On a more serious note, there’s literally no area of human activity left untouched by technology. We are now outsourcing our cognitive capabilities and communications to information technologies.
Being an enabler, technology requires understanding, planning and often enough, development effort, or you won’t make the most of it.
Thinking you can just buy in what you imagine you’ll need and leave the nasty and complicated details to someone else to worry about is very shortsighted.
It’s also a passive approach that cuts us out of huge amounts of vast range of opportunities globally, shrinks our maker ecosystems, and is likely to be increasingly costly in the long run.
There are many important and complex conversations on technology that we should have.
For example, we’re told that artificial intelligence will change everything. This is most likely not entirely true, but there seems little official consideration as to what AI will touch and the consequences of that happening.
AI technology comes with many murky ethical issues. Like, not actually being intelligent but relying on cheap, digital serfs to help generate the merely good-enough and often plagiarised output the machines produce. However, AI’s already here so what should we do now?
Cyber security is another high-level term that arguably does more damage than good by hiding complex, unresolved issues that have aggregated over decades.
All the cyber security stuff is very real, though. It is directly affecting everyone but where is the discussion and thinking around that and policy suggestions to keep our systems, finances and privacy safe? Other countries have them.
Most days a missive about the chronic skills shortage in New Zealand arrives, omitting that we’ve failed to build a complete “pipeline” of workers. It’s actually beneficial for the IT companies to have employees go away for a while. That way they’ll pick up new skills and ideas for when they come back, and add serious value.
People might want to come back and share their knowledge and experience, but that’s the part we’re bad at. If the opportunities aren’t there, or here rather, no amount of education and training will make up for the one-way traffic of people heading to bigger economies.
This was a common story in Nepal, where techies wanted to stay and rebuild after the devastating earthquake, but couldn’t afford to say no to the money in richer neighbouring countries, with heaps more opportunities presented overseas.
When it comes to telecommunications, we now have fresh evidence that a relatively small investment done properly can reap enormous benefits for all of society. How do we take that further and ensure there are diverse, resilient nationwide networks in a destructive climate emergency?
There should be a different answer to that than a capricious billionaire running Starlink.
Technology can also mean silently importing alien cultural norms, business processes that are a bad fit for New Zealand, and even legislation, from overseas.
Local tech capability in government boils down to having a seat and a voice at the global table, instead of having decisions made for us by organisations that publish world maps without New Zealand on them.
Australia has recognised this. The Aussie cyber affairs and critical technology ambassador - no really, they have one of those - Brendon Dowling, wants a united front for our region, to help shape the global technology future by being more active.
Dowling’s call comes after the United Nations said it wanted to minimise the influence of the technical community as a stakeholder, in the future direction of the internet. It’s a thinly veiled attempt by unfriendly nation-states to seize control of the largest general-purpose network humanity has built.
It’s not the first one either if you look at what the UN’s International Telecommunications Union has been floating in the past. A small and very isolated set of islands in the South Pacific can ill afford for that to happen.
The tech sector is a hugely important cog in the economy, standalone as well as supporting and empowering other areas. More than the economy in fact, as it also communicates culture, and is part of our education and governance systems.
Curiously enough, none of that seems to pique the interest of our politicians in an election year.
