously about that, and they’re thinking about their ethical responsibilities,” he said. “I give Silicon Valley technologists relatively high marks because in some industries people don’t care at all about the consequences.”

Moore’s Law slowdown

The Valley even has challenges on the tech side, Markoff noted. Moore’s Law, the reality that the number of transistors on a piece of silicon doubles every couple of years, may be coming to an end or at least slowing down. “We’re at a stage now, 50 years in, where it’s a real question of whether we’re still on that pace,” he said. “You can argue that we’re at least stalled for awhile,” in particular because the cost of transistors has stopped falling thanks to the escalating cost of cramming more transistors on a chip.

That’s a big deal, he said, because that exponential improvement is the driving force for much of tech’s relentless progress. “If the exponential’s over, is it going to continue to spin out new industries?” he asked. “It’s a real open question for me.”

Yet another of Markoff’s concerns is that digital culture may be veering away from the original view that computers are “instruments of liberation” from centralized control of technology. Indeed, Furrier said, it sometimes seems as if we have backtracked and are now living in a technology world of no privacy from large companies and governments and control of key algorithms of digital life is held by a few companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. That, Furrier said, is the opposite of the freedom implied in Apple Inc.’s famous “1984 ad.”

“I come from a generation where we really hated taking direction from anybody,” Markoff said, “but I see younger people who take direction from the palm of their hand. Everything from where to get Korean barbecue to whom to marry. That’s a cultural shift that is eerie to me.”

Although Markoff remains generally optimistic about the Valley’s future, he’s less of a utopian today. “I feel that this online world that we’ve created, this cyberspace, is merely a mirror of the physical world,” he said. “It reflects everything good and bad about our world.”

Photo by theCUBE