My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Global population growth is slowing, and it’s not showing any signs of recovery. To the environmentalists of the 1970s, this may have seemed like a movement in the right direction. The drawbacks to population decline, however, are severe and numerous, and they’re not all obvious.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with economist and demographer Dean Spears about the depopulation trend that is transcending cultural barriers and ushering in a new global reality. We discuss the costs to the economy and human progress, and the inherent value of more people.

Spears is an associate professor of economics at Princeton University where he studies demography and development. He is also the founding executive director of r.i.c.e., a nonprofit research organization seeking to uplift children in rural northern India. He is a co-author with Michael Geruso of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People.

In This Episode

* Where we’re headed (1:32)

* Pumping the breaks (5:41)

* A pro-parenting culture (12:40)

* A place for AI (19:13)

* Preaching to the pro-natalist choir (23:40)

* Quantity and quality of life (28:48)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Where we’re headed (1:32)

. . . two thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below the two children per two adults level that would stabilize the population.

Pethokoukis: Who are you and your co-author trying to persuade and what are you trying to persuade them of? Are you trying to persuade them that global depopulation is a real thing, that it's a problem? Are you trying to persuade them to have more kids? Are you trying to persuade them to support a certain set of pro-child or pro-natalist policies?

Spears: We are trying to persuade quite a lot of people of two important things: One is that global depopulation is the most likely future — and what global depopulation means is that every decade, every generation, the world's population will shrink. That's the path that we're on. We're on that path because birth rates are low and falling almost everywhere. It’s one thing we're trying to persuade people of, that fact, and we're trying to persuade people to engage with a question of whether global depopulation is a future to welcome or whether we should want something else to happen. Should we let depopulation happen by default or could it be better to stabilize the global population at some appropriate level instead?

We fundamentally think that this is a question that a much broader section of society, of policy discourse, of academia should be talking about. We shouldn't just be leaving this discussion to the population scientists, demographic experts, not only to the people who already are worried about, or talking about low birth rates, but this is important enough and unprecedented enough that everybody should be engaging in this question. Whatever your ongoing values or commitments, there's a place for you in this conversation.

Is it your impression that the general public is aware of this phenomenon? Or are they still stuck in the ’70s thinking that population is running amok and we’ll have 30 billion people on this planet like was the scenario in the famous film, Soylent Green? I feel like the people I know are sort of aware that this is happening. I don't know what your experience is.

I think it's changing fast. I think more and more people are aware that birth rates are falling. I don't think that people are broadly aware — because when you hear it in the news, you might hear that birth rates in the United States have fallen low or birth rates in South Korea have fallen low. I think what not everybody knows is that two thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below the two children per two adults level that would stabilize the population.

I think people don't know that the world's birth rate has fallen from an average around five in 1950 to about 2.3 today, and that it's still falling and that people just haven't engaged with the thought that there's no special reason to expect it to stop and hold it to. But the same processes that have been bringing birth rates down will continue to bring them down, and people don't know that there's no real automatic stabilizer to expect it to come back up. Of the 26 countries that have had the lifetime birth rate fall below 1.9, none of them have had it go back up to two.

That's a lot of facts that are not as widely known as they should be, but then the implication of it, that if the world's birth rate goes below two and stays there, we're going to have depopulation generation after generation. I think for a lot of people, they're still in the mindset that depopulation is almost conceptually impossible, that either we're going to have population growth or something else like zero population growth like people might've talked about in the ’70s. But the idea that a growth rate of zero is just a number and then that it's not going to stop there, it's going to go negative, I think that's something that a lot of people just haven't thought about.

Pumping the breaks (5:41)

We wrote this book because we hope that there will be an alternative to depopulation society will choose, but there’s no reason to expect or believe that it's going happen automatically.

You said there's no automatic stabilizers — at first take, that sounds like we're going to zero. Is there a point where the global population does hit a stability point?

No, that's just the thing.

So we're going to zero?

Well, “there's no automatic stabilizer” isn't the same thing as “we're definitely going to zero.” It could be that society comes together and decides to support parenting, invest more in the next generation, invest more in parents and families, and do more to help people choose to be parents. We wrote this book because we hope that there will be an alternative to depopulation society will choose, but there’s no reason to expect or believe that it's going happen automatically. In no country where the birth rate has gone to two has it just magically stopped and held there forever.

I think a biologist might say that the desire to reproduce, that's an evolved drive, and even if right now we're choosing to have smaller families, that biological urge doesn't vanish. We've had population, fertility rates, rise and fall throughout history — don't you think that there is some sort of natural stabilizer?

We've had fluctuations throughout history, but those fluctuations have been around a pretty long and pretty widely-shared downward trend. Americans might be mostly only now hearing about falling birth rates because the US was sort of anomalous amongst richer countries and having a relatively flat period from the 1970s to around 2010 or so, whereas birth rates were falling in other countries, they weren't falling in the US in the same way, but they were falling in the US before then, they're falling in the US since then, and when you plot it over the long history with other countries, it's clear that, for the world as a whole, as long as we've had records, not just for decades, but for centuries, we've seen birth rates be falling. It's not just a new thing, it's a very long-term trend.

It's a very widely-shared trend because humans are unlike other animals in the important way that we make decisions. We have culture, we have rationality, we have irrationality, we have all of these. The reason the population grew is because we've learned how to keep ourselves and our children alive. We learned how to implement sanitation, implement antibiotics, implement vaccines, and so more of the children who were born survived even as the birth rate was falling all along. Other animals don't do that. Other animals don't invent sanitation systems and antibiotics and so I think that we can't just reason immediately from other animal populations to what's going to happen to humans.

I think one can make a plausible case that, even if you think that this is a problem — and again, it's a global problem, or a global phenomenon, advanced countries, less-advanced countries — that it is a phenomenon of such sweep that if you're going to say we need to stabilize or slow down, that it would take a set of policies of equal sweep to counter it. Do those actually exist?

No. Nobody has a turnkey solution. There's nothing shovel-ready here. In fact, it's too early to be talking about policy solutions or “here's my piece of legislation, here's what the government should do” because we’re just not there yet, both in terms of the democratic process of people understanding the situation and there even being a consensus that stabilization, at some level, would be better than depopulation, nor are we there yet on having any sort of answer that we can honestly recommend as being tested and known to be something that will reliably stabilize the population.

I think the place to start is by having conversations like this one where we get people to engage with the evidence, and engage with the question, and just sort of move beyond a reflexive welcoming of depopulation by default and start thinking about, well, what are the costs of people and what are the benefits of people? Would we be better off in a future that isn't depopulating over the long run?

The only concrete step I can think of us taking right now is adapting the social safety net to a new demographic reality. Beyond that, it seems like there might have to be a cultural shift of some kind, like a large-scale religious revival. Or maybe we all become so rich that we have more time on our hands and decide to have more kids. But do you think at some point someone will have a concrete solution to bring global fertility back up to 2.1 or 2.2?

