HTTPS was invented to solve a security problem -- a completely social issue that wouldn't exist if people just could be trusted with your data. Unicode was invented to solve the problem that not everybody writes with the Latin alphabet, a problem caused only because people don't agree to fix it. Neither of those would have meant anything if someone didn't convince everybody to use them -- another purely social problem. In fact, almost all computer science issues are attempts to solve or make irrelevant certain classes of social problems. They're not unrelated fields at all. Communication and technology are practically the same thing.
>I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology
The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?