Can I be your Minister of Technology? I'd be nice to have someone in the spot with some experience and understanding of how tech actually works. One of my duties would be to sit in the back of the House or Senate, with an airhorn, while they are in session. Anytime someone says something blatantly technologically moronic - oh, like, for example, that they are going to "eliminate porn on the internet" - I'd blow the airhorn to let everyone in the room know that the right honorable speaker is lying and incompetent. This is a service I will be proud to provide.
Absolutely. Though I hope you don't mind my saying that we might need to break up the position into multiple roles. These days, technology is a huge umbrella term and it affects every area of our lives, from national security to the economy to human rights. I think that in order to properly address the variety of ways it affects all of us, we might need more than one person to look after the issue.
Absolutely. Cyber security, power, telecommunications, international relations, and the Office of Technology Commercialization (previously a NASA department) will all be separate organizations reporting to the MoT. There will also be an internal government outreach organization that will aggressively move to modernize government systems and bring them up to snuff with current platforms and trends. Oh. And data visualization with Tableau will be a required course in Junior High School! Need to make sure the next generation is exquisitely data literate.
Yep. I used to help them out when I was at NASA. It was called a variety of names, but basically the department was responsible for taking all the taxpayer-funded science that NASA had come up with, and finding companies who could turn that science into commercial products. In practice it didn't work so well. It should have been eBay for NASA ideas... but at that point in time, eBay hadn't been invented yet. So technology kinda got funneled out to a few companies that had personal connections within the team, and then many of those companies failed to execute on creating legitimate commercial products from the NASA tech. A lot of those ideas floundered due to lack of accountability and follow through. But nowadays, I'd love to see a modern version of this. A place where NASA scientists could publish their work and findings, and then companies could pitch product ideas, and NASA could trumpet how taxpayer money went to create jobs and new products for the market... that'd be so cool! I have no idea how that department is doing today, or if it even still exists. Oh wait! Google! Lookee here... the department still exists, and now has a much better name and portal!