A modern presidential campaign is a pitch for an American future — think John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” or Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” or Barack Obama’s vision of a country where “a skinny kid with a funny name” could become president. The rhetoric of the 2024 campaign has been a little less lofty than all that. But new technologies like AI and quantum computing are set to remake the digital world, NASA has promised an imminent return to the Moon, and there’s a newly heated race for global tech and industrial dominance. That’s all created an unspoken urgency surrounding which vision for American life and governance will carry the country into the 21st century. This year, the “most important election of our lifetime” cliché… might actually be true. “There’s a real chance that the next administration… will preside over the next major technological inflection point in human history,” said Samuel Hammond , senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. “The stakes behind the two candidates’ distinct visions of the future thus couldn’t be higher.” So what do the two candidates really think about the human future? DFD went over each candidate’s record, and reached out to a handful of long-term tech thinkers across the political spectrum and asked them. Today’s newsletter will focus on Donald Trump, and tomorrow’s on Kamala Harris. Trump’s initial brand as a politician was focused more on the past — reviving post-World War II manufacturing culture and traditional values, with the goal of bringing back a notional lost era of American greatness. This time, things are slightly different. When it comes to the former president (and Elon Musk bestie ), a future comes into focus marked by Trump’s boldfaced, gold-plated aspirations to be the biggest and the best — and a considerable amount of laissez-faire elbow room for the tech industry to achieve those aspirations as they see fit. “Trump has very clearly signaled that he views the tech industry as an important national asset he intends to defend,” said venture capitalist Mike Solana, whose libertarian-leaning Pirate Wires media outlet regularly tweaks the tech industry’s critics and regulators. “Trump represents a more pro-American industry, low-key mercantilist future, while Kamala will likely not focus on tech very much at all, which means our largest companies will be picked apart, both abroad and here at home via [Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina] Khan or someone like her,” Solana continued. A fear of Washington overreach has driven some of the tech industry into Trump’s camp — whether in the form of Khan’s sweeping, neo-Brandesian antitrust enforcement efforts, the values-laden safety commitments in President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, or perceived overweening bills like California’s recently vetoed AI legislation. (Trump has duly pledged to repeal said AI executive order.) Somewhat curiously for a candidate whose taste in music, food and fashion are all decidedly stuck in the 1970s, Trump now regularly articulates an affirmative vision for the future. Trump is a vocal advocate for space exploration, having during his presidency re-established the National Space Council and launched the Space Force, and more recently having effused on the campaign trail about his ally Musk’s Starship reusable rocket. His administration got the ball rolling on AI policy long before the layperson knew what a “GPT” was, and he signed the National Quantum Initiative into law in the last days of his Republican-controlled Congress. He even has his own crypto token. To be sure, American research leadership and generic promises of “progress” are among the very few bipartisan issues left in Washington — see the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law by Biden. But Trump’s desire to reclaim a lost American greatness paradoxically translates into a clear and consistent enthusiasm for American technological innovation. “Trump’s nostalgia for the America that put a man on the moon seems to manifest in a paradoxically retro-futuristic orientation,” said FAI’s Hammond, citing his administration’s enthusiasm for reviving supersonic flight. That vision of a shiny, golden future for American tech and progress could encounter a speed bump, however, when it comes to exactly how it might be achieved. For all his rhetoric about using government proactively, Trump largely pursued standard Republican deregulatory policy during his first term as president. That could put him at odds with a newer school of progress-oriented thinkers who argue that warts and all, government has a major role to play (one that includes spending money) in driving technological progress. “This election is about different visions of state capacity,” said Peter Leyden, founder of the strategic foresight firm Reinvent Futures and former editor at Wired. “There’s a more vigorous, muscular kind of state involvement in the economy and around technology, and then a stripped-down Wild West regulation landscape and much weaker state capacity,” he added. A second Trump administration, then, will almost certainly feature more high-profile futurist promises like his 2019 vow to reach Mars “very soon.” But how those promises are fulfilled would likely be left to favorites in industry like Musk. That means that to consider the future Trump is promising for America, one might just as well consider the one being promised by his growing fan club in Silicon Valley.
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