Festival of Politics

And what better venue than our Parliament. Great to be wandering around inside the building, to attend sessions in some of the same meeting rooms that our politicians meet in. Two sessions today - The Robots Are Coming! and Is Your Phone Toxic? The first was chaired by Jackie Baillie MSP and she on the one hand said that she had been trying to get the 'Scottish Government' to arrange some sessions about technology for MSPs since she was elected but then said politicians weren't the right people to intervene in technology they didn't know about. This seems to be part of the problem - politicians have decided or been persuaded to leave the technology sector to the experts and the market and as a result have been blindsided by what is possible and the effect it has on us all. What if instead they brought an ethical dimension to it all - their job in my opinion and it was up to the technology experts to explain how their products can behave the way we want them to and if they can't or more likely won't then legislation kicks in. All part of a widening of the scope of the session from 'robots' to computers, applications and artificial intelligence. On the panel there was also an academic, someone from Wired magazine and a 'young person', in decreasing levels of interest. The young person in particular seemed keen to use all the buzz words and phrases that would ensure he got onto more panels rather than anything really insightful, but I guess it is partly about giving people the opportunity to practise. In the attention economy should they be practising on my time though? The second was chaired by someone who presents a TV channel on the Parliament and he came across as slicker but less interesting. This time the academic was less insightful than the ex-Google employee turned academic although he didn't get any tough questioning about his own ethics in presumably trousering wads of cash for working for Google. The young person this time seemed more nervous as well as suffering from a cold but did come up with a few more interesting comments. Including one that I thought was particularly good about the way we look at IT as a way to make lots of money and therefore is it any surprise when the people that work in the field are people who just want to make money. What if IT was seen as a way to make people's lives better? Still, despite the minor gripes I think it was a great event to be a part of and something that reflects a more open political world.