Look at it like this: The UN projects that the peak will be about six decades from now in 2084. Of course, I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know that it's going to be 2084, but let's take that six-decades timeline seriously because we're not talking about something that's going to happen next year or even next decade.

But six decades ago, people were aware that — or at least leading scientists and even some policymakers were aware that climate change was a challenge. The original computations by Arrhenius of the radiative forcing were long before that. You have the Johnson speech to Congress, you have Nixon and the EPA. People were talking about climate change as a challenge six decades ago, but if somebody had gotten on their equivalent of a podcast and said, “What we need to do is immediately get rid of the internal combustion engine,” they would've been rightly laughed out of the room because that would've been the wrong policy solution at that time. That would've been jumping to the wrong solution. Instead, what we needed to do was what we've done, which is the science, the research, the social change that we're now at a place where emissions per person in the US have been falling for 20 years and we have technologies — wind, and solar, and batteries — that didn't exist before because there have been decades of working on it.

So similarly, over the next six decades, let's build the research, build the science, build the social movement, discover things we don't know, more social science, more awareness, and future people will know more than you and I do about what might be constructive responses to this challenge, but only if we start talking about it now. It's not a crisis to panic about and do the first thing that comes to mind. This is a call to be more thoughtful about the future.

A pro-parenting culture (12:40)

The world's becoming more similar in this important way that the difference across countries and difference across societies is getting smaller as birth rates converge downward.

But to be clear, you would like people to have more kids.

I would like for us to get on a path where more people who want to be parents have the sort of support, and environment, and communities they need to be able to choose that. I would like people to be thinking about all of this when they make their family decisions. I'd like the rest of us to be thinking about this when we pitch in and do more to help us. I don't think that anybody's necessarily making the wrong decision for themselves if they look around and think that parenting is not for them or having more children is not for them, but I think we might all be making a mistake if we're not doing more to support parents or to recognize the stake we have in the next generation.

But all those sorts of individual decisions that seem right for an individual or for a couple, combined, might turn into a societal decision.

Absolutely. I'm an economics professor. We call this “externalities,” where there are social benefits of something that are different from the private costs and benefits. If I decide that I want to drive and I contribute to traffic congestion, then that's an externality. At least in principle, we understand what to do about that: You share the cost, you share the benefits, you help the people internalize the social decision.

It's tied up in the fact that we have a society where some people we think of as doing care work and some people we think of as doing important work. So we've loaded all of these costs of making the next generation on people during the years of their parenting and especially on women and mothers. It's understandable that, from a strictly economic point of view, somebody looks at that and thinks, “The private costs are greater than the private benefits. I'm not going to do that.” It's not my position to tell somebody that they're wrong about that. What you do in a situation like that is share and lighten that burden. If there's a social reason to solve traffic congestion, then you solve it with public policy over the long run. If the social benefits of there being a flourishing next generation are greater than people are finding in their own decision making, then we need to find the ways to invest in families, invest in parenting, lift and share those burdens so that people feel like they can choose to be parents.

I would think there’s a cultural component here. I am reminded of a book by Jonathan Last about this very issue in which he talks about Old Town Alexandria here in Virginia, how, if you go to Old Town, you can find lots of stores selling stuff for dogs, but if you want to buy a baby carriage, you can't find anything.

Of course, that's an equilibrium outcome, but go on.

If we see a young couple pushing a stroller down the street and inside they have a Chihuahua — as society, or you personally, would you see that and “Think that's wrong. That seems like a young couple living in a nice area, probably have plenty of dough, they can afford daycare, and yet they're still not going to have a kid and they're pushing a dog around a stroller?” Should we view that as something's gone wrong with our society?

My own research is about India. My book's co-authored with Mike Geruso. He studies the United States more. I'm more of an expert on India.

Paul Ehrlich, of course, begins his book, The Population Bomb, in India.

Yes, I know. He starts with this feeling of being too crowded with too many people. I say in the book that I almost wonder if I know the exact spot where he has that experience. I think it's where one of my favorite shops are for buying scales and measuring tape for measuring the health of children in Uttar Pradesh. But I digress about Paul Ehrlich.

India now, where Paul Ehrlich was worried about overpopulation, is now a society with an average birth rate below two kids per two adults. Even Uttar Pradesh, the big, disadvantaged, poor state where I do my work in research, the average young woman there says that they want an average of 1.9 children. This is a place where society and culture is pretty different from the United States. In the US, we're very accustomed to this story of work and family conflict, and career conflicts, especially for women, and that's probably very important in a lot of people's lives. But that's not what's going on in India where female labor force participation is pretty low. Or you hear questions about whether this is about the decline of religiosity, but India is a place where religion is still very important to a lot of people's lives. Marriage is almost universal. Marriage happens early. People start their childbearing careers in their early twenties, and you still see people having an average below two kids. They start childbearing young and they end childbearing young.

Similarly, in Latin America, where religiosity, at least as reported in surveys, remains pretty high, but Latin America is at an average of 1.8, and it's not because people are delaying fertility until they're too old to get pregnant. You see a lot of people having permanent contraception surgery, tubal obligations.

And so this cultural story where people aren't getting married, they're starting too late, they're putting careers first, it doesn't match the worldwide diversity. These diverse societies we're seeing are all converging towards low birth rates. The world's becoming more similar in this important way that the difference across countries and difference across societies is getting smaller as birth rates converge downward. So I don't think we can easily point towards any one cultural for this long-term and widely shared trend.

A place for AI (19:13)

If AI in the future is a compliment to what humans produce . . . if AI is making us more productive, then it's all the bigger loss to have fewer people.

At least from an economic perspective, I think you can make the case: fewer people, less strain on resources, you’re worried about workers, AI-powered robots are going to be doing a lot of work, and if you're worried about fewer scientists, the scientists we do have are going to have AI-powered research assistants.

Which makes the scientists more important. Many technologies over history have been compliments to what humans do, not substitutes. If AI in the future is a compliment to what humans produce — scientific research or just the learning by doing that people do whenever they're engaging in an enterprise or trying to create something — if AI is making us more productive, then it's all the bigger loss to have fewer people.

To me, the best of both worlds would be to have even more scientists plus AI. But isn’t the fear of too few people causing a labor shortage sort of offset by AI and robotics? Maybe we’ll have plenty of technology and capital to supply the workers we do have. If that’s not the worry, maybe the worry is that the human experience is simply worse when there are fewer children around.

