There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

Edited to add: all of science is beyond the comprehension of one person, but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore.

I think the shock experienced in these kind of hearings has more to do with leaders and law makers being hopelessly out of touch with common technologies that are used by most people every day; it’s akin to them puzzling over how to operate a flushing toilet. They don’t need to interact with the world as other citizens do, because they have layers of abstraction shielding them from it. Not a good thing.

The example of the B-2 Spirit is such a strange one, given the complete absence of civilian oversight to the programme. It was essentially built for military experts by engineering experts.

Non-experts are expected to provide oversight in highly technical issues, but they should be working closely with advisors who have cutting edge domain knowledge and can translate that into policy implications. The leaders and law makers do not need specialist knowledge, but they -do need to be on top of their brief as it relates to society and the laws that govern it. A person of reasonable intelligence can provide essential oversight to a machine like Google, even if they could not construct such a machine themselves. Nobody can even create a human being themselves from scratch, but that’s not an excuse for being a bumbling lawmaker.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp...

Not the worst mistake from OP.

When preparing notes for a congressional hearing, you’d hope they carefully triple check everything. Not just by re-reading, either, but also by cross-referencing with other documents and asking others to proof-read.

I don’t expect a commenter on any forum to do more than a cursory re-read for spelling errors.

1) the author conflates tech basic literacy and preparation on the specific topic by the congress members and marks them as “being a tech expert”. Nobody asks them to know the ins and outs of the companies they’re scrutinizing, but just to be prepared about the matter that’s being discussed and to show some minimal tech literacy.

2) the author proceeds to switch to a different meaning of “expert” with a falsely modest tirade about he himself not being an expert. Sure you are, by all common meanings of “expert”, as you immodestly point out namedropping all your publications and collaborations.

3) after all this, the author settles for a meaning of expert that makes absolutely no sense: an all-knowing being that, thanks to some genius-like trait, is able to see everything from the outside and know the very specifics of everything they run.

Once he sets this new meaning nobody has ever agreed on, he proceeds to point out no such person exists. Maybe it could exist, but such a CEO-savant would be anti-economical to any company, a horrible stickler with a micromanaging obsession, that would spend time about knowing every new detail of his company (just check the amount of patents these companies file every year) instead of focusing on the vision and the long term.

The piece also completely disregards the fact that humanity has evolved to the point where we are right now exactly because humans are very good at building unsupervised complex system that don’t rely on the knowledge of the individual to function. We, as societies, are fundamentally primed to do that. Our social systems are exactly that. Now, Silicon based technology has brought us another step forward in this, and we feel lost as we fail to grasp the enhanced complexity of what underlies out lives. I don’t see it as something new, and humans will evolve to adapt to this new layer of technology.

What I just read is a piece that tries to bend the meaning of “expert” to prove the point that nobody knows what tech is doing, as if big tech was just perpetuating itself as a sentient being. It’s a very slippery slope, that could be used to justify the people that physically drive the decisions of these companies. Decisions that are strategical, political, and above all taken by humans, not machines, who are well aware how to drive complex and multifaceted organizations to maximize profit and return to their investors.