| SAN FRANCISCO — Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Future in Five Questions from the sunny Bay Area. After our panel appearance at yesterday’s Reboot conference, I spoke with Kara Frederick, the Heritage Foundation’s director of tech policy, about her sweeping vision for re-imagining how conservatives relate to tech. We talked about the connection between Starlink access and the conservative notion of homesteading, how antitrust law might be expanded to rein in Big Tech and how Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” gave her intellectual and political permission to be a techie. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? LEOs [low earth orbit satellites], and making sure that American citizens and individuals have access to things like Starlink. It's almost rote now to think of Starlink in a geopolitical context, but the way that it could advantage self-governance is phenomenal. If you look at the right-coded meme of homesteading, LEOs can enable a form of digital homesteading. You layer different types of technology, like individual GPUs and whatnot, everybody's ability to compute and process, I think should be protected and enshrined in law. I don’t think Americans’ ability to move wherever they want within our country and build up their own digital strongholds and still participate in the economy through this one piece of technology gets talked about enough. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Smart cities. We used to talk about this a lot, and I wrote about them in 2020 with regard to their relationship with predictive policing and drones. But I haven’t been surprised by the lack of progress in smart city technology, because I don't think it's ready for prime time yet. I think it's been overhyped for a long time. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers.” Obviously it’s “right-coded,” but it was also my first introduction to sci-fi that retained the values of citizenship and self-governance. When I thought about the future, I thought techno-optimism was going to win the day but also that you could have a society that looked modern but still retained age-old values, like if you don’t serve your country, you don’t vote. It made me realize that a world could look like this, but you could still have patriots in it, and people who were devoted to one specific country. Instead of divorcing myself from the red-blooded conservative values with which I was raised, when I started doing rotations for the National Security Agency, and started to go into bits-and-bytes tech mode, I could still retain who I was as a human and the old-school values that were inculcated in me from my military father's upbringing. It helped me understand you could still be an American, and a patriot, and an accelerationist to a certain degree. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Enforcing existing antitrust law to prevent the concentration of power among big tech companies, and also to engender competition and spur innovation. I truly believe that it's not these big, sclerotic tech companies that are the real innovators. The genuine innovators are the new entrants, the startups, the smaller competitors that have more of an incentive to out-compete these companies. But they're being stiff-armed. You’ve seen the acqui-hires; here in Silicon Valley it’s common knowledge that big tech companies will hire very talented engineers and basically put them in the corner to color, so they can't create something that out-innovates the existing entrenched monopoly. Having a national data protection framework is also, to me, an extremely common-sense measure. Limit the amount of and types of data that these tech companies can collect, store and share, and severely hinder the commercial surveillance apparatus that the American people overwhelmingly dislike. What has surprised you the most this year? Artificial general intelligence. When I started looking at AI from a policy standpoint in DC in February of 2018, AGI was something that people whispered about in dark rooms, and those who did out loud were considered quacks and charlatans. So to hear industry leaders say they think it is actually around the corner absolutely surprised me. I didn't think we were there. I was definitely not an AI doomer, but at the same time, I didn't think it was going to be our new reality. Talking to founders over the course of all these years, seeing them go on to build these AI companies and then report back, has opened my eyes. Talking to the people who are doing the building changed my mind on this.
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