You used the term “plenty of,” and I think that sort of assumes that there's a “good enough,” and I want to push back on that because I think what matters is to continue to make progress towards higher living standards, towards poverty alleviation, towards longer, better, healthier, safer, richer lives. What matters is whether we're making as much progress as we could towards an abundant, rich, safe, healthy future. I think we shouldn't let ourselves sloppily accept a concept of “good enough.” If we're not making the sort of progress that we could towards better lives, then that's a loss, and that matters for people all around the world.

We're better off for living in a world with other people. Other people are win-win: Their lives are good for them and their lives are good for you. Part of that, as you say, is people on the supply side of the economy, people having the ideas and the realizations that then can get shared over and over again. The fact that ideas are this non-depletable resource that don't get used up but might never be discovered if there aren't people to discover them. That's one reason people are important on the supply side of the economy, but other people are also good for you on the demand side of the economy.

This is very surprising because people think that other people are eating your slice of the pie, and if there are more other people, there's less for me. But you have to ask yourself, why does the pie exist in the first place? Why is it worth some baker's while to bake a pie that I could get a slice of? And that's because there were enough people wanting slices of pie to make it worth paying the fixed costs of having a bakery and baking a whole pie.

In other words, you're made better off when other people want and need the same things that you want and need because that makes it more likely for it to exist. If you have some sort of specialized medical need and need specialized care, you're going to be more likely to find it in a city where there are more other people than in a less-populated rural place, and you're going to be more likely to find it in a course of history where there have been more other people who have had the same medical need that you do so that it's been worthwhile for some sort of cure to exist. The goodness of other people for you isn't just when they're creating things, it's also when they're just needing the same things that you do.

And, of course, if you think that getting to live a good life is a good thing, that there's something valuable about being around to have good experiences, that a world of more people having good experiences has more goodness in it than a world of fewer people having good experiences in it. That's one thing that counts, and it's one important consideration for why a stabilized future might be better than a depopulating future. Now, I don't expect everyone to immediately agree with that, but I do think that the likelihood of depopulation should prompt us to ask that question.

Preaching to the pro-natalist choir (23:40)

If you are already persuaded listening to this, then go strike up a conversation with somebody.

Now, listening to what you just said, which I thought was fantastic, you're a great explainer, that is wonderful stuff — but I couldn't help but think, as you explained that, that you end up spending a lot of time with people who, because they read the New York Times, they may understand that the ’70s population fears aren't going to happen, that we're not going to have a population of 30 billion that we're going to hit, I don't know, 10 billion in the 2060s and then go down. And they think, “Well, that's great.”

You have to spend a lot of time explaining to them about the potential downsides and why people are good, when like half the population in this country already gets it: “You say ‘depopulation,’ you had us at the word, ‘depopulation.’” You have all these people who are on the right who already think that — a lot of people I know, they're there.

Is your book an effective tool to build on that foundation who already think it's an issue, are open to policy ideas, does your book build on that or offer anything to those people?

I think that, even if this is something that people have thought about before, a lot of how people have thought about it is in terms of pension plans, the government's budget, the age structure, the nearer-term balance of workers to retirees.

There's plenty of people on the right who maybe they're aware of those things, but also think that it really is kind of a The Children of Men argument. They just think a world with more children is better. A world where the playgrounds are alive is better — and yes, that also may help us with social security, but there's a lot of people for whom you don't have to even make that economic argument. That seems to me that that would be a powerful team of evangelists — and I mean it in a nonreligious way — evangelists for your idea that population is declining and there are going to be some serious side effects.

If you are already persuaded listening to this, then go strike up a conversation with somebody. That's what we want to have happen. I think minds are going to be changed in small batches on this one. So if you're somebody who already thinks this way, then I encourage you to go out there and start a conversation. I think not everybody, even people who think about population for a living — for example, one of the things that we engage with in the book is the philosophy of population ethics, or population in social welfare as economists might talk about it.

There have been big debates there over should we care about average wellbeing? Should we care about total wellbeing? Part of what we're trying to say in the book is, one, we think that some of those debates have been misplaced or are asking what we don't think are the right questions, but also to draw people to what we can learn from thinking of where questions like this agree. Because this whole question of should we make the future better in total or make the better on average is sort of presuming this Ehrlich-style mindset that if the future is more populous, then it must be worse for each. But once you see that a future that's more populous is also more prosperous, it'd be better in total and better on average, then a lot of these debates might still have academic interest, but both ways of thinking about what would be a better future agree.

So there are these pockets of people out there who have thought about this before, and part of what we're trying to do is bring them together in a unified conversation where we're talking about the climate modeling, we're talking about the economics, we're talking about the philosophy, we're talking about the importance of gender equity and reproductive freedom, and showing that you can think and care about all of these things and still think that a stabilized future might be better than depopulation.

In the think tank world, the dream is to have an idea and then some presidential candidate adopts the idea and pushes it forward. There’s a decent chance that the 2028 Republican nominee is already really worried about this issue, maybe someone like JD Vance. Wouldn’t that be helpful for you?

I've never spoken with JD Vance, but from my point of view, I would also be excited for India's population to stabilize and not depopulate. I don't see this as an “America First” issue because it isn't an America First issue. It's a worldwide, broadly-shared phenomenon. I think that no one country is going to be able to solve this all on its own because, if nothing else, people move, people immigrate, societies influence one another. I think it's really a broadly-shared issue.

Quantity and quality of life (28:48)

What I do feel confident about is that some stabilized size would be better than depopulation generation after generation, after generation, after generation, without any sort of leveling out, and I think that's the plan that we're on by default.

Can you imagine an earth of 10 to 12 billion people at a sustained level being a great place to live, where everybody is doing far better than they are today, the poorest countries are doing better — can you imagine that scenario? Can you also imagine a scenario where we have a world of three to four billion, which is a way nicer place to live for everybody than it is today? Can both those scenarios happen?

I don't see any reason to think that either of those couldn't be an equilibrium, depending on all the various policy choices and all the various . . .

This is a very broad question.

Exactly. I think it's way beyond the social science, economics, climate science we have right now to say “three billion is the optimal size, 10 billion is the optimal size, eight billion is the optimal size.” What I do feel confident about is that some stabilized size would be better than depopulation generation after generation, after generation, after generation, without any sort of leveling out, and I think that's the plan that we're on by default. That doesn't mean it's what's going to happen, I hope it's not what happens, and that's sort of the point of the conversation here to get more people to consider that.

But let's say we were able to stabilize the population at 11 billion. That would be fine.

It could be depending on what the people do.

But I’m talking about a world of 11 billion, and I'm talking about a world where the average person in India is as wealthy as, let's say this is in the year 2080, 2090, and at minimum, the average person in India is as wealthy as the average American is today. So that's a big huge jump in wealth and, of course, environmentalism.

And we make responsible environmental choices, whether that's wind, or solar, or nuclear, or whatever, I'm not going to be prescriptive on that, but I don't see any reason why not. My hope is that future people will know more about that question than I do. Ehrlich would've said that our present world of eight billion would be impossible, that we would've starved long before this, that England would've ceased to exist, I think is a prediction in his book somewhere.

