Let me start by saying, I am no spring chicken, however, I am at that in-between age where I am neither young nor am I old. So, being in the middle, I get to observe both sides. I have friends who are young and friends who are older.
And what I have come to observe is that as we age, we tend to stick with what we know. I'm not sure if it is out of comfort, or just pure laziness. We just do and there is no bigger area that we do this than with tech. And yes, you young people will do it, too. Unless you are just one of those rare people like John McAfee who keeps up with tech. I swore I wouldn't lose touch with all things 'in' and sure enough, I did.
When I first heard of bitcoin back in 2010, I was interested, but as I investigated it, I quickly got overwhelmed and stopped researching it. Of course, now, I am kicking myself.
So this leads me to my title; WHY WE NEED MORE YOUNG PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT
The other day, I asked some friends, why isn't our government talking about automation and all the jobs we are about to lose and the need to overt a Great Depression 2.0. No one really had an answer and no one really cared because they haven't followed the issue like I have. They're my age! Go figure.
I am deeply concerned that we are going to be unprepared for what's coming because we have leaders that are clueless about technology and how fast it is going to change our world.
The Harvard Business Review published an article titled: Why Trump Never Tweets About Automation, and it was basically saying, it's because he doesn't understand it. Here's the link: https://hbr.org/2017/01/why-trump-doesnt-tweet-about-automation
Our Congress is made up of old men and a few older women, and Politico wrote a great piece about our aging government:
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/27/aging-government-workforce-analysis-000525
Most in our government are career politicians who don't plan on leaving anytime soon. But, the issue I have with them is not their age, it's their lack of tech knowledge and that many of them are out of touch with real America. The get up, grab your coffee, get to work America. It's rumored that the majority of congress is scared to operate a smart phone. Yikes. Maybe that's why they've ignored regulating bitcoin for so long. They just couldn't wrap their heads around it and thought it would go away.
I believe they aren't planning for what's coming because they don't understand what it is that's coming. They think if they cut taxes and create more service jobs were all good, however, service jobs, most of them will be obsolete in twenty years. Manufacturing jobs, gone, clerical jobs, gone, retail jobs, gone....AI, automation, tech, it's going to blow us away with its abilities.
We can't solve our problems with old archaic thinking. It might have worked a hundred years or even fifty years ago, but not now.
This is why we need leaders who understand this and can take action to research, consider a universal basic income, retrain the workforce and prepare us for the future.
I say, term limits are needed, the career politicians need to go, and we need to elect new younger faces in our government who understand the plight of everyday Americans and what is about to come.
Ideal candidates should be a mixture of young and old, male and female, more minorities, poor and rich and all knowledgeable on moving us forward into the new age of tech. Instead of this all white, old man dominated government.