Imagine a world in which all politicians were computer scientists. What a dreary dystopia that would be. It’s hard to think of anything worse than a nation ruled by people with PhDs in machine learning.
That said, politicians do need to know something about the digital world. It’s no longer good enough for our elected representatives to feign technical illiteracy, throw up their arms in defeat, and ask the office twenty-something to fix it. Every professional thinks politicians are clueless about their particular area of expertise – doctors complain that MPs are medically illiterate, teachers moan that they don’t get pedagogy and so on. But a special case can be made for upping the digital literacy of our elected, because unlike the many, many subjects about which our politicians know little, digital technology increasingly concerns foundational questions of accountability, fairness, and abuse of power. And to answer these questions today increasingly requires some degree of technological know-how.
Later today, the DCMS committee, led by the increasingly impressive Damian Collins, will be grilling Facebook’s Chief Technical Office over the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in