Wild West Tech photo series holds a mirror up to Silicon Valley
Technology
Wild West Tech photo series holds a mirror up to Silicon Valley
(AFP) - Laura Morton started to think about her photo project around 2012, when the discussion was ripe over Google, Facebook and other big tech companies taking over San Francisco.
"I see my project as documenting a historic moment that I think is a combination of the gold rush with the summer of love," Morton recently told RFI at France's Visa pour l'image festival.
"San Francisco as a city became really a city in the gold rush."
Cal Hacks 2.0, a 36-hour hackathon inside a football stadium, with 2,071 participants from 143 schools and 10 countries. At hackathons, usually lasting a few days, programmers and software/hardware developers collaborate on a project, often competing for prizes.
Hackathons are an important part of the technology industry ecosystem. University of California, Berkeley, California, October 2015.
The 39-year-old photographer says it's important to understand the people behind technology "because who they are as a person influences the technology they build".
After nine years of reporting on early-stage startups, Morton now documents people building artificial intelligence (AI). She's noticed a change.
"The people working on AI now are a lot more interested in how it's going to affect humanity," she says.
"AI by definition is trying to teach a computer how to act like a human, so the people involved in that are really interested in humanity as a whole."
Morton won the 2022 Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Award and has received support from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund.