And there's more food per person on every continent. Even in the couple decades that I've been going to India, children are taller than they used to be, on average. You can measure it, and maybe I'm fooling myself, but I feel like I can see it. Even as the world's been growing more populous, people have been getting better off, poverty has been going down, the absolute number of people in extreme poverty has been going down, even as the world's been getting more populous. As I say, emissions per person have been going down in a lot of places.

I don't see any in principle, reason, if people make the right decisions, that we couldn't have a sustainable, healthy, and good, large sustained population. I've got two kids and they didn't add to the hole in the ozone layer, which I would've heard about in school as a big problem in the ’80s. They didn't add to acid rain. Why not? Because the hole in the ozone layer was confronted with the Montreal Protocol. The acid rain was confronted with the Clean Air Act. They don't drive around in cars with leaded gasoline because in the ’70s, the gasoline was unleaded. Adding more people doesn't have to make things worse. It depends on what happens. Again, I hope future people will know more about this than I do, but I don't see any, in principle reason why we couldn't stabilize at a size larger than today and have it be a healthy, and sustainable, and flourishing society.

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* On why AI won't take all the jobs - @Dan_Jeffries1

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But with climate change and energy-hungry AI making daily headlines, the time — finally — for a nuclear renaissance seems to have arrived.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Dr. Tim Gregory about the safety and efficacy of modern nuclear power, as well as the ambitious energy goals we should set for our society.

Gregory is a nuclear scientist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. He is also a popular science broadcaster on radio and TV, and an author. His most recent book, Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World is out now.

In This Episode

* A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)

* Motivators for a revival (7:20)

* About nuclear waste . . . (12:41)

* Not your mother’s reactors (17:25)

* Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)

The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation.

Pethokoukis: Why do America, Europe, Japan not today get most of their power from nuclear fission, since that would've been a very reasonable prediction to make in 1965 or 1975, but it has not worked out that way? What's your best take on why it hasn't?

Going back to the ’50s and ’60s, it looked like that was the world that we currently live in. It was all to play for, and there were a few reasons why that didn't happen, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It's a startling statistic that the US built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Three Mile Island than it has built since. And similarly on this side of the Atlantic, Europe built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than it has built since, which is just astounding, especially given that nobody died in Three Mile Island and nobody was even exposed to anything beyond the background radiation as a result of that nuclear accident.

Chernobyl, of course, was far more consequential and far more serious than Three Mile Island. 30-odd people died in the immediate aftermath, mostly people who were working at the power station and the first responders, famously the firefighters who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, and probably a couple of hundred people died in the affected population from thyroid cancer. It was people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident.

So although every death from Chernobyl was a tragedy because it was avoidable, they're not in proportion to the mythic reputation of the night in question. It certainly wasn't reason to effectively end nuclear power expansion in Europe because of course we had to get that power from somewhere, and it mainly came from fossil fuels, which are not just a little bit more deadly than nuclear power, they’re orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear power. When you add up all of the deaths from nuclear power and compare those deaths to the amount of electricity that we harvest from nuclear power, it's actually as safe as wind and solar, whereas fossil fuels kill hundreds or thousands of times more people per unit of power. To answer your question, it's complicated and there are many answers, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

I wonder how things might have unfolded if those events hadn’t happened or if society had responded proportionally to the actual damage. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are portrayed in documentaries and on TV as far deadlier than they really were, and they still loom large in the public imagination in a really unhelpful way.

You see it online, actually, quite a lot about the predicted death toll from Chernobyl, because, of course, there's no way of saying exactly which cases of cancer were caused by Chernobyl and which ones would've happened anyway. Sometimes you see estimates that are up in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. They are always based on a flawed scientific hypothesis called the linear no-threshold model that I go into in quite some detail in chapter eight of my book, which is all about the human health effects of exposure to radiation. This model is very contested in the literature. It's one of the most controversial areas of medical science, actually, the effects of radiation on the human body, and all of these massive numbers you see of the death toll from Chernobyl, they're all based on this really kind of clunky, flawed, contentious hypothesis. My reading of the literature is that there's very, very little physical evidence to support this particular hypothesis, but people take it and run. I don’t know if it would be too far to accuse people of pushing a certain idea of Chernobyl, but it almost certainly vastly, vastly overestimates the effects.

I think a large part of the reason of why this had such a massive impact on the public and politicians is this lingering sense of radiophobia that completely blight society. We've all seen it in the movies, in TV shows, even in music and computer games — radiation is constantly used as a tool to invoke fear and mistrust. It's this invisible, centerless, silent specter that's kind of there in the background: It means birth defects, it means cancers, it means ill health. We've all kind of grown up in this culture where the motif of radiation is bad news, it's dangerous, and that inevitably gets tied to people's sense of nuclear power. So when you get something like Three Mile Island, society's imagination and its preconceptions of radiation, it's just like a dry haystack waiting for a flint spark to land on it, and up it goes in flames and people's imaginations run away with them.

The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation. There's this amazing statistic that if you live within a couple of miles of a nuclear power station, the extra amount of radiation you're exposed to annually is about the same as eating a banana. Bananas are slightly radioactive because of the slight amount of potassium-40 that they naturally contain. Even in the wake of these nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima, the amount of radiation that the public was exposed to barely registers and, in fact, is less than the background radiation in lots of places on the earth.

Motivators for a revival (7:20)

We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.

You just suddenly reminded me of a story of when I was in college in the late 1980s, taking a class on the nuclear fuel cycle. You know it was an easy class because there was an ampersand in it. “Nuclear fuel cycle” would've been difficult. “Nuclear fuel cycle & the environment,” you knew it was not a difficult class.

The man who taught it was a nuclear scientist and, at one point, he said that he would have no problem having a nuclear reactor in his backyard. This was post-Three Mile Island, post-Chernobyl, and the reaction among the students — they were just astounded that he would be willing to have this unbelievably dangerous facility in his backyard.

We have this fear of nuclear power, and there's sort of an economic component, but now we're seeing what appears to be a nuclear renaissance. I don't think it's driven by fear of climate change, I think it's driven A) by fear that if you are afraid of climate change, just solar and wind aren't going to get you to where you want to be; and then B) we seem like we're going to need a lot of clean energy for all these AI data centers. So it really does seem to be a perfect storm after a half-century.

And who knows what next. When I started writing Going Nuclear, the AI story hadn't broken yet, and so all of the electricity projections for our future demand, which, they range from doubling to tripling, we're going to need a lot of carbon-free electricity if we've got any hope of electrifying society whilst getting rid of fossil fuels. All of those estimates were underestimates because nobody saw AI coming.

