It's time to boost tech literacy

Silicon Valley luminaries are easily mocked as having a precious, narrow take on the world. People in the tech industry can’t see past themselves, critics often charge; they act as if the products they build sit at the centre of everything.

But this year, the techies were right: Technology did rule many issues in 2015. And not only did tech dominate the news, it often moved too quickly for politicians, regulators, law enforcement officials and the media to understand its implications. This year we began to see the creaking evidence of our collective ignorance about the digital age.

The sorry showing ought to spark a resolution for the new year. In 2016, let’s begin to appreciate the dominant role technology now plays in shaping the world, and let’s strive to get smarter about how we think about its effects.

“The pace of technological change has never been faster, so it’s more important for people to understand things that are harder to keep on top of,” said Julius Genachowski, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and now a partner at the Carlyle Group investment firm.

That may sound tough to do — but fortunately, it isn’t impossible.
First, to understand the problem, consider the year’s headlines. From terrorism to protests over police abuse, from the scandal at Volkswagen to global tensions over energy and the climate, technology was central to just about every major news story that came across the wire.

The news often highlighted a failure to grasp the effects of change. For instance, presidential candidates and law enforcement authorities were at a loss to explain how they might prevent terrorists from using social media to inspire attacks around the globe. When they tried to do so, they betrayed an absence of basic digital acumen — see Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton calling to shut down parts of the Internet, a policy idea many experts dismissed as unrealistic, if not impossible.

The media, meanwhile, was blindsided by the rise of movements buoyed by social media. Trump’s presidential bid, fueled as much by his mastery of Twitter and Instagram as by coverage on cable news, repeatedly foiled pundits’ predictions that he would be crushed by more established candidates. In a different vein, the movement that forced news outlets to begin covering police abuse was driven by an army of activists armed with smartphones. Even its name was a hashtag: #blacklivesmatter.

Then there were the regulators, who fared little better at understanding the implications of technology. Volkswagen’s disclosure that many of its diesel cars had been equipped with software intended to cheat on emissions tests highlighted the power of hidden code, a problem that researchers have warned about for years and one that could grow more pernicious as our household items continue to be transformed into Internet-connected minicomputers.

Officials appeared similarly surprised by the unabated rise of the ride-hailing service Uber, which hires contract workers through an app and whose business model seems poised to worm its way into other industries. Courts struggled to classify Uber’s drivers — were they employees, contractors or some novel kind of gig worker that straddles both categories?

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York was one of many officials who tried to curb Uber’s growth, only to fail in the face of the company’s well-orchestrated campaign to oppose his plan. Similarly, voters in San Francisco rejected a measure to impose limitations on Airbnb, the short-term rental service that has caused headaches for neighbors and municipal regulators.

New York’s mayor and San Francisco’s Airbnb agonists discovered a truth dawning on officials who have tried to take on new app-powered service companies: By bypassing regulations through software, these services have achieved broad popularity, and efforts to limit their effects need to take into account their loyal following.

The headlines of 2015 highlight a collective failure to anticipate the reach of technology. “What you’re seeing is an anxiety over how technology is changing things,” said Aneesh Chopra, who in 2009 was appointed by President Barack Obama as the first chief technology officer of the United States, a position he held until 2012.

But Chopra, who is now an executive vice president at the technology incubator Hunch Analytics, has an optimistic take on tech literacy. He has argued that initiatives by the White House and other parts of the federal government offer a promising example of how seemingly old-fashioned institutions can get up to speed with tech.

“At the federal level we’ve done a better job of understanding the full power, potential and limitations of technology,” he said. “A tech person who was looking at some of the initiatives would even say, ‘I get it. This is a tech-literate government.’”

Chopra is biased, having set up many of the initiatives he now points to. Still, he cited one example that suggested greater tech sophistication on the part of the government: the debate over privacy, security and encryption technologies. Since Edward J. Snowden’s revelations of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, many technology companies, including Apple and Google, have expanded their use of encryption software to safeguard users’ information.

The FBI has responded angrily to these efforts, which it says prevent authorities from searching criminals’ devices even after obtaining a court order. Officials have asked tech companies to roll back the use of encryption or to install a “back door” that would let cops search users’ devices with a court order. Technology firms have refused, citing users’ privacy and the threat of hacking.

“The reality is, if you put a back door in, that back door’s for everybody, for good guys and bad guys,” Timothy D Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an interview with “60 Minutes” Sunday.

From afar, the debate does not look very sophisticated. Members of Congress have accused tech companies of abetting terrorists and child pornographers. The tricky balance between law enforcement authority and users’ privacy has been a hot issue in the presidential debates. In the most recent Republican debate, for example, Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, suggested that if she were president, she would persuade technology companies to work with the government simply by asking them.

“I was asked as a CEO,” she said. “I complied happily. And they will as well. But they have not been asked.” But the argument made little sense. Tech companies have been asked to comply with the government on encryption, and many have refused.
Chopra said the outcome of the White House’s internal policy debates showed it was much better informed by tech expertise. The current chief technology officer, Megan Smith, is a former executive at Google. In March, the White House appointed Edward W. Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton who is an expert on computer security and encryption, as Smith’s deputy.

“There is a tech seat at the table,” Chopra said, and the expertise has led to more tech-literate policy recommendations. Notably, in the fall, after an extensive push by tech executives, the White House backed down from seeking legislation that would compel tech companies to give law enforcement a way to get into encrypted systems.

There are several other examples of efforts by the government to gain tech-industry expertise, among them improvements in health care technology. The efforts suggest that if industry experts and lawmakers or regulators work together, they can find solutions to thorny problems introduced by new technologies.

Genachowski pointed out that education and generational change would improve tech literacy. As more people who have grown up with digital devices begin to run the world, we may see governments and other institutions respond with greater nimbleness to tech changes.

But that’s a long, slow process. In the meantime, technology will keep advancing.
“The generational shift is important, but it’s also true that technology will continue to change at a pace that will make it an ongoing challenge for people in government and the private sector to keep pace,” Genachowski said. “So it’s not enough to wait for people to age into the debate — because the issues and technology and the debate will move on.”