Former President Donald Trump will return to the White House, bringing his retrofuturistic, tech-friendly, pro-industrial vision for America’s future with him. (Oh, and Elon Musk is coming, too.) The cadre of right-wing Silicon Valley thinkers and activists who threw in with Trump have been vindicated, and there’s evidence that “mainstream” tech is falling in line too: Jeff Bezos sent “Big congratulations” to Trump on X, wishing him “all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,” and Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Threads that he’s “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” It is, of course, good business sense to make nice with the President of the United States who will be responsible for regulating your products. But tech’s immediate eagerness to engage with Trump this time around — especially in contrast with the anguish following his first win — also points to a shared understanding that a Musk-influenced Trump administration could take a big step back from President Joe Biden’s more active regulatory approach, giving industry a freer hand to shape the digital future. Free marketeers have already jumped at the chance to make predictions and offer their suggestions for how a second Trump administration should tackle cutting-edge technology. Artificial intelligence is likely first up for major changes, with Trump having pledged to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, and blue-state would-be regulators like California tied up with other battles. “Speculating about the states, I can definitely see a lot of blue-state energy for social media regulation, but AI will probably be overtaken by the many bigger fish to fry,” Matt Mittelsteadt, AI and cyber policy fellow at the Mercatus Institute, told DFD. Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission under Trump and current head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, wrote in a blog post that he foresees a rollback of current AI policy and use of the technology to combat China and enforce border security. “A Trump admin is, on all policy matters, instinctually inclined to maximize the federal executive’s role,” Chilson wrote, adding that “Trump’s team will put out their own EO with an optimistic vision for the future of AI in the US, one that emphasizes the race with China.” He also speculated that AI in surveillance could easily ramp up: “Someone is going to sell Trump on using AI in immigration enforcement, for monitoring, surveillance and predictive analytics at the border.” Trump, as it happens, actually has a track record on AI. The R Street Institute’s Adam Thierer pointed on X to one of the first Trump administration’s last acts, a January 2020 Office of Management and Budget guidance that set up a “flexible, adaptive” framework (in Thierer’s words) for AI regulation overall. The former president will likely take a similarly “flexible” approach to crypto. Bitcoin reached an all-time high this morning as traders expecting pro-crypto policy from a second Trump administration pumped money into the market. While the term of Securities and Exchange Commission Chair and key crypto foe Gary Gensler doesn’t expire until 2026, some observers expect him to resign with Trump, who once pledged to make America “the bitcoin superpower of the world,” back in the White House. Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote at the Marginal Revolution blog that Trump should “Stabilize the regulatory environment for cryptocurrency” and “Simplify tax rules for crypto.” At the same time, the other side might be admitting defeat, with pro-crypto Democrat Justin Slaughter, a former Securities and Exchange Commission adviser, claiming on X that a “former Biden WH staffer” has told him that regulating crypto is now a null issue. Fairshake, a pro-crypto super PAC, spent more than $130 million on this year’s elections. When it comes to space, Elon Musk’s pet topic, Ars Technica’s veteran space reporter Eric Berger wrote on X that “with Musk involved it will be even bigger” than in the first Trump administration — when the then-president launched the Space Force and rejuvenated the National Space Council. “Expect changes to Artemis and a renewed emphasis on Mars,” he wrote. The Artemis program, launched during Trump’s first administration, aims to establish a base on the moon that will facilitate human missions to Mars, a key policy goal of Musk’s. (His company SpaceX has nearly $12 billion in contracts with NASA and is the primary facilitator of manned missions to the International Space Station.) Of course, whenever Donald Trump (and Elon Musk) are involved, a key question follows: Will any of this actually happen ? A vision of the future is a powerful thing, but it also takes discipline to bring it to fruition. Trump’s critics have a final word of caution about the one countervailing force that might, if history is any record, be powerful enough to stymie it: The inherent entropy of a Trump-helmed White House. "Trump has a lot of backers in Silicon Valley and techworld, but I think they tend to project their own desires onto him,” Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center For New Liberalism think tank, told DFD. He pointed to some other Trump promises, such as tariffs, and a potentially “chaotic White House.” If those are the winds that prevail, he wrote, “Trump could be very bad for American tech and innovation policy."
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