Nobody expected it and nobody was prepared for it and yet, Donald J. Trump is now the elected President of the United States. While it may seem that Pakistani residents do not have much to worry about, it is not that simple.
Trump as the president of the most powerful nation on Earth should worry everyone in the world, including technology-lovers like us at ProPakistani.
This is the guy who says global warming is a hoax and described it as ‘bullshit’. This is also the guy who doesn’t know anything about technology, and yet calls out people who do know about it for lying to him. The FBI recently said that they had vetted 650,000 emails in eight days and Trump said he didn’t believe them, even though a number of technology experts, including Edward Snowden, said that the task could have been done in mere hours instead of eight days.
Drop non-responsive To:/CC:/BCC:, hash both sets, then subtract those that match. Old laptops could do it in minutes-to-hours.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 7, 2016
Donald Trump also raged on Apple’s refusal to unlock a cellphone for the FBI, saying “To think that Apple won’t allow us to get into her cellphone? Who do they think they are?”. Simply put, he was (and still is) against the standards of privacy that Apple tried so hard to uphold.
He is completely against the use of technology for military communication as well. Instead, he says they should communicate via courier. Here is what he said,
“… and I like the old days, especially for the military, on things like that…. you wanna attack or you wanna do something….. it’s called courier…..it’s called… let’s put it in a thing…. put it in an envelope and let’s hand it to the general… let’s not send it over the wires (waving his stubby fingers in the air for some reason) where everybody’s probably reading it, right? And no matter how good…. no matter how good they say it is…. it’s not…. I mean, people can hack it I guess…. it’s terrible… I know and if you talk about military and you talk about secrets, you talk about politics……”
“And to top it all off, Trump thinks he can just call up Bill Gates to shut down the internet.”
To sum it up, Donald Trump is not good for technology. The question remains, what does Donald Trump as the president of one of the most powerful nations on earth, mean for technology?
Global Trade
Donald Trump will be bad news for the technology companies in Silicon Valley. He has a plan in place to impose steep tariffs on goods manufactured in China.
Since almost all American technology companies rely on a global supply chain, it is going to have a heavy effect on them. As a result, American tech products may end up getting more expensive for people in U.S. as well as the rest of the world.
According to Gregory Autry, an assistant professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business,
“As tech is oftentimes defined, you’re talking about Silicon Valley. Trump is definitely a problem for that model. His economic policies are focused on punishing China for its trade abuses and returning manufacturing to the U.S.”
Immigration
Recently, Silicon Valley has been making a huge push to support and expand the H-1B visa program— a program that enables talented workers from overseas to remain in the U.S. and give them a path to a green card while filling the Valley’s demand for highly skilled jobs.
Trump plans to end this program! He also sees immigrants— ALL immigrants— as a hindrance that he wants to get rid off, and not as entrepreneurs making the United States a better place (40 percent of Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children).
Cybersecurity
The internet suffered the largest DDOS attack in history last month. Cybersecurity is more important now than ever but the worst person to be in the office of one of the nations who can actually do something is Donald Trump.
Inept in anything that has to do with technology, his campaign’s focus on cybersecurity was more on Hillary’s mismanagement of her email server than on actual reforms. His current plan to address the issue is dangerously vague.
In short, Trump is disastrous for technology. The only solace we, as Pakistani tech-lovers, can take from the American people’s decision to elect Donald Trump as president is the possible (probable?) return of the incredible entrepreneurial brains we have been exporting to them up till now. Surely, if this isn’t the time to leave the United States of America, what is?
Source— TechCrunch
Image— Breitbart
