Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1185664
25 OPINION INNOVATION is a difficult animal to compre- hend because of its unpredictability. The internet has brought about a lot of new doors for innova- tors to open, and they have done so. Since the mid-90s, when the internet first came about, we have seen a complete reshaping of our lives. The way we work, the way we interact, the way we socialise and the way we digest content and information has revolutionised our lives in the most profound ways. These changes have had both positive and negative effects on our lives but, overall, we all can look forward to a better future with technol- ogy. It has brought about new opportunities for emerging economies, while solidifying others such as the US and China. Since the mid-90s all this has happened and there is more to come. However, innovation also happens in cycles, and the consumer product cycle seems to be diminishing in its innovative prowess. If you look at the big products – phones, televisions and computers – over the past three years very little has changed. This means that in- novators have to look elsewhere for growth, and this is where I believe technology can develop into more meaningful channels. Areas such as education have had very minimal innovation over the past two decades. If you take away the interactive whiteboard, all-in-one PCs and tablets, a classroom is pretty much the same as it was fifty years ago. I do hope that real innovation in areas such as education is more focused on the student, rather than the tools. Big names such as Google, Micro- soft and Apple have created interesting projects and platforms in education and there's more exciting stuff in the pipeline. However, to truly revolutionise this sector one has to prioritise the educational experience of the individual, and this is where it starts to become difficult. If you create an iPhone, it works pretty much the same for everyone. And that is why it's so successful. But an education programme needs refinement and individuality. It needs to con- stantly change. That is the tricky part. Artificial Intelligence can play an important role because it is an input-output process, where the quality grows exponentially with more data. I think these are exciting technologies that we have to prepare for. Technology and innovation will always have a limiting barrier to what they can achieve. We often minimise the importance of the social and physical environment in the educational process, but it certainly can contribute to more innova- tion. There's a general agreement, the world over, that there is much wrong with education systems today and there is room for improvement. The truth is that the biggest educational inno- vation over the past 15 years has not been tablets or massive open online courses, but a much more simpler website - YouTube. YouTube has changed how people learn about things. There's so much content on YouTube that you can learn to do anything - from building a plane in Mi- necraft to building a plane in real life. It is difficult to predict what tomorrow's schools will look like but a good guess would be that they become a place where children can find who they are, learn the values of living together to progress society and become who they wish. I hope that it's a place where children can be happy and where their sense of discovery is inspired and expanded, rather than diminished. something of a retrospective 'auto-correction': after the same government had issued a Presidential pardon to a notorious Columbian cocaine trafficker a few years earlier, eliciting sharp criticism from all sides. Either way, Gisela Feuz was the first of several analogous cases – one of which involved then Justice Minister Tonio Borg having to personally intervene to avoid a repeat occurrence: which goes to show just how embarrassing the first case had proved for Malta's international image – before government finally re- alised its ham-fisted approach had all along been flawed, and amended the law accordingly. But evidently, the law has not been amended enough. There is a reason why Magis- trate Natasha Galea Sciberras likewise found herself 'agree- ing with the police', even while apparently stating the opposite in her ruling. The operative phrase comes in the next sentence: "Galea Sciberras insisted that she had no other choice than to sen- tence the 39-year-old woman to six months in prison and a €700 fine…." 'No other choice'. There it is, in black on white. Under the current legislation, the plaintiff's admission to simple possession is not enough to overturn the prosecution's argument that this was a case of trafficking… because what counts in a court of law is not the factuality of the case itself; but what the law says… yes, even when the law is very plainly talking out of its backside. Simply put, our legal defi- nition of 'trafficking' is still insufficient to distinguish between simple possession, and possession with the intent to sell to third parties. And just to illustrate how perfectly absurd this situation really is… imagine we were talking about 'simple possession' of something other than illegal drugs for a change. Like cars, for instance. In the eyes of the law (assuming that drug laws apply to automo- biles, which I do now only for the purposes of this argu- ment), it is irrelevant whether the car that you possess is intended solely for your own personal use or not. If the law implies that 'owning a car also means that you might be shar- ing it with other drivers' – as it does with drugs – then the court will have no option but to treat you as a second-hand car dealer, instead of just any other licensed motorist on the road. Likewise, it mattered not a jot that Gisela Feuz probably didn't even import enough marijuana to fill a single joint, let alone to sell by the sachet- full on any street corner. Her case ticked certain legal boxes… and that, at the end of the day, was the only thing that really mattered. (Oh, and it bears mentioning that those boxes are arbitrar- ily decided by government… and not by the law-courts, still less by the police. Those two unfortunate institutions have to make do with the laws as they are handed down to them… not as they would like them to be. Only fair to point that out.) There is, however, a cru- cial difference between the two scenarios. In 1997, the Maltese government had not been elected on a promise to kick-start a discussion on the possible legalisation of marijuana… only to stall the debate for over two years. Much more damningly: while the administration back then was certainly guilty of sending people to prison over negligible quantities of mari- juana – a drug now univer- sally acknowledged to be less harmful than previously sup- posed… a) it had the (rather crappy) excuse of ignorance on its side. For let's be hon- est: nobody knew anything about the medical properties of marijuana back in 1997; and b) it wasn't simultane- ously growing, packaging and selling the exact same drug itself, under the magical label 'Medical Marijuana'… making literally millions of euros in the process. Today's Labour govern- ment is guilty of both those charges. And to compound its guilt: not only did it renege on its promise to discuss le- galisation… but it didn't even bother reforming our existing (woefully inadequate) drug laws to iron out these absurdi- ties and inconsistencies… you know, so that we might end up with drug legislation that actually makes even half a milligram of sense… And as both these cases so amply illustrate, there is only one possible upshot of this calamitous failure. Innocent people going to prison. Innocent people. Going to prison. Miscarriages of justice don't come more blatantly than that, you know. And for drug use, too. I mean honest- ly… makes you wonder who's really on drugs here… maltatoday | SUNDAY • 17 NOVEMBER 2019 I do hope that real innovation in areas such as education is more focused on the student, rather than the tools The next wave of innovation will not be about phones Evarist Bartolo Evarist Bartolo is Minister for Education and Employment