03/16/19 GORE: HIGH ON HIGH TECH (extended)

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GORE: HIGH ON HIGH TECH

Except for the occasions when Bill Gates is in town, there's no high-tech booster in Washington with a higher profile than Vice-President Al Gore. The Veep, who is the Administration's point man on tech policy, wants not only to nurture the industry but also to use its innovations to create a more efficient government. On Mar. 3, the Vice-President shared his views on technology with Washington Bureau Chief Lee Walczak, Senior Correspondent Howard Gleckman, and White House Correspondent Richard S. Dunham.
Note: This is an extended, online-only version of the Q&A that appears in the March 16, 1998, issue of Business Week.
Q: This Administration presents itself as very much in sync with high tech. What does that mean in terms of policy?
A: It means listening and understanding the special needs that high-tech companies have. And then working in partnership with them. Just to pick one example out of many: There are 350,000 high-tech jobs that cannot be filled, partly because our educational and job-training institutions cannot produce the people with the skills to fill them.
I spent a good part of yesterday with high-tech CEOs in Georgia, looking at an innovative model for meeting that need. It's called Intellectual Capital Partnership Program. And it's completely redesigning the higher-educational process to focus on high-tech skills.
But there are many similar examples. And you don't know about them if you don't spend the time trying to understand this New Economy.
Q: The industry wants to increase quotas for high-skilled immigrants. Why haven't you agreed?
A: We've made no decision on that issue. The Administration's first priority will be to ensure that American workers have the opportunity to acquire the skills they need to fill these jobs and have priority over any foreign workers with similar training.
And that's one of the reasons we have been so aggressive in pushing this unprecedented expansion of access to higher education with HOPE Scholarships and tax credits for employer investment in lifelong learning, and the Technology Literacy Challenge. The whole set of initiatives make up the biggest investment since the GI Bill in expanded access to higher education and job training. We're trying to reinvent the job-training program with a system of vouchers .
And to the extent we can accelerate dramatic improvements in higher education and job training to give Americans those skills, there will be less need for immigration waivers.
Q: The high-tech industry desperately wants to loosen quotas for high-skill immigrants. You want to expand education and job training. Is there a trade-off?
A: It's not a trade-off. They've already agreed to [support job training]. Now we're communicating to them about how they can be of maximum effectiveness in that battle. We will evaluate the immigration issue on its own merits.
Now, in a dialogue like this one, there is always an important element of trust. As it builds, each side develops a greater capacity to understand what the other is saying. And if you want to call that a trade-off, I guess you could, but it doesn't have the connotation of trading one for the other.
Q: Does the high-tech industry understand how Washington works?
A: I saw a movie at the drive-in in Carthage, Tenn., when I was a little boy. It was called Godzilla Meets Rodan. They had different ways of relating, too.
Q: Have regulators learned to deal with high-tech enterprises?
A: Both the rapid growth in high-technology industries and globalization of the marketplace present new realities and challenges in every aspect of law and regulation. But in our country, we find time and again that our oldest principles always apply to new situations.
I'm a fan of most high-tech companies. It's really exciting to have all these entrepreneurs out there, all these dynamic CEOs, all these employees coming up with new ideas and doing well by their families and communities at the same time that they are shaking the foundations of the world into which they were born. I'm thrilled by it.
Q: You are urging states to refrain from taxing Internet commerce. But in practice, don't such "infant industry" protections stay in place long after their useful life?
A: We're for a limited moratorium. We have agreed to support it only on the condition that the industry enter into a dialogue with state, county, and local governments on a solution that doesn't cause sudden infant death syndrome for the industry. I'm optimistic that the country will be able to find a resolution to this.
Q: Do you feel that the techies still have this Wild West, libertarian streak and want to be left alone by Washington?
A: I think it's both a cartoon-like distortion and a definite strain of thought within a significant portion of the industry.
Some of it started as a generational divide. As these men and women in their 20s climb higher on the corporate ladder and look at bigger markets and more complex challenges, they change and grow and evolve. And part of that process has involved developing a different appreciation of how to relate to what is, after all, a self-government.
And I think President Clinton and I have helped that process along by reaching out to them pretty aggressively.
In government, there is always a two-way flow of ideas between the realm of public policy and the business world. These execs go through the process where they first want a place at the table and then decide, "Hey, it's our table, too."
Q: How has technology changed the nature of government?
A: Our Constitution and most of our institutions were based on metaphors that came out of the early stages of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Devices like steam engines taught how pressures build and valves let off steam. The checks and balances in our Constitution come out of a set of understandings that were quite familiar to Eli Whitney and the business leaders of that age.
In a similar way, there are exciting new [ideas] that emerge every day in the high-tech community that apply beyond the world of business. Computers make it possible to "de-massify" our approach to a lot of problems and issues. The ability to process a vast quantity of data enables us to become a lot more efficient.
Q: How?
A: We're shifting a lot of government services toward the Internet. We're eliminating a lot of paperwork, targeting results instead of process, measuring performance, flattening out organization charts, conveying [information] directly to front-line government employees. Today, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Reinventing Government program, and we have a huge new effort under way to improve government services.
The dialogue that I've had with the high-tech industry has been very helpful in developing new approaches to redeeming the promise of self-government by creating a government that works better and costs less. It's the same phenomenon we've seen in many companies that downsized and reduced expenses [while] simultaneously improving the quality of their products and services.
We've got a long way to go, but we're really beginning to make significant progress. People are going to be surprised to wake up a few years hence and find that our federal government is all of sudden working a hell of a lot better than anybody ever thought it could -- at a lot lower cost.

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