I have myself worked for a big pharmaceutical, as well as a big semiconductor company, but these days, I prefer consulting for startups or working on my own things.
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I believe that there are structural problems in the pharmaceutical industry. Both in drug development as well as medical device development, the regulations run far behind where the technology and best known methods for development. For instance the General Principles of Software Validation looks like something that would have been advised in the 1960s, and would largely have been displaced by what many refer to as Agile development (which by itself is perhaps a couple of decades old). The FDA's interpretation of "Agile" often feels like the worst of both worlds (the slowness of phase-gate, combined with each iteration being as incomplete as they often are in early sprints of an Agile process with a new team).
In addition, incentives in the industry doesn't necessarily reward the most successful treatments with success and longevity. More complex, non-drug treatments are more complicated to explain by salespeople, and have lower margins, so having a small molecule based pill as a treatment tends to become the defacto treatment for many diseases.
There are constant mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures in the industry, making it seem like the modus operandi for moving the share price of a pharmaceutical, rather than making treatments people need as being the main means of increasing value.
All these huge inefficiencies lead to large costs, high failure rates, and long times to market. To attempt to compensate for this, many firms in the industry ends up doing things that are shady like doing weird things with their patents, charging exorbitant prices, and lobbying for regulations to favor the big firms.
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Tech definitely has a problem with privacy. TBH, I never trusted Facebook. A motto of "move fast and break things" doesn't jive well with people concerned about stakeholders affected by what is being built. Google'd privacy approach seemed better in the past, but it is difficult to see that they are still following their old "Don't be Evil" motto.
Tech, whether we like it or not is where we are in terms of "ages". Once the industrial revolution happened, the percentage of farmers around were significantly reduced. This caused a lot consternation due to the societal upheaval that it brought. A lot of the early industry was very problematic-unsafe working conditions, abusing human beings in service of machines, etc. Eventually things did get better, even though the problems associated with factory work continue to exist. The industrial revolution co-existed with a jump in literacy, however, and the way people think was forever changed.
Some people really don't think the information age should be considered a different age, but should instead just be considered an extension of the industrial revolution. But I think as more and more time goes on, there will be fewer and fewer traditional industrial jobs (just like the number of farmers as a percentage of people became a lot less), and most people will need to know how to use digital systems (computers in particular) for their work as a default. There are even some people thinking that we've
moved on from the information age already, though that is not broadly accepted.
With all that said, we won't even be able to imagine right now how different the world will be 30 years from now. AI is making progress at impressive (even disconcerting) rates delivering on promises over and over again. In addition, the internet of things and decentralized distributed ledger technologies are gaining more traction. Automation is something on every business owner's mind, and it is only a matter of time before unskilled human labor becomes a rare thing. Quantum Sensing, Computing, and Networking are all also looking inevitable (though it is very difficult to predict the time to prevalence).
So tech is probably the biggest source of upheaval in peoples lives. In fact, "disruption" is an actual goal for many tech start-ups. I am not sure what to make of it. I have always thought of myself as an inventor/innovator, and I embraced the "creative-destruction" aspects of this. However, as I've gotten older and consider the people affected by the destructive aspects of innovation, I do wonder if there are ways to ease the blows before the creative parts of the process come to fruition.
I have no answers here. It is naive to think we can stop innovation. If I don't innovate, someone else will. This is the reality we live in and will live in for the foreseeable future.
Big Tech, as a sector, is just going to get bigger. Curbing it as a sector would be similar to us talking about curbing "Big Factory" or "Big Manufacturing" at the start of the industrial revolution. How Big Tech will be curbed, ultimately, is to have Big ______, whatever ______ is to come after tech.
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As for the political influences of Big _____. Transparency is the most important thing. That means for the public to be able to trace the donations of corporations to politicians. I would prefer it to be traceable to the dollar. Then we can see explicitly how much influence there is on every politician from every corporation.
