The Answer to Everything.
China.
This is the first in a series of “columns” that look at issues that will emerge during president-elect Donald Trump’s second term. Some have already done so.
This from David Brooks, opinion columnist for The New York Times:
…..(G)radually intellectuals and then lots of other people lost faith in progress, in the idea that growth, technology and innovation would make the future better than the past. In 2011 Virginia Postrel published a book called “The Future and Its Enemies,” arguing that the true division in politics is not left vs. right but dynamists vs. stasists. Dynamists believe in open-ended change. Stasists are in protective mode. We don’t need to rush pell-mell into the future, they say; we need to take care of our own.
This conflict is now roiling the Republican Party. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are dynamists. They want to welcome talented immigrants to the American economy for the same reason the New York Mets are spending over $700 million to sign Juan Soto. You could field a team with all native-born players, but you couldn’t hope to compete with the best in the world.
This has elicited howls of outrage from those who want to restrict immigration, including supporters of canceling the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants. We should be employing Americans in these jobs, those on MAGA’s rightward edge respond. The vaunted technological progress the dynamists worship has ripped American communities to shreds.
This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. (Source: nytimes.com)
The key to the future of global power is mastery of artificial intelligence. The nation that masters AI first will be the most powerful nation on earth. The nation that masters AI and quantum computing first will be the most powerful nation in the history of mankind. Each of those three sentences is true.
It’s noteworthy that, in the main, Trump voters don’t like H-1B visas and/or express unhappiness about Elon Musk’s influence on the president-elect and/or agree with Steve Bannon that the rise of Elon is a betrayal of the base. But as a policy matter, it’s a moot point. Whatever AI needs, it will get. Whatever quantum computing needs, it will get. The race with China on both technologies is the most important national security issue of this century. Nothing else comes close.
The notion that the race for AI/quantum supremacy can somehow be “guard-railed” — that China will enter into an international AI regulatory regime of some sort — is delusional. The Xi regime sees AI and quantum computing the same way Elon Musk does — winner takes all.
So no matter what MAGA-land says or what right-wing media opines, the rejoinder is always going to be: China. We will embrace the AI/quantum race because if we don’t, China will get there first and the balance of power shifts accordingly and (perhaps) irreversibly.
As tickets to power go, the AI/quantum computing package is the greatest thing since Genghis Kahn saddled up the horses. Except the great warrior had to kill 40 million people (give or take a few million) to expand his empire. The AI/quantum Tech Lords are being handed an empire without having to fire a single shot.
The Tech Lords takeover of the Department of Defense is already well under way. Yes, there will be fierce resistance from the Congressional-military-industrial complex but it will inevitably fail because the Tech Lords are better at AI than anyone at DOD and AI is the future of warfare. The Tech Lords will soon become the brains of America’s intelligence services, because AI is the future of intelligence gathering and analysis. If Google gets there first in quantum computing, then it will be able to decrypt all communications, no matter how encoded, of every foreign government, rendering our enemies and adversaries transparent and thus defenseless. At that point, anti-trust actions against Google will no longer be..appropriate (to pick a word).
There are probably 500,000 people (at the most) in the United States who are “fluent” in the coding and algorithms of artificial intelligence. Probably less than 250,000 are truly proficient at the highest level. There are probably less than 100,000 people in the United States who are truly proficient in the field of quantum physics/computing. There are probably 250,000 people (at most) who are capable of intelligently investing in and assessing the values of AI and quantum computing companies.
So, all in, you have less than a million people who are capable of harnessing the power of the two most important technologies in the history of mankind. They are the true elite.
And then there’s the rest of us; 341 million of us, to be (roughly) exact. What we’re being told (not explicitly, but obviously) is: Whatever the Tech Lords want, they will get. If they need 100,000 people on H-1B visas to get their work done, then they will get those 100,000 people. Whatever you want is fine — negotiable, but fine — but you won’t get anything close to what the Lords will get, because they are the answer to China and you’re not.
Trump was elected by a populist movement, fueled by opposition to a de facto policy of open borders, that carried him to victory. At the same time, he was financed, when his campaign truly needed the money, by Tech Lords (Musk especially), all of whom favor limitless H-1B visas and are generally pro-immigration otherwise.
Guess who won?
Andrew Ross Sorkin summarized the outcome succinctly:
The flow of Silicon Valley executives President-elect Donald Trump wants to join his administration is becoming a torrent after he announced more picks over the weekend.
It’s the latest evidence of tech heavyweights’ growing influence on Washington, and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is at the center of it.
Trump tapped a pair of the V.C.’s executives to high-profile roles. He named Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the firm, to be director of the Office of Personnel Management — a role that could make him crucial to streamlining staffing across the federal government.
Trump also appointed Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to advise on artificial intelligence policy. Krishnan is a confidant of Elon Musk, and host of a widely followed tech podcast with his wife. Krishnan will work with David Sacks, the Silicon Valley investor who was an early backer of Trump, and who has been named the White House crypto and A.I. czar.
The speed with which the Tech Lords have taken over the incoming administration is astonishing, but not surprising. “The answer to everything” really is China. So handing the keys over to the Tech Lords was, sooner or later, inevitable. As Mr. Brooks put it: you have to put your best players on the field.
Whatever else he might want, Trump doesn’t want to be the president who “lost” to China. In America, “who lost China” gets ugly fast. So what he will say to his base is: “I didn’t and I don’t want to do this, but I have to, because otherwise China will win.”