It's been very, very interesting just in the last six, 12 months seeing Big Tech in North America moving first on this. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all either invested or actually placed orders for small modular reactors specifically to power their AI data centers. In some ways, they've kind of led the charge on this. They've moved faster than most nation states, although it is encouraging, actually, here in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, the government announced that our new nuclear power station is definitely going ahead down in Sizewell in Suffolk in the south of England. That's a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor, it's absolutely massive. But it's been really, really encouraging to see Big Tech in the private sector in North America take the situation into their own hands. If anyone's real about electricity demands and how reliable you need it, it's Big Tech with these data centers.

I always think, go back five, 10 years, talk of AI was only on the niche subreddits and techie podcasts where people were talking about it. It broke into the mainstream all of a sudden. Who knows what is going to happen in the next five or 10 years. We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.

In the US, at least, I don’t think decarbonization alone is enough to win broad support for nuclear, since a big chunk of the country doesn’t think we actually need to do that. But I think that pairing it with the promise of rapid AI-driven economic growth creates a stronger case.

I tried to appeal to a really broad church in Going Nuclear because I really, really do believe that whether you are completely preoccupied by climate change and environmental issues or you're completely preoccupied by economic growth, and raising living, standards and all of that kind of thing, all the monetary side of things, nuclear is for you because if you solve the energy problem, you solve both problems at once. You solve the economic problem and the environmental problem.

There's this really interesting relationship between GDP per head — which is obviously incredibly important in economic terms — and energy consumption per head, and it's basically a straight line relationship between the two. There are no rich countries that aren't also massive consumers of energy, so if you really, really care about the economy, you should really also be caring about energy consumption and providing energy abundance so people can go out and use that energy to create wealth and prosperity. Again, that's where nuclear comes in. You can use nuclear power to sate that massive energy demand that growing economies require.

This podcast is very pro-wealth and prosperity, but I'll also say, if the nuclear dreams of the ’60s where you had, in this country, what was the former Atomic Energy Commission expecting there to be 1000 nuclear reactors in this country by the year 2000, we're not having this conversation about climate change. It is amazing that what some people view as an existential crisis could have been prevented — by the United States and other western countries, at least — just making a different political decision.

We would be spending all of our time talking about something else, and how nice would that be?

For sure. I'm sure there'd be other existential crises to worry about.

But for sure, we wouldn't be talking about climate change was anywhere near the volume or the sense of urgency as we are now if we would've carried on with the nuclear expansion that really took off in the ’70s and the ’80s. It would be something that would be coming our way in a couple of centuries.

About nuclear waste . . . (12:41)

. . . a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup.

I don't know if you've ever seen the television show For All Mankind?

I haven't. So many people have recommended it to me.

It’s great. It’s an alt-history that looks at what if the Space Race had never stopped. As a result, we had a much more tech-enthusiastic society, which included being much more pro-nuclear.

Anyway, imagine if you are on a plane talking to the person next to you, and the topic of your book comes up, and the person says hey, I like energy, wealth, prosperity, but what are you going to do about the nuclear waste?

That almost exact situation has happened, but on a train rather than an airplane. One of the cool things about uranium is just how much energy you can get from a very small amount of it. If typical person in a highly developed economy, say North America, Europe, something like that, if they produced all of their power over their entire lifetime from nuclear alone, so forget fossil fuels, forget wind and solar, a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. You need a very small amount of uranium to power somebody's life, and the natural conclusion of that is you get a very small amount of waste for a lifetime of power. So in terms of the numbers, and the amount of nuclear waste, it's just not that much of a problem.

However, I don't want to just try and trivialize it out of existence with some cool pithy statistics and some cool back-of-the-envelopes physics calculations because we still have to do something with the nuclear waste. This stuff is going to be radioactive for the best part of a million years. Thankfully, it's quite an easy argument to make because good old Finland, which is one of the most nuclear nations on the planet as a share of nuclear in its grid, has solved this problem. It has implemented — and it's actually working now — the world's first and currently only geological repository for nuclear waste. Their idea is essentially to bury it in impermeable bedrock and leave it there because, as with all radioactive objects, nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. The idea is that, in a million years, Finland's nuclear waste won't be nuclear waste anymore, it will just be waste. A million years sounds like a really long time to our ears, but it's actually —

It does.

It sounds like a long time, but it is the blink of an eye, geologically. So to a geologist, a million years just comes and goes straight away. So it's really not that difficult to keep nuclear waste safe underground on those sorts of timescales. However — and this is the really cool thing, and this is one of the arguments that I make in my book — there are actually technologies that we can use to recycle nuclear waste. It turns out that when you pull uranium out of a reactor, once it's been burned for a couple of years in a reactor, 95 percent of the atoms are still usable. You can still use them to generate nuclear power. So by throwing away nuclear waste when it's been through a nuclear reactor once, we're actually squandering like 95 percent of material that we're throwing away.

The theory is this sort of the technology behind breeder reactors?

That's exactly right, yes.

What about the plutonium? People are worried about the plutonium!

People are worried about the plutonium, but in a breeder reactor, you get rid of the plutonium because you split it into fission products, and fission products are still radioactive, but they have much shorter half-lives than plutonium. So rather than being radioactive for, say, a million years, they're only radioactive, really, for a couple of centuries, maybe 1000 years, which is a very, very different situation when you think about long-term storage.

I read so many papers and memos from the ’50s when these reactors were first being built and demonstrated, and they worked, by the way, they're actually quite easy to build, it just happened in a couple of years. Breeder reactors were really seen as the future of humanity's power demands. Forget traditional nuclear power stations that we all use at the moment, which are just kind of once through and then you throw away 95 percent of the energy at the end of it. These breeder reactors were really, really seen as the future.

They never came to fruition because we discovered lots of uranium around the globe, and so the supply of uranium went up around the time that the nuclear power expansion around the world kind of seized up, so the uranium demand dropped as the supply increased, so the demand for these breeder reactors kind of petered out and fizzled out. But if we're really, really serious about the medium-term future of humanity when it comes to energy, abundance, and prosperity, we need to be taking a second look at these breeder reactors because there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground around the world now to power the world for almost 1000 years. After that, we'll have something else. Maybe we'll have nuclear fusion.

Well, I hope it doesn't take a thousand years for nuclear fusion.

Yes, me too.

Not your mother’s reactors (17:25)

In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming.

I don’t think most people are aware of how much innovation has taken place around nuclear in the past few years, or even few decades. It’s not just a climate change issue or that we need to power these data centers — the technology has vastly improved. There are newer, safer technologies, so we’re not talking about 1975-style reactors.

Even if it were the 1975-style reactors, that would be fine because they’re pretty good and they have an absolutely impeccable safety record punctuated by a very small number of high-profile events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'm not to count Three Mile Island on that list because nobody died, but you know what I mean.

