Son, I like your ideas for an extracurricular school project. Since your high school is right outside of Washington DC and since you have a “Washington Program” that takes you into DC every Wednesday, you are in a perfect position to get involved with the 2020 Presidential election in some way. Furthermore, I like your very cool idea to investigate the impact of technology in the government of the future and rating how each 2020 candidate has a grasp on this topic. Clearly Andrew Yang is a great starting point on this subject.

Click on this link where Yang argues that “The US Government is 24 Years Behind in Tech”. https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/21/andrew-yang-the-u-s-government-is-24-years-behind-on-tech/

Also check out this Time magazine article on the expansive differential of the age groups among the Presidential candidates

Click on this Time Magazine link for more details: https://time.com/5618238/democrats-age/

As this Time article discusses, there are at least two categories of candidate age groups:

Age Group #1 – The Old Presidential Candidates: The 4 oldest Presidential Candidates are all in their 70’s: Bernie Sanders (77), Joe Biden (76), Donald Trump (73), Elizabeth Warren (70).

Age Group #2 – The Young Presidential Candidates: 2 of the Youngest Presidential Candidates: Andrew Yang (44), Pete Buttiegieg (37)

The age difference between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg: 40 years.

The age difference between Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg: 33 years.

The age difference between Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang: 33 years.

The age difference between Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang: 26 years.

These are very substantial spreads in the age differences among these candidates.

Yang and Buttigieg grew up with Internet and Smart phone technology. Heck, Yang is a Silicon Valley executive! The oldest Presidential candidates are at best peripheral users of Internet and smart phone technology. You must ask yourself: which of these groups of candidates are aware of both the power and dangers of the Internet technology mega-trends of:

On-Demand Cloud Computing Services

High Speed 5G Public Networks

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

When these three technologies are combined, they offer truly transformative possibilities that have the potential to be either extremely negative or extremely positive.

Clearly, the two candidates that come to mind that can grasp the potential of these Internet technologies are first and foremost Andrew Yang and second Pete Buttigieg.

To do more research on this subject, read the following reviews on these two books. I bought both of these books for you and I to read together. The first book is The Big Nine. I heard about this book from one of the parents at one of your lacrosse tournaments  this summer.

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The big nine corporations–Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple–are the new gods of AI .  It is also worth noting that six of these companies are American and three of them are Chinese. The Big Nine examines the impact of these tech companies on civilization and their potential role in government. I assure Chinese government officials are reading this book.

Read more:  https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/amy-webb/the-big-nine/9781541773752/

Next is Andrew Yang’s book (this is on your high school summer book reading list. Get to reading this book son!!! : )

This book focuses on the potentially negative effects of technology (specifically robotics and AI) on jobs held by millions of workers.

Here is link on Yang’s web-site on this book: https://www.yang2020.com/buy-the-book/

Keep reading, keep researching, keep thinkin’ and brainstormin’ son!!! I am very proud of you! : )