One future relies on the heavy hand of government to solve our problems. The other future gives a blank check to builders. But neither the broken bureaucracy nor the tyranny of technologists will save the West. Both of these futures lose.
Consider a possible reality. Tens of thousands of engineers show up every morning in massive industrial parks dedicated to aerospace, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. The result is an industrial base that produces advanced weapons five to six times faster than its competitors. By many measures, this reality already exists, but it's not happening in Scranton, Pennsylvania or Yuma, Arizona. Our adversaries are building it in cities like Shenyang, China, and Yalabooga, Russia. Our country is trying to revivify the arsenal of freedom. But if we don't go faster, we could soon be overshadowed by something else. A high-tech arsenal of autocracy.
How did we get here? Partly because our rivals made deliberate choices about cultivating industrial power, but also because we face danger of our own making. Two alternative futures where we accept American decline and lose our commanding strength to China.
One future relies on the heavy hand of government to solve our problems. Here we risk over-reliance on ineffective institutions or regulating every ambition into oblivion. The other future gives a blank check to builders, empowering technologists who think they know better than elected officials, democratic institutions, or the citizens who elect both. But neither the broken bureaucracy nor the tyranny of technologists will save the West. Both of these futures lose. They in equal parts guarantee the next chapter of this country will be determined not by Washington DC or Silicon Valley, but by Shenzhen. We need a different future. One that is imagined by the very existence of a forum like this. One where technology capital, the technology capital of the world and our country's capital learn how to build together again. One that protects our way of life and saves the West.
But before we fully discover this third path, we first need to explore the two obstacles to it. The first is that we trust Uncle Sam to govern our way out of a high-tech arms race with our adversaries. There's just one problem with this future. These days, the government isn't legislating much of anything at all. That wasn't always true. FDR enabled the Ford Motor Company to outbuild the entire axis power of Italy. DARPA created dominant military capabilities. The internet, nuclear power, and the space program all exist because of vision and purpose that once characterized federal mega projects. But contrast this to today. Our federal government is not doing its job. It does not help us build great things. It does not solve hard problems. Frankly, it has abandoned its post.
Consider some of the major public policy debates of the last 25 years. Immigration. 70 to 80% of Americans support comprehensive reform. Yet, the last time we passed anything related to this in law was 40 years ago. Health care. We spend roughly double compared to advanced democracies and see profoundly worse outcomes. We were promised wholesale reform but got stuck with a system that is basically on financial life support itself.
Education, underemployment, and unemployment from recent college grads has reached an unprecedented level due to changes in the labor force, primarily due to AI. But we're not adequately preparing students for this new world. The United States has fallen out of the top 10 in educational attainment and is lagging far behind our competitors in math and science. How about the basic responsibility of using taxpayer money to build real things? Surely the government could at least do that. But you guessed wrong. Between chips and the green energy law, we've allocated one trillion plus on major infrastructure. And all we have to show for it so far is a handful of lousy EV charging stations and not a single fully built chips fab. We haven't even sent a man to the moon in my lifetime.
But it's too hard or someone else is going to do this aren't excuses that cut it anymore in the 21st century. You might as well sign the deed for the American experiment over to the Chinese Communist Party. People in this room know what hard is. Hard is building reusable rockets that go to space, reenter the atmosphere, and land on ships in the middle of the ocean. Hard is creating robotics and artificial intelligence with unthinkable capability and compute. Hard is what Pentagon leadership is doing right now to fix how the government procures new capability and accelerate critical munitions resupply. We live our lives in hard mode. This is the price of doing anything great, big, or bold and it cannot be an excuse to abdicate the duties that the American people elected our government to complete.
The government isn't doing its job on tech and we all know why. Populism, special interests, anti-tech sentiment, and tribalism all conspire to make it virtually impossible to do anything of consequence. It's commonly said that if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. When your main tools appear to be investigations and the bully pulpit, every problem looks like a messaging bill and a press release. The loudest voices make it seem as though theatrical hysteria is preferred over the pursuit of solutions.
Innovation is moving far faster than most regulators and legislators can follow. That means that the rules that they write are often horribly outmoded by the time they're put into effect. Facebook had two billion users before the first platform regulation was put in place. Drones became weapons of war long before the government created laws governing how we can defend the homeland against them. Trillions of dollars worth of crypto exchanged hands before the government could even agree on what it was. Our institutions are failing and the government's attitude towards tech does not help. If we keep going this way, we're accepting American decline as inevitable. Without building the best technology first and fastest, this era of history will end and so will America's hegemonic role along with it. I am not willing to concede that point.
