The Fall of Big Data
&gt; The third major failure has been a general apathy about politics amongst my colleagues here in the Bay Area. When many of the best minds in machine learning have decided that the most existential threat to civilization is the rise of Skynet, we have had a major failure of group think.<p>I cannot agree more. I am also in the Bay Area, and I feel surrounded by people who are deeply out of touch with the rest of the country.<p>There is real desperation in this country. That&#x27;s why Trump is President. People didn&#x27;t vote for him because they are racist. They voted for him because they worry about putting food on their tables. They worry about being left behind in a world that has fewer and fewer ways for the average Joe to dream about a future. They&#x27;re angry, rightfully so, and in Trump, they found someone willing to listen.<p>They sure as hell didn&#x27;t find it in us. Sure, we&#x27;ve given them lip service. We&#x27;ve looked at them through our rose-tinted Google Glasses, and at best, we&#x27;ve felt a twinge of regret at the way the world is going. Not enough to do anything. For all the efforts to teach girls to code (a problem deeply related to our own talent shortage), how much have we done to figure out what a blue-collar worker in rural Indiana is supposed to do when the sole factory in his town shuts down?<p>Because let&#x27;s face it -- we look down on them. We call them hicks and rednecks. We scoff at their lack of high-falutin education. We think they got left behind because they&#x27;re not good enough. Because they didn&#x27;t pass the tests we did, didn&#x27;t have the ambition we do, didn&#x27;t try as hard as we do. It&#x27;s a nice thought if you want something to let you sleep at night, but it&#x27;s not true. Those people aren&#x27;t worse than us. They&#x27;re not left behind because they&#x27;re stupid. They&#x27;re being left behind because people like us stopped giving a damn a long time ago.<p>The solutions we did offer were exactly the ones you&#x27;d expect from a far-removed elite aristocracy. Teach everyone to code, or throw them money. Neither of which they want. So the people you laughed at, the people you thought yourselves better than, the people you offered little more to than pie in the sky techno-utopian dreams -- is it any surprise they turn around and elect someone you don&#x27;t even understand? You never understood them anyway.