Obama’s CTO: Just do what, exactly?
dan tynan on Nov 18 2008 at 9:52 am | Filed under: Computerworld, Culture Crash, National insecurity, politics
It’s a lousy job, but somebody’s got to do it. Once we find someone who’s crazy–err, patriotic enough to take the position as our nation’s first CTO, what should he or she do?
It might possibly be the worst job in the world, outside of replacing Jerry Yang as Yahoo’s CEO. Yet people seem to be clamoring for it — or at least, clamoring to have someone famous fill it.
I’m talking of course about the brand new cabinet post of United States Chief Technology Officer. The list of names bandied about for US CTO are a Who’s Who of geekdom: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Carly Fiorina, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, Bill Joy, and, yes, Jerry Yang. (Google’s Eric Schmidt has already said, no thanks. He’s already master of the universe, so why accept a demotion?)
Other candidates are more obscure but probably more appropriate: Princeton’s Ed Felten, crytopgraphy wonk Bruce Schneier, Harvard’s Julius Genachowski, Stanford copyright king Lawrence Lessig.
So far, not a soul has nominated Larry Ellison. So maybe Americans aren’t that crazy after all….
For the rest, visit my Culture Crash blog at ComputerWorld.
(Nicely Photoshopped Obama-Kirk photo found at Trekunited.com. Live long and prosper.)
