The chief
technology officer of the United States and former Google executive
talks with Susan Dominus about why more techies should consider
Washington — in spite of the BlackBerrys.
Now
that you work at the White House, approximately how many times a day do
you find yourself thinking, God, we did this so much better at Google?
Maybe not Google, but corporate America in general. Sometimes it’s
frustrating, because of the I.T. stuff that needs upgrading — the
president is really pushing hard for that to be done.
Have you come across anything particularly retrograde?
My son saw me with my BlackBerry, and he was like, “Hi, ’90s mom.”
Also, I had this big, thick laptop, and my other son, who was born in
2005, was like, “What is that?” He’d never seen such a big one.
But you’re not in I.T. Your focus is national technology policy. What are you doing with that?
We’re working with talented regulators, figuring out how to help
innovators have a space in which to prototype and plan — what we call
“sandboxing” — while we’re still protecting the American people.
“Talented regulators” — was that a phrase you ever would have used before you started working in government?
They are talented. I love how entrepreneurial people are here. I
actually think that working in the federal government, or state or
local, is one of the most significant things that a technical person can
do.
Which is not something you often hear people in Silicon Valley say.
But so many kids at the top schools apply for Teach for America. I’d
like to talk to those young people and say: Consider government. It’s
real service, and you can affect hundreds of millions of people. And if
you’re working for U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department, you can affect
billions of people.
To which they would say: But it’s laborious and driven by politics, hierarchy and hidebound loyalties. If you come, you can bring your own methods. The American government will be whatever we all make of it.
Your office is also working to make large sets of government data public. What’s the hope there?
Scientists and universities and the general public can do extraordinary
things with it. It could be weather or climate data; it might be data
from the Department of the Interior or NASA or water data. Whole
industries are being built from things that taxpayers have helped the
government know.
What might someone do with water data?
Anything from local citizen-science work to statewide planning work to —
who knows what someone could think of. I’m trying to think of
something.
When
it comes to women in technology, there are probably two household names
— Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. Did a desire to be a role model
for women drive your choice to come here? The more people we
can attract to science and technology — men, women, everybody — the more
economic opportunity we have as a nation.
But how can the tech industry provide economic opportunities when so many of its products threaten to eliminate jobs?
The key thing is helping young people stay at the table in STEM longer.
There’s going to be 1.4 million tech and I.T. jobs coming within the
next decade and only 400,000 trained people to fill them. So why are
more people not training for it? I think it has to do with culture and
feeling that it is daunting — that’s not for me.
How did you get onboard early with science and engineering?
I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our
teachers believed in hands-on active learning — there was a mandatory
science fair, which was critical. We just had to do this stuff.
As
a grad student in the ’80s, you helped build a solar car, and today all
we have are iPhones that we use mostly for playing Candy Crush. Do you
feel as if tech has lost its way? It’s going both ways — look at Tesla and look at where the mainstream car companies are going.
But it’s taking a long time. Technology always takes longer than you think, but it comes.
