Hey, Tech Kids! Get Off My Lawn!

- Kevin Maney

Mark Cuban is flagrantly flirting with the notion of running for president in 2020, so I asked him if a big driver of his decision might be that the nation desperately needs tech-savvy leadership. “Yes,” the entrepreneur and NBA team owner replied via email. “The current administration’s lack of understanding of technology places our country at risk for unthinkable harm.”

Yikes! And here we’ve been distracted by worries that Little Rocket Man might lob a nuke at Los Angeles and probably hit Bakersfield instead. Clearly, the techno alarm Cuban raises is something we need to unpack.

First of all, the U.S. suffers from the biggest gap in history between technology and what our nation’s leaders know about technology. Our president is 71 years old and thinks Twitter is miraculous. He doesn’t use a computer and wouldn’t know Slack from Spanx. He’s equated sophisticated hacking with his young son’s ability to crack a home computer parental control password. He’s a climate change denier and would rather save coal jobs than invest in solar energy. Basically, Donald Trump has done nothing to suggest he’ll ever embrace an innovative technology solution to a pressing global problem.

Congress isn’t much better. The average age of U.S. senators is 61.8, among the oldest in history. Of the 435 House members and 100 senators, just eight have worked as engineers, six as software executives and three as venture capitalists. None of the other pre-politics career paths would suggest a real understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) or blockchain. By this count, the Capitol has more former insurance agents (21) than former technologists (17).