<https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/07/> The first of two episodes of Secrets of Silicon Valley (BBC2, Sunday) was a sobering look at how tech is going to change society quickly and dramatically. The presenter, technology writer Jamie Bartlett, with his scruffy beard and manbun, seems comfortingly analogue compared with the hoodied inventors and venture capitalists he meets. One tells him that anyone who questions the wisdom of where we are heading is “anti-progress”, and finishes with a long and chilling stare. It wasn’t all dystopia. Bartlett visited a Silicon Valley mansion, where young engineers mostly had idealistic visions – one was inventing a way to reverse climate change, another was coming up with a plant-based burger. They tell themselves what all Silicon Valley inhabitants do – that making the world better, and making billions of dollars in the process, are not mutually exclusive. Airbnb executives claim to be connecting people across the world and helping people earn money to pay the rent; the effect is to push up housing costs for locals in cities such as Barcelona. A man from Uber says something vague about how the app is changing the way we use cars to save the world. But the programme shows how it has affected the livelihoods of taxi drivers, and worse, it claimed that, in Hyderabad in India, three Uber drivers have killed themselves. Bartlett does an emotional interview with the widow of one of them ....