But the modern nuclear reactors are amazing. The ones that are coming out of France, the EPRs, the European Power Reactors, there are going to be two of those in the UK's new nuclear power station, and they've been designed to withstand an airplane flying into the side of them, so they're basically bomb-proof.

As for these small modular reactors, that's getting people very excited, too. As their name suggests, they're small. How small is a reasonable question — the answer is as small as you want to go. These things are scalable, and I've seen designs for just one-megawatt reactors that could easily fit inside a shipping container. They could fit in the parking lots around the side of a data center, or in the basement even, all the way up to multi-hundred-megawatt reactors that could fit on a couple of tennis courts worth of land. But it's really the modular part that's the most interesting thing. That's the ‘M’ and that's never been done before.

Which really gets to the economics of the SMRs.

It really does. The idea is you could build upwards of 90 percent of these reactors on a factory line. We know from the history of industrialization that as soon as you start mass producing things, the unit cost just plummets and the timescales shrink. No one has achieved that yet, though. There's a lot of hype around small modular reactors, and so it's kind of important not to get complacent and really keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is mass-production and mass rapid deployment of nuclear power stations, crucially in the places where you need them the most, as well.

We often think about just decarbonizing our electricity supply or decoupling our electricity supply from volatilities in the fossil fuel market, but it’s about more than electricity, as well. We need heat for things like making steel, making the ammonia that feeds most people on the planet, food and drinks factories, car manufacturers, plants that rely on steam. You need heat, and thankfully, the primary energy from a nuclear reactor is heat. The electricity is secondary. We have to put effort into making that. The heat just kind of happens. So there's this idea that we could use the surplus heat from nuclear reactors to power industrial processes that are very, very difficult to decarbonize. Small modular reactors would be perfect for that because you could nestle them into the industrial centers that need the heat close by. So honestly, it is really our imaginations that are the limits with these small modular reactors.

They've opened a couple of nuclear reactors down in Georgia here. The second one was a lot cheaper and faster to build because they had already learned a bunch of lessons building that first one, and it really gets at sort of that repeatability where every single reactor doesn't have to be this one-off bespoke project. That is not how it works in the world of business. How you get cheaper things is by building things over and over, you get very good at building them, and then you're able to turn these things out at scale. That has not been the economic situation with nuclear reactors, but hopefully with small modular reactors, or even if we just start building a lot of big advanced reactors, we'll get those economies of scale and hopefully the economic issue will then take care of itself.

For sure, and it is exactly the same here in the UK. The last reactor that we connected to the grid was in 1995. I was 18 months old. I don't even know if I was fluent in speaking at 18 months old. I was really, really young. Our newest nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C, which is going to come online in the next couple of years, was hideously expensive. The uncharitable view of that is that it's just a complete farce and is just a complete embarrassment, but honestly, you've got to think about it: 1995, the last nuclear reactor in the UK, it was going to take a long time, it was going to be expensive, basically doing it from scratch. We had no supply chain. We didn't really have a workforce that had ever built a nuclear reactor before, and with this new reactor that just got announced a couple of weeks ago, the projected price is 20 percent cheaper, and it is still too expensive, it's still more expensive than it should be, but you're exactly right.

By tapping into those economies of scale, the cost per nuclear reactor will fall, and France did this in the ’70s and ’80s. Their nuclear program is so amazing. France is still the most nuclear nation on the planet as a share of its total electricity. In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming. By the way, still today, all of those reactors are still working and they pay less than the European Union average for that electricity, so this idea that nuclear makes your electricity expensive is simply not true. They built 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, and they did them in parallel. It was just absolutely amazing. I would love to see a French-style nuclear rollout in all developed countries across the world. I think that would just be absolutely amazing.

Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)

I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.

What is your enthusiasm level or expectation about nuclear fusion? I can tell you that the Silicon Valley people I talk to are very positive. I know they're inherently very positive people, but they're very enthusiastic about the prospects over the next decade, if not sooner, of commercial fusion. How about you?

It would be incredible. The last question that I was asked in my PhD interview 10 years ago was, “If you could solve one scientific or engineering problem, what would it be?” and my answer was nuclear fusion. And that would be the answer that I would give today. It just seems to me to be obviously the solution to the long-term energy needs of humanity. However, I'm less optimistic, perhaps, than the Silicon Valley crowd. The running joke, of course, is that it's always 40 years away and it recedes into the future at one year per year.

So I would love to be proved wrong, but realistically — no one's even got it working in a prototype power station. That’s before we even think about commercializing it and deploying it at scale. I really, really think that we're decades away, maybe even something like a century. I'd be surprised if it took longer than a century, actually. I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.

Don't go to California with that attitude. I can tell you that even when I go there and I talk about AI, if I say that AI will do anything less than improve economic growth by a factor of 100, they just about throw me out over there. Let me just finish up by asking you this: Earlier, we mentioned Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How resilient do you think this nuclear renaissance is to an accident?

Even if we take the rate of accident over the last 70 years of nuclear power production and we maintain that same level of rate of accident, if you like, it's still one of the safest things that our species does, and everyone talks about the death toll from nuclear power, but nobody talks about the lives that it's already saved because of the fossil fuels, that it's displaced fossil fuels. They're so amazing in some ways, they're so convenient, they're so energy-dense, they've created the modern world as we all enjoy it in the developed world and as the developing world is heading towards it.

But there are some really, really nasty consequences of fossil fuels, and whether or not you care about climate change, even the air pollution alone and the toll that that takes on human health is enough to want to phase them out. Nuclear power already is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and I read this really amazing paper that globally, it was something like between the ’70s and the ’90s, nuclear power saved about two million lives because of the fossil fuels that it displaced. That's, again, orders of magnitude more lives that have been lost as a consequence of nuclear power, mostly because of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if the safety record of nuclear in the past stays the same and we forward-project that into the future, it's still a winning horse to bet on.

If in the UK they've started up one new nuclear reactor in the past 30 years, right? How many would you guess will be started over the next 15 years?

Four or five. Something like that, I think; although I don't know.

Is that a significant number to you?

