From smart glasses invoking fears of surveillance to social media being flooded by fake news, our society increasingly bears the burden of unintended consequences of technology. While technology companies invent products at an unprecedented pace, the vast majority of consumers lack a voice in shaping these technologies to meet their current and future needs. Instead, product inventions primarily happen in large technology centers, like Silicon Valley, that are inherently biased towards the views and experiences of product designers and developers who do not reflect a broad demographic in terms of age, education levels, race, and physical abilities.

This project tackles this problem by leveraging NLP technologies and the wisdom of the crowd to collect unintended consequences that a large and diverse population of US technology users has experienced with existing products in the past and anticipates for new products in the future.