Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A common malady of persons in government is to predict the future of commercial computing. No one seems to learn the folly of this practice.

Recently, the Administration announced a few things about the future of computers in education. There is a five-year plan from someone about how they are going to put digital textbooks in the hands of students.

First, predicting that some students in America will use some digital textbooks in five years is like predicting that the sun will rise somewhere in America in the next five years. It is so certain that it contains no news.

Second, predicting the future of commercial computing seems to be a common malady among government employees.

When I was in government, I worked with one person who annually predicted the future of commercial computing. He would stand in front of a group of managers and brief them for an hour on where computing would be a year hence. He would then use his certain predictions to guide what we should purchase.

There was one fault with his briefing:

His predictions were wrong every year.

No one else seemed to notice his perfect record. Maybe everyone noticed, but no one wanted to say anything contrarian. They just nodded and tried to ignore him. They did, however, sign the approvals that allowed him to waste millions of dollars on computers. Every year he would go in a different direction and replace all the computers he bought the previous year.

Sometimes someone would ask me what I thought would happen in the next year with computers. My reply:

If I new what would happen in a year with computers, I wouldn’t tell you. I would quit this government job and make a million dollars in the stock market.

The government’s five-year plan for digital education is just plain silly. The Secretary of Education is wasting his time (paid for by tax payers). The wikipedia article about the Secretary indicates that he has never taught school. That seems odd, but this is after all government.