Computer literacy of public servants

So, I enter a government office. As usual, the line was very long. The officer was very slow in processing documents of people. I go out of my line just to see what was wrong, lo and behold, he was having diffculty using the software program of his computer.

Is the government fully computerized? Nah! Go to a precinct and you will see the old fashion typewriters clicking away. It’s not funny at all. It is sad and in this day and age, it is a crime not to have your office computerized. Computerization brings efficiency to the workplace. It helps get things done in half the time. It eliminates ‘corrupt’ practices.

Many government offices have installed computers and expensive programmes in their offices without properly training the staff. Many offices don’t even have a tech-person to attend to daily computer glitches that may happen. So, when something goes wrong, the whole operations stop and offices/ sections are closed for the day. Sanamagan!

Recently, Japan’s minister who heads the government’s cybersecurity Yoshitaka Sakurada publicly disclosed during a parliamentary session that he does not use devices and has no knowledge on the use of computers. This obviously got a flak from the people including the Japanese Prime Minister. How can one function efficiciently without being computer literate?

What is the truth about how much computer technology and computational competence has been used by every government employee (elected and appointed) in the service of the Filipino people?

My good friend Benny Gonzales, A.K.A. Mr. energy, a SALN expert and retired international financial analyst said, “In this age of IoT, AI, and ML (these were deliberately spelled as acronyms as a test of familiarity), it is disturbing that government officials and the bureaucracy which makes all the decisions are practically computer ignoramuses except for their elementary nodding acquaintances with their emails and social media accounts.”

As the complexity and competitiveness of the world are pushed to extremes in order to get ahead, our national problems are still being addressed through scribblings on the back of envelopes. To hope that the best and most profitable and/or equitable decisions will ever have a wing or a prayer for the people to rely on is nothing but a wishful dream as long as decisions at the top are solely driven by threatening rhetoric rather than by facts, numbers and optimizations.

Such is the sad state of affairs of the 110 million Filipinos being “served” by 1.5 million elected politicians, their appointees and government employees whose decision making abilities are personal, non-computer aided, not data driven and therefore invariably flawed from the point of view of the people’s interest and benefit. If the nation is to be true to itself and call a spade a spade, it must admit that righteous governance today requires using big data and financial analytics – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. Otherwise, the blind will continue leading the blind ad nauseam at all levels of governance.

The old excuse turned mentality of relying on an army of assistants who will do the work for the boss is no longer valid because to begin with, the functionary giving the order is clueless of how to judge competence in an area where he does not know enough to make a valid decision. He is forever in danger of hiring someone who only knows how to extrapolate and mistake this for calculus because he does not know any better himself.

The new employee assumed expert is now the one-eyed king in the kingdom of the blind. Entirely unvetted by any external community of knowledgeable persons; his instant tutors are suppliers and their consultants with their own vested interests that are never completely aligned with the interest of the public. As this initial recruitment blunder is committed over and over again throughout the entire bureaucracy, all these employees will do is to fake it till they make it, weighing everything down until they are discovered and fired – but by whom?

Gonzales added, “We have the following in the trillions of pesos: corruption, the annual national budget, the Train laws and the build, build, build program which are being orchestrated and decided by Facebook user-type computer competence at the most. In reality, with more than a hundred million lives and multi-trillions at stake, we should already be using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the underlying algorithms and financial modeling for all our needs.

The irony of the situation is that when we do not use these to our advantage, they are actually being used against us. In the past it used to be that you had to be a bit nerdy if you were into computers. Now it is the new imperative. Compute or die!

An interesting survey which can be done is one of computer illiteracy among politicians and their appointees since 1981. It’s 2018 and they are still faking if not totally ignoring this technology.

I am sure that you have heard from your parents or grandparents that once upon a time, we were second only to Japan in terms of economic development. Now we are the cellar dwellers in Asia and are currently being beaten by many, many countries in Africa. Anyone who says otherwise does not know his numbers. Since 1981 to the present, we have been trying economic development pinoy-style – without the computational power of the computer. That is close to 40 years wasted”!

By the way, Facebook is gearing up its “elections war room” for the midterm polls in the Philippines. According to Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global head of policy management, the team they created to address the possible misuse and abuse of the social media platform at the recently held elections in Brazil and the United States is also preparing for the May 2019 elections in the Philippines.

Bickert said that among the election-related issues they encounter are the so-called coordinated inauthentic behavior which involves networks of actors that are using fake accounts to misrepresent their identity and mislead users to share and visit websites with low quality content. Last month, Facebook took down 95 pages and 39 accounts with political and entertainment content in the country “for encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads.”

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Yesterday was the 90th birth anniversary of former Vice-President Doy Laurel. When he died in 2004, my late father Maximo V. Soliven wrote a piece on him entitled, A Fond Farewell to Doy - He fought the good fight and dreamed the ‘impossible dream:

“Doy was not perfect. He made enemies and mistakes. Yet in his case, Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony will be proven wrong. In his tribute to the murdered Julius Caesar, committed grudgingly to memory by every reluctant schoolboy of our time, Rome’s Mark Anthony grieves: “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interrèd with their bones.”

Not so with Doy. The good he did will be remembered – at last.

 We honor him today for what he accomplished, for his self-sacrifice, his idealism – and his lost hopes. For, like his friend Ninoy Aquino, Doy dreamed the “Impossible Dream.” I can still remember him vividly, singing that song a capella in his unusually rich baritone, with fervor, accompanied by his own accomplished children. His faithful and tireless helpmeet was his beautiful wife, Celia Diaz-Laurel. Doy fought “the unbeatable foe.” He was handsome, dynamic and brave…Ave atque vale, Doy: Our hearts and our prayers go with you.”

(Watch…Doy! A Night of Love, a musicale tribute for his 90th birthday tonight at the Maybank Theater)