We are ceding technology leadership

I started this newsletter to share ideas and enthusiasm about technology, and to gently goad all of us to do a better job developing and deploying technology.  Those are the issues and ideas that are close to my heart.  I fell in love with technology and engineering as an Apollo-era kid, and I still believe that innovation can drive economic growth and a lot of good in the world.

But boy, did I pick a hard time to be enthusiastic about technology.  This Trump/Vance administration is just an absolute destroyer of progress and value.  I’ve talked about the pocketbook cost of the Trump/Vance administration, and it is a lot.  But the cost to our technology leadership and industry?  This administration is incalculably bad. The stock market drop will cost us some money now – but the destruction of our technology leadership will damage the lives of our children and grandchildren.

This thread says it better than I can: https://www.threads.net/@philbuildthefuturenow/post/DIXmSAYsLzl?xmt=AQGzgMZEDeJrL2lONuyYj3pRURcgBctf7LWfy8vt_Ed3dw.  We have a massive gap in education, R&D investment, and infrastructure relative to China — and this is going to be a drag on our economy for decades.  We aren’t graduating enough engineers.  We aren’t paying teachers competitively.  We aren’t building transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure fast enough.  We are falling behind on R&D investment, on patents. 

Meanwhile, the Trump/Vance administration isn’t investing in education. Instead, it is attacking our universities and tearing apart the education department without any sense of a goal for what we should do differently. It is pursuing an immigration policy that pushes away the best and brightest international students rather than drawing them in.  

Rather than an industrial policy focused on bringing the high-growth innovative industries to our shores, the administration is fighting to reshore low-wage manufacturing jobs, the jobs of the last century.  It is slowing down the entire biotech pipeline.

It isn’t easy to be enthusiastic about technology when the administration seems dedicated to destroying our leadership.  This is why my newsletter has taken more of a turn into politics than I had intended — we can’t have a great high-growth technology sector that creates great jobs if the government goes out of its way to damage the industry.  

The US has been a technology leader for decades. Chips, computers, the Internet, software, wireless communications, satellite-based services, life sciences, AI, and more are all the result of the combination of entrepreneurship, capital markets, our research universities, federal research funding, and immigration policy that encouraged the best in the world to come here. The next wave of breakthroughs is already in this pipeline—quantum, materials science, more life science breakthroughs, new waves of AI, etc.   

And now our government has decided to attack the elements of success.  Certainly, we can improve parts of the process; no part of our technology pipeline is immune to criticism.  But let’s have a discussion about how to improve the output and how to tweak the system.   Let’s not just attack university funding with no goal.   Or tear down skilled immigration with no goal.  Or whack federal research funding with no goal.   

We need a leader who states, “We will be the leaders in AI, quantum, electrification, energy, space, and pharma. We will invest R&D dollars in those areas, attract the best from around the world and encourage them to move here, protect our industries with tariffs, strong IP controls, and industrial policy, and have a tax policy encouraging investment in these areas."

But this is not the leadership we are getting.  We will cede leadership to others in the world, and our lives will be poorer for it.

Shorts

"If you write, don’t stop after a paragraph. Stop mid-thought. If you're coding, leave a function stub. The Zeigarnik Engine doesn't get its power from ticking boxes. It gets power from tension. And tension is what you need to build inertia." – I had never heard of the Zeigarnik Engine; what a great tool.

AI isn't useless, but personal fulfillment from creative work is equal to what was sacrificed to make it.   So true.  I can use AI tools to make silly pictures or write essays — but none of that is fulfilling.  You need to sweat the details and process yourself to get any sense of fulfillment.

What would a real anti-China trade strategy look like?  How we would do things if we were serious.  This is all common sense, what any rational thinker would come up with.  Our current government is simply not serious.

A wearable smart insole that tracks how you run, walk, stand.  I love products that fuse modern sensors and software into everyday objects.  The huge market for this is in sports training.  Golfers would go insane for this. There are others – OpenGo, Boogio – but not widely available and high cost.