About Me

Hi, my name is Olivia Huang and I am a recent graduate of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study (Class of 2022). I received a BA Individualized, Interdisciplinary Major in Software Engineering and the Future of Technology.

Software Engineering and The Future of Technology:
The Sociocultural Politics of Innovation

I created my own interdisciplinary major at Gallatin because I did not think the traditional Computer Science education track incorporated enough emphasis on the humanities to empower socially-aware, foresightful, and ethical developers. My Gallatin concentration is centric to the discipline of Computer Science and explores the trajectory of technological innovation while considering how the political economy and narratives of media motivate and manipulate societal behavior and incentives. Gallatin has instilled a commitment in me to orient the future towards a more just and equal agenda.

The humanities give incentive to innovation and guide our decisions by revealing what we value and disvalue, as human beings. Are we losing meaning in humanity to the lack of oversight and responsibility in technological evolution?

Developers should be mindful of ethical implications that may posed by malpractice within the accelerating trajectory of technology, especially pertaining to:

In Gallatin, we work closely with faculty to evolve our Plan of Study every semester, and must defend our Concentration and Rationale to a panel of advisors as a requisite to graduate. Here is what (a condensed version of) my rationale looked like:

I don’t think it’s possible to grasp any singular discipline in totality without navigating & unpacking the origins of capitalism (more specifically, neoliberalism), policy, and media, because these entities are essentially the origin of incentive behind everything (as in, motivations, decisions, and schools of thought), pertaining to the individual and also corporations... This highlights the spirit of NYU Gallatin’s interdisciplinary scholarly endeavors. While my concentration is centric to decisions made in Software Engineering & considering the best practices of developing future technologies to empower the collective, it would be irresponsible and inappropriate to even begin conceptualizing and addressing this without understanding how economic structures and media motivate & manipulate behavior and incentives. Capitalism and media are closely tied, and thus come to exhibit how they grapple with architectures of power and influence (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). Under the capitalist mode of production, development is incentivized by what is good for the market, but this will naturally come at the cost of what is good for humanity and what is good for the planet. I believe that being aware of dynamics in the political economy is necessary contextual background needed to make informed decisions in software engineering, because decisions are political and if not carefully thought out, can lead to unprecedented issues. Although surveillance capitalism and capitalism are two separate entities, they are entities that have become autonomous in nature, developing for themselves, because the production of commodities is no longer aimed at the satisfaction of human necessities and is geared toward endless accumulation of wealth and profit (Debord, 1967).

These systemic structures have directly & indirectly manifested issues such as surveillance capitalism, alienation in society, fabricated desires, and many more. Combined with the trajectory of technological evolution, the two together pose an imminent threat of an Orwellian and megalomaniacal future, with technological developments in biotechnology, genetic engineering, AI prediction bias, and algorithmic behavioral manipulation, just to name a few (Harari, 2015). The methodologies and practices in which we implement and use technology wields the power to both exacerbate inequality, or empower the collective, which is what my concentration specializes in understanding. However, not all hope is lost, as advancements making a bid for the democratization and decentralization of technology such as blockchain and Web3.0 empower a narrative to restore power & agency to the individual. How can technology and humans work together to decolonize inequality and mend the fractured aspects of humanity? My concentration explores this.

Works I have included consider and hypothesize courses of action bisected into both contemporary contexts and futurist contexts. For instance, in Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari makes a bid for Dataism, or the techno-religion that upholds the free-flow of information, and hypothesizes how algorithms could potentially govern society better than human knowledge and wisdom. However, in order for Dataism to succeed, it comes at the stipulation that innovation is no longer motivated by capital and economic growth, but more-so by what will likely be humanist pursuits of health, happiness, and power, during its initial agenda. Yet, while Harari outlines a great framework for developers to be aware of, pertaining to what the future might look like, this society does not exist yet and we must still be cognizant on how to address the issues of the contemporary world. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff addresses issues and solutions pertaining to the current climate of technology, politics, and society. My concentration entertains both modern and futurist narratives speculating how technology and humans can coexist and thrive in epochs of great uncertainty, while empowering the people and minimizing inequality.

A complete list of works I incorporated into my concentration can be found here:
While these works are all at a high caliber of importance, the asterisks (*) indicate texts that I found to be especially profound

4 works from the Humanities:

  1. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949
  2. * Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, 1988
  3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, 1974
  4. Out of the Ivy and into the Arctic: Imitation Coral Reconstruction in Cross-Cultural Contexts, Donna Bilak, 2020
4 works from the Social and/or Natural Sciences:
  1. * The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967
  2. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revised, Andrew Feenberg, 2002
  3. Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach, 2018
  4. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Author(s): Langdon Winner Source: Daedalus, Winter, 1980, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136 Published by: The MIT Press
7 works from Premodern/Early modern periods:
  1. ​​De Anima (On the Soul) Aristotle, 350 B.C.E
  2. The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, 350 B.C.E.
  3. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant, 1785
  4. Mencius, Mencius, ~300 B.C.E.
  5. The Analects, Confucius, ~300 B.C.E.
  6. De Officiis (On Duties), Cicero, 44 B.C.E.
  7. The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1872
5 works that point specifically to concerns in concentration:
  1. *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018
  2. *Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, 2015
  3. You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier, 2010
  4. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle, 2011
  5. The Social Dilemma, Jeff Orlowski, 2020
  6. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil, 2005

Past internships I have contributed to in the past include:

  1. Edgi Learning – an EdTech platform empowering the youth to reclaim their futures by learning about issues that matter most
  2. Everydaze – an iOS application that incentivizes people to practice daily gratitude. It is currently on TestFlight and still in development.

Outside of software engineering, I like to spend my time playing volleyball, practicing Usui Reiki, and doing anything that involves being outside. I feel my best when I am around my friends :)

I am currently with Wilhelmina Models, based in NYC. Here is a link to my portfolio.

Find more of me and...

Thanks for visiting my page.