Tech was a big loser in this election cycle

There will be plenty of post-mortems from this highly unusual election season. As a technologist, we should face up to fact we did not do well in this election cycle

• Neither campaign really talked about science and tech futures and next-gen opportunities for the country. Even though folks like Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban were visible in the campaigns, in the debates and countless other appearances the candidates did not talk with much pride about our STEM capabilities
• One of the biggest fears in the workforce is that automation will lead to massive job losses. If you read my book Silicon Collar or an abridged version here, the fear is irrational. But neither candidate addressed the issue.
• The Wikileaks and other security breaches were embarrassing and reduced faith in our IT folks.
• Lost in the politics was the fact that the State Dept IT should have made it easier for their chief executive to get email on her fingertips, not have her implement her own solution. Too many CIOs have outdated email infrastructure and more and more of us turn to “rogue” solutions like Gmail and communicating via social and mobile apps 
• The massive miss of the pollsters will make people wonder if Big Data and other analytics have been over hyped

Let’s learn from this. We need to put our best foot forward and we need to get much more actively involved in making sure STEM topics get the policy attention they deserve.