4 ms·

I'm not asking for all of our Ministers to be technocrats. They needn't be SMEs. They needn't even be a major player in the industry prior to becoming a politic

I'm not asking for all of our Ministers to be technocrats. They needn't be SMEs. They needn't even be a major player in the industry prior to becoming a politician. But in all honesty, a Technology Minister not having a technical background is like an Education Minister being unable to read or write. I'm not asking for some IEEE fellow with 100s of patent. I'm not even asking for a junior engineer with a couple of years in the industry. Hell, I daren't even ask for someone with a Math A-Level at this point. I'm asking for someone who can string a sentence about technology together, while also understanding a 10th of what they just regurgitated. It's embarrassing watching the leader that is meant to represent our industry go on stage and repeat a babble of buzzwords that they learnt about 4 hours before, in their latest think-tank meeting. That's not leadership. That's bull-shiting, and it stinks.

vasco 4y ago
Of course more expertise is better when all else is equal, I thought the quote stood on its own to not be interpreted as asking for less expertise. Rather that the source of the problems is a disregard for people's rights and other more basic failures, than not understanding how an LLM works.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Right. But then, poverty is not the only problem a government wants to address, and Technology Ministry is arguably one that will spend most of its time addressing things other than poverty, at least directly, and this does benefit from expertise.
  - vasco 4y ago
    Everything benefits from expertise, I'm now 3 layers down repeating the same thing. The whole point is that you don't need any tech knowledge to respect the basic ratified human right of access to information. That is all you need to not enact bans on specific websites for your country. Being a good technologist is an advantage to such a position, obviously.

vasco 4y ago

Of course more expertise is better when all else is equal, I thought the quote stood on its own to not be interpreted as asking for less expertise. Rather that the source of the problems is a disregard for people's rights and other more basic failures, than not understanding how an LLM works.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Right. But then, poverty is not the only problem a government wants to address, and Technology Ministry is arguably one that will spend most of its time addressing things other than poverty, at least directly, and this does benefit from expertise.
- vasco 4y ago
  Everything benefits from expertise, I'm now 3 layers down repeating the same thing. The whole point is that you don't need any tech knowledge to respect the basic ratified human right of access to information. That is all you need to not enact bans on specific websites for your country. Being a good technologist is an advantage to such a position, obviously.