It's not enough for my liking. I would like to see many, many more. Look at France. I know I keep going back to it, but it's such a brilliant example. If France hadn't done what they'd done in between the ’70s and the ’90s — 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, all of which are still working — it would be a much more difficult case to make because there would be no historical precedent for it. So, maybe predictably, I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a French-scale nuclear rollout, let's put it that way.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics - WSJ

* AI Spending Is Propping Up the Economy, Right? It’s Complicated. - Barron’s

* Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. - NYT

* Sam Altman says Gen Z are the 'luckiest' kids in history thanks to AI, despite mounting job displacement dread - NYT

* Lab-Grown Diamonds Are Testing the Power of Markets - Bberg Opinion

* Why globalisation needs a leader: Hegemons, alignment, and trade - CEPR

* The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find - SSRN

* An Assessment of China's Innovative Capacity - The Fed

* Markets are so used to the TACO trade they didn't even blink when Trump extended a tariff delay with China - Fortune

* Labor unions mobilize to challenge advance of algorithms in workplaces - Wapo

* ChatGPT loves this bull market. Human investors are more cautious. - Axios

* What is required for a post-growth model? - Arxiv

* What Would It Take to Bring Back US Manufacturing? - Bridgewater

▶ Business

* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg

* Alexa Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. How Smart Is It Now? - NYT

* Google and IBM believe first workable quantum computer is in sight - FT

* Why does Jeff Bezos keep buying launches from Elon Musk? - Ars

* Beijing demands Chinese tech giants justify purchases of Nvidia’s H20 chips - FT

* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg Opinion

* Why Businesses Say Tariffs Have a Delayed Effect on Inflation - Richmond Fed

* Lisa Su Runs AMD—and Is Out for Nvidia’s Blood - Wired

* Forget the White House Sideshow. Intel Must Decide What It Wants to Be. - WSJ

* With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO Buys His Way Out of the Trade Battle - WSJ

* Donald Trump’s 100% tariff threat looms over chip sector despite relief for Apple - FT

* Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival - FT

* Threads is nearing X's daily app users, new data shows - TechCrunch

▶ Policy/Politics

* Trump's China gamble - Axios

* U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China - NYT

* A Guaranteed Annual Income Flop - WSJ Opinion

* Big Tech’s next major political battle may already be brewing in your backyard - Politico

* Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants - Nature

* China has its own concerns about Nvidia H20 chips - FT

* How the US Could Lose the AI Arms Race to China - Bberg Opinion

* America’s New AI Plan Is Great. There’s Just One Problem. - Bberg Opinion

* Trump, Seeking Friendlier Economic Data, Names New Statistics Chief - NYT

* Trump’s chief science adviser faces a storm of criticism: what's next? - Nature

* Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project - NYT Opinion

▶ AI/Digital

* Can OpenAI’s GPT-5 model live up to sky-high expectations? - FT

* Google, Schmoogle: When to Ditch Web Search for Deep Research - WSJ

* AI Won’t Kill Software. It Will Simply Give It New Life. - Barron's

* Chatbot Conversations Never End. That’s a Problem for Autistic People. - WSJ

* Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia - Wapo

* Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Solve U.S. Chip-Making Dilemma - WSJ

* GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment - NBER

* GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and the Model Card - Don’t Worry About the Vase

* What you may have missed about GPT-5 - MIT

* Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online - NYT

* 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work - NYT

* AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One) - EIG

* These workers don’t fear artificial intelligence. They’re getting degrees in it. - Wapo

* AI Gossip - Arxiv

* Meet the early-adopter judges using AI - MIT

* The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess - Ars

* A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom - Arxiv

* OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt - Wired

* Sam Altman and the whale - MIT

* This is what happens when ChatGPT tries to write scripture - Vox

* How AI could create the first one-person unicorn - Economist

* AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think - WSJ Opinion

* Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning - Arxiv

▶ Biotech/Health

* Scientists Are Finally Making Progress Against Alzheimer’s - WSJ Opinion

* The Dawn of a New Era in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's Treatment - RealClearScience

* RFK Jr. shifts $500 million from mRNA research to 'safer' vaccines. Do the data back that up? - Reason

* How Older People Are Reaping Brain Benefits From New Tech - NYT

* Did Disease Defeat Napoleon? - SciAm

* Scientists Discover a Viral Cause of One of The World's Most Common Cancers - ScienceAlert

* ‘A tipping point’: An update from the frontiers of Alzheimer’s disease research - Yale News

* A new measure of health is revolutionising how we think about ageing - NS

* First proof brain’s powerhouses drive – and can reverse – dementia symptoms - NA

* The Problem Is With Men’s Sperm - NYT Opinion

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* The Whole World Is Switching to EVs Faster Than You - Bberg Opinion

* Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality - NBER

* Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent - Ars

* Data Center Energy Demand Will Double Over the Next Five Years - Apollo Academy

* Why Did Air Conditioning Adoption Accelerate Faster Than Predicted? Evidence from Mexico - NBER

* Microwaving rocks could help mining operations pull CO2 out of the air - NS

* Ford’s Model T Moment Isn’t About the Car - Heatmap

* Five countries account for 71% of the world’s nuclear generation capacity - EIA

* AI may need the power equivalent of 50 large nuclear plants - E&E

▶ Space/Transportation

* NASA plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon—a space lawyer explains why - Ars

* Rocket Lab's Surprise Stock Move After Solid Earnings - Barron’s

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* James Lovell, the steady astronaut who brought Apollo 13 home safely, has died - Ars

* Vaccine Misinformation Is a Symptom of a Dangerous Breakdown - NYT Opinion

* We’re hardwired for negativity. That doesn’t mean we’re doomed to it. - Vox

* To Study Viking Seafarers, He Took 26 Voyages in a Traditional Boat - NYT

* End is near for the landline-based service that got America online in the ’90s - Wapo

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Who will actually profit from the AI boom? - Noahpinion

* OpenAI GPT-5 One Unified System - AI Supremacy

* Proportional representation is the solution to gerrymandering - Slow Boring

* Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The Ecomodernist

* How Many Jobs Depend on Exports? - Conversable Economist

* ChatGPT Classic - Joshua Gans’ Newsletter

* Is Air Travel Getting Worse? - Maximum Progress

▶ Social Media

* On AI Progress - @daniel_271828

* On AI Usage - @emollick

* On Generative AI and Student Learning - @jburnmurdoch

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

The innovation landscape is facing a difficult paradox: Even as R&D investment has increased, productivity per dollar invested is in decline. In his recent co-authored paper, The next innovation revolution—powered by AI, Michael Chui explores AI as a possible solution to this dilemma.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Chui and I explore the vast potential for AI-augmented research and the challenges and opportunities that come with applying it to the real-world.

Chui is a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI unit, where he leads McKinsey research in AI, automation, and the future of work.

In This Episode

* The R&D productivity problem (01:21)

* The AI solution (6:13)

* The business-adoption bottleneck (11:55)

* The man-machine team (18:06)

* Are we ready? (19:33)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

The R&D productivity problem (01:21)

All the easy stuff, we already figured out. So the low-hanging fruit has been picked, things are getting harder and harder.

Pethokoukis: Do we understand what explains this phenomenon where we seem to be doing lots of science, and we're spending lots of money on R&D, but the actual productivity of that R&D is declining? Do we have a good explanation for that?

I don't know if we have just one good explanation. The folks that we both know have been both working on what are the causes of this, as well as what are some of the potential solutions, but I think it's a bit of a hidden problem. I don't think everyone understands that there are a set of people who have looked at this — quite notably Nick Bloom at Stanford who published this somewhat famous paper that some people are familiar with. But it is surprising in some sense.

