mr. president what about technology what
what are you looking specifically for
technology to solve the biggest
challenges that you see in government
but I'll distinguish between government
adapting technology to do a better job
which has been a major focus of mine
since I came into office and frankly
we've just scratched the surface whether
it's encouraging people to vote or
dislodging big data so that people can
use it more easily or getting their
forms processed online more simply but
there's there's a huge amount of work to
drag the federal government and state
governments and local governments into
the 21st century it's interesting that
when I talked to friends in Silicon
Valley some of whom I've recruited them
to come into the administration I'm able
to show fairly rapidly what I've said to
them when they're on the outside the gap
between the talent in the federal
government and the private sector is
actually not wide at all they're really
smart people who work really hard here
and are passionate about what they do
the technology gap is massive it when I
when I first got here and I always
imagined like the Situation Room would
be this super cool thing and I'd be like
Tom Cruise and the Minority Report and
we'd be meddling around stuff and I'd
have all these it's not like that at all
you know the movies I think display
particularly when it comes to hunting
down terrorists on the other side of the
globe display this this omniscience that
we possess somehow and it's just not
there yet
and it's been drastically underfunded
not properly in design so there's a
whole bunch of work we have to do around
getting government to be more customer
friendly and to make it at least as easy
as ordering a pizza or you know an
airline ticket for you to be able to
file your taxes for example but I think
in terms of the broader questions around
technology I've talked about
individualized medicine and and health
and generally energy is obviously
massive I am a firm believer that if we
get climate change right if we're able
to tap the brakes and figure out how we
avoid six foot rise in the oceans that
humanity don't figure stuff out I'm
pretty optimistic if we don't get it
right I'm worried and we've done a lot
of good work but there's just an
enormous amount of work still to be done
to deploy analytical tools and computing
to crack the code around clean energy
we've made progress but we've got a long
way to go and then as I indicated before
and this is to use Joy's term a meta
problem I think figuring out the
structure of regulating connectivity in
the Internet in a way that is
accountable transparent safe allows us
to isolate and get at the bad guys but
ensures that the government does not
possess so much power
in all of our lives that becomes a tool
for oppression
you know we were still working on that
and some of those are technological
problems some of them are legal problems
and and a problem of shaping the right
architecture politically and illegally
to create mechanisms for accountability
but you know so some of it is is
actually just a tough set of technology
problems that and encryption being a
good example where you know I've met
with civil libertarians and national
security people over and over and over
again and it's actually a knotty problem
no nobody can give me a really good
answer in terms of how we reconcile some
of these issues so so I think that
there's going to be exciting times that
here's one thing I can guarantee you
there's stuff I haven't even thought of
yet and I guess since this is a
frontiers issue the last thing I should
mention is you know I'm still a big
space guy and figuring out how to move
into the next generation of space travel
is something that we're significantly
underfunding there's some good work
being done by the private sector again
because increasingly that's displaced
government funding on some of the what
the heck why not ventures crazy ideas
but you know when we think about
spaceflight we're still thinking about
basically the same chemical reactions we
were back in the Apollo flights 50 years
later it seems like we should be yeah I
don't know if you know lifting crystals
were out there but you know we should be
getting some breakthroughs on that front
[Music]