Twenty Years of Conversations: Reflections on Technology and Society
By Roberto V. Zicari, Editor, ODBMS.org
“Because ultimately, what these twenty years of dialogue have taught me is that technology is never just about the technology. It’s about us, and the world we choose to build together.”
When I launched ODBMS.org in 2005, the technology landscape looked remarkably different. Object databases were the conversation. SQL versus NoSQL was a heated debate. The cloud was still a meteorological term for most developers. Twenty years and hundreds of interviews later, what strikes me most isn’t just how much technology has changed, but how profoundly it has reshaped the questions we ask.
In those early years, our conversations centered on technical elegance—data models, query optimization, transactional consistency. We debated whether object-relational mapping would bridge two worlds or create new complexities. These were important questions, but they were questions about technology itself.
Today’s conversations reveal a different world. When I interview leaders now, we discuss trust frameworks for AI in clinical care, the societal implications of real-time data streams that move billions of dollars in milliseconds, the responsibility that comes with systems that make life-or-death healthcare decisions. The technology hasn’t just gotten faster or more powerful—it has become deeply embedded in the fabric of human decision-making.
This evolution reflects something fundamental: we’ve moved from asking “Can we build this?” to asking “Should we build this?” and “What happens when we do?” The practitioners I’ve spoken with over two decades—from Vinton Cerf discussing internet governance to recent conversations about AI ethics and trustworthy systems—increasingly grapple with questions that transcend engineering.
The patterns that emerge from twenty years of dialogue are striking. First, the acceleration is real and relentless. A database professional from 2004 measuring latency in hundreds of milliseconds would be stunned by today’s nanosecond-level systems. But speed alone tells an incomplete story. What matters more is the expanding scope of impact. Systems that once managed business transactions now influence medical treatments, shape financial markets, and mediate human knowledge.
Second, every technological breakthrough creates new responsibilities. The Big Data revolution promised insights; it delivered privacy challenges. Cloud computing promised accessibility; it raised questions about data sovereignty. Generative AI promises creativity; it demands frameworks for attribution, bias, and trust. Each wave of innovation brings not just solutions but new ethical territories to navigate.
Third, the gap between possibility and wisdom persists. We can build systems of remarkable sophistication, yet we struggle with governance, interpretability, and equitable access. The technical challenges we once obsessed over—scalability, performance, reliability—now seem almost quaint compared to the societal challenges of ensuring technology serves humanity rather than destabilizing it.
Perhaps most significantly, I’ve watched the democratization of technology amplify both its potential and its risks. Open source movements have accelerated innovation beyond what any single corporation could achieve. Yet this same openness means that powerful capabilities spread faster than our collective wisdom about their use.
Looking back through twenty years of expert articles and interviews, I see an arc from technical optimism to responsible pragmatism. The pioneers I spoke with in 2005 were building the future with enthusiasm and relatively few constraints. Today’s innovators build with one eye on capability and another on consequence. They think not just about systems that work, but about systems that work for society.
The database and data management community has always been at the intersection of possibility and reality. We store, structure, and serve the information that powers decisions. Now, as that information flows through AI systems and influences outcomes at unprecedented scale, our responsibility extends beyond technical excellence to social awareness.
As ODBMS.org enters its third decade, we are more committed than ever to addressing these pressing issues head-on. The portal has evolved to tackle the urgent questions emerging from the generative AI era—questions about trustworthy AI systems, responsible deployment, bias and fairness, data provenance, and the governance frameworks needed for AI in critical domains like healthcare and finance. Our conversations now explore not just how these systems work, but how we ensure they work ethically and equitably.
The core mission remains: to create a space where practitioners, researchers, and leaders can share not just their technical insights, but their wisdom about building technology that serves human flourishing. In this new era of generative AI, that mission has never been more vital. Because ultimately, what these twenty years of dialogue have taught me is that technology is never just about the technology. It’s about us, and the world we choose to build together.
