Nice article. I just hope that the US focuses on getting broadband out at home first.

I'll try this again...

Well, all that high-minded generality - though loaded with completely groundless assertions like "Sophisticated use of technology in education would boost student achievements and reduce the drop out rate" - makes for stirring classroom banter, but fails to address the problems that have prevented access to technology in the US and the world.

Let's see, we have frivolous patent management and enforcement ("one-click purchasing" via a web page is one of the spectacular examples of this insane hubris), network infrastructure is owned by carriers in the US who charge significantly more for the privilege of using it than almost any other industrialized country (even though billions of tax breaks drove its construction), and megalithic corporations exercise anti-competitive tactics (forced obsolescence by abdicating "support" among others) to help extract usurious license fees for software "upgrades" which deliver virtually no value at all to the owners - all of which absolutely crush innovation, exact the equivalent of a "technology tax" on the public, and is massively geared almost exclusively toward stockholder enrichment and, therefore, intrinsically opposed to your altruistic aspirations.

Much has been written about these issues so I won't even try to encapsulate in a 250-word comment. But if you can't solve the 3 critical problems listed in the previous paragraph, technology will continue to be more of a luxury item than an everyday enabler of wonderfulness.

Perhaps the most important thing a National CTO has to do is strike a balance between the entrepreneurs and the system builders. Many people hope that the sort of disruptive, revolutionary innovation that we've come to expect from entrepreneurs will fix all our infrastructure problems. This is not only naive, but dangerous.
Startup-driven innovation has its place, but you can't just throw out the physical and technical infrastructure on which 300 million of us depend today. For all the talk of fundamentally new fuel and energy technologies, the primary focus of the National CTO will have to be on the evolutionary, incremental improvement in reliability and energy efficiency of our existing physical and technical infrastructure (and the industries that support it). So she/he needs to be a systems thinker first and foremost. We don't need a Bill Joy or a Elon Musk as National CTO but a Fred Smith or a Norm Augustine.
Don't think this choice matters? Consider the fact that we handed our financial infrastructure to the entrepreneurs (remember CDO's??) while the financial systems thinkers were relegated to powerless regulatory agencies and think tanks over the last 8 years. We can't afford to make this mistake again.
http://blog.vanno.com/index.php/2008/11/23/tesla-gm-and-a-national-cto/