We can no longer accept technological excellence as a substitute for political failure. We must accept that our politicians first understand technology before they take the hammer of law to it. And likewise, we should not tolerate the continued outsourcing of critical policy questions to the technology industry. We're playing catch-up here. In the early 2010s, when Chinese military documents first started talking about AI weapons and CCP factionalists started posting about the idea of an industrial party, we were arguing about whether or not tech wanted to work with the Pentagon at all. Continuing on this course, one where we rely on central planners to do the hard work of innovating, is one where we lose. Adversaries will build mega factories and we'll just keep holding hearings. It's simply time to demand more of our elected officials.
But just because government has no idea how to hyperscale innovation doesn't mean that we should give the tech community the keys to the city. Government incompetence alone does not fully explain our present crisis. A large part of the blame also rests on technologists themselves.
We all know that an alternate future where tech assumes the authority of the state would end in disaster. We know this because it already isn't working when we let it happen today. Many of our greatest technology companies have for years viewed themselves as global rather than American companies. I would argue that this is one of the great privileges we benefit from in a free society that lacks civil-military fusion like our autocratic adversaries. You don't have to work with the government, but there are downsides for that decision.
In the 2010s, software engineers resisted Pentagon work on things like Project Maven and autonomous weaponry. Meanwhile, parts of the tech establishment enabled our principal adversaries to become stronger, richer, and more emboldened than ever. Many so-called visionary founders have time and time again deliberately chosen to build the wrong things for bad reasons. We've spent years sprinting on building things that don't matter at all and slow-walking the things that do. While exercising this freedom, we have forgotten the obvious. Technology should at a minimum strengthen the American dream, not kill it. I will say it again. There is nothing wrong with abstaining from working with the government. But we must all realize that there is no moral neutrality in that decision.
For too long, we've pretended that the national interest isn't our responsibility. That the global commons and free market will ensure the highest and best use of tech. But we all know this is ridiculous. We cannot cede governing authority to unelected, unaccountable builders at the risk of ending the American experiment. Let me be clear. Imputing the values of corporatocracy or technocracy onto democracy is doomed to failure. The moment the government accedes to the demands of tech is the moment that the character of our country irreversibly changes. If you don't like government's tech policy, vote in a new government. Don't accept tech as a substitute for politics.
Now, I realize the high irony of a billionaire tech founder and investor saying all of this, but before any of that, I'm an American from central Ohio whose family worked in steel mills and on automobile assembly lines. If we build things that do not serve people like those I grew up with or cannot be held accountable by people like them, then we've completely failed. We've betrayed everything that makes this country what it is and what it can be. But both of these two possible images of the 21st century are bleak. Neither future works. So what's the third path? I believe it starts with asking better questions.
When founders start companies, they should ask how does this strengthen the country that is making this success possible? And when government works with tech, it shouldn't ask how do we control this? Rather, how can we leverage this to help the country thrive? Because American democratic capitalism is not abstract. It comes from a specific place and a specific set of ideals that we have an obligation to protect. You could move your company to another country, but it simply won't work. To think otherwise is a luxury belief.
By contrast, consider a belief rooted in history and reality. When government and builders work together, the results are extraordinary. Union Pacific built the transcontinental railroad. IBM helped us win the space race. Skunk Works is a large part of why the Cold War ended without a nuclear disaster. And today, companies like Anduril are trying to do the same. Building the autonomous arsenal for the next generation of deterrence.
If we get this relationship right for the decades ahead, the possibilities are enormous. AI that protects taxpayer dollars instead of a system that enables fraud. Nuclear energy that powers the heartland. Robotics that revive American industry. But none of this will happen if government and technology continue to treat each other as enemies. Vibe shifts come and go, but culture lasts. So our task is simple. It isn't just more humility and civic-mindedness from tech. And it isn't singularly the expectation of competence from government. It's to align the stakeholders to a common goal because the next American century will require that the hill and valley work together to govern and build. History is unkind to unserious nations. Our adversaries won't be kind to them either. So, the choice is ours. I challenge us to choose to be a serious one. Thank you.
