Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of The Future In Five Questions. This week, I spoke with Jason Oxman, president and chief executive of the Information Technology Industry Council. His trade association represents the global tech sector, including heavyweights Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple, as well as major chipmakers like Intel and Taiwan’s TSMC. We talked about how a disruptive technology of the 1800s is still relevant to today’s debates over tech regulation, his recent trip to Arizona (where President Joe Biden gave Intel the largest CHIPS grant), and why he feels the administration is falling short on trade policy even as it shores up semiconductor production. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Voluntary consensus-based industry standards for technology innovations. So, we talk about government regulation of technology all the time. And when the government regulates technology, they tend to focus on the issues of the day or overreact or overcorrect, or their solutions may be fixed in time because that's how government works, and they don't update their regulations on a regular basis. That's why industry standards are a better solution than government regulation. Standards development organizations — what they do is they bring together technical experts from entire industries to develop consensus-based standards that govern how technology works and how it protects people. So, they work in the areas of safety. I'll look for the UL logo on our Christmas lights to make sure they don't burn our house down. They work in technical interfaces like Ethernet or USB or HDMI. We all know when we buy those cables, they're going to work on any device, regardless of brand. Some regulation is necessary, but as a general matter, innovators do better than government. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Overhyped is the idea that consumer use of technology defines the technology’s success or failure and it's a failure if consumers aren't using it. So for example, 3D printing — there was so much excitement about 3D printing. Consumers aren't doing a lot of 3D printing in their houses, but companies are using it to manufacture just in time parts. Huge success but perceived as overhyped because consumers aren't using it. The metaverse — we're excited about the metaverse. We’re not all living in the metaverse yet in our homes. We will be at some point in the future. But where the metaverse is enormously successful is in industrial uses of the metaverse for digital twins and for reimagining manufacturing facilities. Because consumers haven't adopted it yet, it's perceived as overhyped. There was this hype about space tourism. We're all going to be traveling to space, and only a small number of billionaires have done it. But there is robust activity in space — a lot of competition for building rockets for launching facilities and equipment and networks into space, so industrial uses of space competition are happening. But because space tourism isn't happening, consumers aren't doing it, it's a bit overhyped. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “Into the Groove: The Story of Sound.” It's by a tech journalist. His name is Jonathan Scott. It traces the scientific efforts to record sound, which go back hundreds of years, but were really perfected in both the technology and marketing frankly, by Thomas Edison with the phonograph in the 1870s. But the part of the story that I think is really most interesting for both technology nerds and tech policy nerds is a recurring theme when disruptive technology like the phonograph emerges. It’s that incumbent industries and groups kind of reflexively attack the new technology because either they don't understand it, or they see it as a threat to their livelihood. When the phonograph was first deployed in the 1870s, musicians, composers really went after the technology. One of the best stories is John Philip Sousa, a composer who lobbied against the phonograph, and then actually, he kept doing this. When the player piano a couple of decades later came out, he went to Congress and lobbied against the player piano. Why? Because he made music and made his money selling sheet music. He was concerned that because of the phonograph and people listening to music in their homes instead of going to a concert hall, there wouldn't be an audience for live performances, and he wouldn't sell any more. Same thing with the player piano — he was worried that if the player piano worked, nobody would buy sheet music for the piano anymore. What was fascinating in this book is the way Thomas Edison responded to this criticism of the phonograph. This resonates today with discussions of emerging technology like AI. He published an article listing all the potential benefits of the phonograph. You can use the phonograph to record books, so the blind can read. You can use it to learn foreign languages, so you can listen to what foreign languages sound like. Teachers can use it to teach phonetics and elocution. He even mentioned medical diagnosis — you could record heart rhythms and compare them to see who's healthy and who's not. It's a great book, not only because of the history, but also because it really resonates with the tech policy discussions of today. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? I'm going to talk about this in the context of my visit to Phoenix, where I saw President Biden announce the CHIPS and Science Act grant to Intel for its amazing new leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing plant that’s under construction there. The president talked about this ambitious goal the administration has — to move the U.S. from today, manufacturing zero percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors to 20 percent by the end of the decade. But at the same time, just down the street from Commerce at the U.S. Trade Representative, the administration is literally pulling the U.S. out of trade talks. They're walking away from decades of support for digital trade. They're even encouraging foreign governments to more heavily regulate U.S. technology companies. So we can make all the chips in the world here in the U.S., but if we can't export U.S. manufactured goods including semiconductors themselves to the rest of the world, then the U.S. is missing out on a market opportunity that quite literally includes 95 percent of the world’s population that doesn't live in the United States. I think the Biden administration is doing a great job on the one hand on the CHIPS and Science Act implementation, bringing manufacturing of semiconductors to the U.S., but I think they're doing a poor job on the other hand with USTR, candidly not understanding how they're blocking the future success of the U.S. manufacturing sector, technology and all other industries alike. I haven't heard a good answer from USTR to this. Why not allow U.S. companies to export those through a trade agreement with the EU, which we don't have. I mean, the EU are our allies. They're certainly not a national security threat. It's not just about chips — it's about a complete failure to engage in trade agreements, trade negotiations to support digital trade. What surprised you most this year? The number of Supreme Court cases dealing with the First Amendment and technology. It's been amazing — some of those cases have already been decided, some are still pending — to see the amount of litigation happening and making its way up to the Supreme Court around these issues of the role of government and the role of private actors and how the First Amendment applies to these cases involving, in some senses, state government action requiring companies to do a certain thing, challenges to government not allowing companies to do a certain thing. Wrapped up in all of that is the First Amendment question of how this new marketplace of online communication fits with historic Supreme Court treatment of other marketplaces of ideas. And the pace of that Supreme Court decision making in this area has been incredibly rapid this term alone.
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