For more than two decades, Tim O’Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry. Originally a publisher of technical manuals, he was among the first to perceive both the societal and commercial value of the internet—and as he transformed his business, he drew upon his education in the classics to apply a moral yardstick to what was happening in tech. He has been a champion of open-source, open-government, and, well, just about everything else that begins with “open.”

Steven Levy is Backchannel's founder and Editor in Chief. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

His new book WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us seizes on this singular moment in history, in which just about everything makes us say “WTF?”, invoking a word that isn’t “future.” Ever the optimist, O’Reilly celebrates technology’s ability to create magic—but he doesn’t shirk from its dangerous consequences. I got to know Tim when writing a profile of him in 2005, and have never been bored by a conversation. This one touches on the effects of Uber’s behavior and misbehavior, why capitalism is like a rogue AI, and whether Jeff Bezos might be worth voting for in the next election.

Steven Levy: Your book appears at a time when many people who once had good feelings towards technology are now questioning it. Would you defend it?

Tim O’Reilly: I like the title WTF because it can be an expression of amazement and delight or an expression of amazement and dismay. Tech is bringing us both. It has enhanced productivity and made us all richer. I don’t think I would like to roll back the clock.

Not that rolling it back is an option.

No, but it’s important for us to realize that technology is not just about efficiency. It’s about taking these new capabilities that we have and doing more with them. When you do that, you actually increase employment. As people came off the farm, we didn’t end up with a vast leisure class while two percent of people were feeding slop to animals. We ended up creating new kinds of employment, and we used that productivity actually to enhance the quality and the quantity of food. Why should it be different in this era of cognitive enhancement? Uber and Lyft are telling us that things we used to think of as being in the purely digital realm, in the realm of media, whatever, are coming to the real world. So that’s the first wake up call for society. Secondly, we’re seeing a new kind of interaction between people and algorithmic systems. Third, they represent a new kind of marketplaces based on platforms [in this case, they exist because the of the platform of smartphones—and then they can become platforms of their own, as new services, like food delivery, are added in addition to transit]. This marketplace works because people are being augmented with new cognitive superpowers. For example, because of GPS and mapping apps, Uber and Lyft drivers don’t need a lot of training.

Agreed. But when the curtain rolls back we see that those superpowers have consequences: Those algorithms have bias built in.

That’s absolutely right. But I’m optimistic because we’re having a conversation about biased algorithms. We had plenty of bias before but we couldn’t see it. We can’t see, for example, that the algorithms that manage the workers at McDonald’s or The Gap are optimized toward not giving people full-time work so they don’t have to pay benefits. All that was invisible. It wasn’t until we really started seeing the tech-infused algorithms that people started being critical.

In WTF you talk about a specific out-of-control algorithm: the capitalist impulse to maximize profits regardless of societal consequences. The way you describe is reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s scenario of an AI machine devoted to making paper clips—because that’s its sole mission, it winds up eating up all the materials in the world and even killing those who would turn it off. Corporations whose sole justification is shareholder value seem to be working on a similarly destructive algorithm.