At one level, it's amazing what science and engineering has been able to do. We continue to see these incredible advances, whether it's in AI, or biotechnology, or whatever; but also, what Nick and other researchers have discovered is that we are producing less for every dollar we spend in R&D. That's this little bit of a paradox, or this challenge, that we see. What some of the research we've been trying to do is understand, can AI try to contribute to bending those curves?

. . . I'm a computer scientist by training. I love this idea of Moore's Law: Every couple of years you can double the number of transistors you can put on a chip, or whatever, for the same amount of money. There's something called “Eroom's Law,” which is Moore spelled backwards, and basically it said: For decades in the pharmaceutical industry, the number of compounds or drugs you would produce for every billion dollars of R&D would get cut in half every nine years. That's obviously moving in the wrong direction. That challenge, I don't think everyone is aware of, but one that we need to address.

I suppose, in a way, it does make sense that as we tackle harder problems, and we climb the tree of knowledge, that it's going to take more time, maybe more researchers, the researchers themselves may have to spend more time in school, so it may be a bit of a hidden problem, but it makes some intuitive sense to me.

I think there's a way to think about it that way, which is: All the easy stuff, we already figured out. So the low-hanging fruit has been picked, things are getting harder and harder. It's amazing. You could look at some of the early papers in any field and it have a handful of authors, right? The DNA paper, three authors — although it probably should have included Rosalyn Franklin . . . Now you look at a physics paper or a computer science paper — the author list just goes on sometimes for pages. These problems are harder. They require more and more effort, whether it's people's talents, or whether it's computing power, or large-scale experiments, things are getting harder to do. I think there's ways in which that makes sense. Are there other ways in which we could improve processes? Probably, too.

We could invest more in research, make it more efficient, and encourage more people to become researchers. To me, what’s more exciting than automating different customer service processes is accelerating scientific discovery. I think that’s what makes AI so compelling.

That is exactly right. Now, by the way, I think we need to continue to invest in basic research and in science and engineering, I think that's absolutely important, but —

That's worth noting, because I'm not sure everybody thinks that, so I'm glad you highlighted that.

I don't think AI means that everything becomes cheaper and we don't need to invest in both human talent as well as in research. That's number one.

Number two, as you said, we spend a lot of time, and appropriately so, talking about how AI can improve productivity, make things more efficient, do the things that we do already cheaper and faster. I think that's absolutely true. But we had the opportunity to look over history, and what has actually improved the human condition, what has been one of the things that has been necessary to improve the human condition over decades, and centuries, and millennia, is, in fact, discovering new ideas, having scientific breakthroughs, turning those scientific breakthroughs into engineering that turn into products and services, that do everything from expand our lifespans to be able to provide us with food, more energy. All those sorts of things require innovation, require R&D, and what we've discovered is the potential for AI, not only to make things more efficient, but to produce more innovation, more ideas that hopefully will lead to breakthroughs that help us all.

The AI solution (6:13)

I think that's one of the other potentials of using AI, that it could both absorb some of the experience that people have, as well as stretch the bounds of what might be possible.

I've heard described as an “IMI,” it's an invention that makes more invention. It's an invention of a method of invention. That sounds great — how's it going to do that?

There are a couple of ways. We looked at three different channels through which AI could improve this process of innovation and R&D. The first one is just increasing the volume, velocity, and variety of different candidates. One way you could think about innovation is you create a whole bunch of candidates and then you filter them down to the ones that might be most effective. Number one, you can just fill that funnel faster, better, and with greater variety. That's number one.

The candidates could be a molecule, it could be a drug, it could be a new alloy, it could be lots of things.

Absolutely, or a design for a physical product. One of the interesting things is, this quote-unquote “modern AI” — AI's been around for 70 years — is based on foundation models, these large artificial neural networks trained on huge amounts of data, and they produce unstructured outputs. In many cases, language, we talk about LLMs.

The interesting thing is, you can train these foundation models not just to generate language, but you can generate a protein, or a drug candidate, as you were saying. You can imagine the prompt being, “Please produce 10 drug candidates that address this condition, but without the following side effects.” That’s not exactly how it works, but roughly speaking, that's the potential to generate these things, or generate an electrical circuit, or a design for an air foil or an airframe that has these characteristics. Being able to just generate those.

The interesting thing is, not only can you generate them faster, but there's this idea that you can create more variety. We're usefully proud as humans about our creativity, but also, that judgment or that training that we have, that experience sometimes constrains it. The famous example was some folks created this machine called AlphaGo which was meant to compete against the world champion in this game called Go, a very complex strategic game. Famously, it beat the world champion, but one of the things it did is this famous Move 37, this move that everyone who was an expert at Go said, “That is nuts. Why would you possibly do that?” Because the machine was a little bit more unconstrained, actually came up with what you might describe as a creative idea. I think that's one of the other potentials of using AI, that it could both absorb some of the experience that people have, as well as stretch the bounds of what might be possible.

So you come up with the design, and then a variety of options, and then AI can help model and test them.

Exactly. So you generate a broader and more voluminous set of potential designs, candidates, whether it's molecules, or chemicals, or what have you. Now you need to narrow that down. Traditionally you would narrow it down either one, through physical testing — so put something into a wind tunnel or run it through the water if you're looking at a boat design, or something like that, or put it in an electromagnetic chamber and see how the antenna operates. You'd either test it physically, and then, of course, lots of people figured out how to use physics, mathematical equations, in order to create “digital twins.” So you have these long acronyms like CFD for computational fluid dynamics, basically a virtual wind tunnel, or what have you. Or you have finite element analysis, another way to model how a structure might perform, or computational electromagnetic modeling. All these ways that you can use physics to simulate things, and that's been terrific.

But some of those models actually take hours, sometimes days, to run these models. It might be faster than building the physical prototype and then modeling it — again, sometimes you just wait until something breaks, you're doing failure testing. Then you could do that in a computer using these models. But sometimes they take a really long time, and one of the really interesting discoveries in “AI” is you can use that same neural network that we've used to simulate cognition or intelligence, but now you use it to simulate physical systems. So in some ways it's not AI, because you're not creating an artificial intelligence, you're creating an artificial wind tunnel. It's just a different way to model physics. Sometimes these problems get even more complicated . . . If you're trying to put an antenna on an airplane, you need to know how the airflow is going to go over it, but you need to know whether or not the radio frequency stuff works out too, all that RF stuff.

So these multiphysics models, the complexity is even higher, and you can train these neural nets . . . even faster than these physics-based models. So we have these things called AI surrogate models. They're sort of surrogates. It's two steps removed, in some ways, from actual physical testing . . . Literally we've seen models that can run in minutes rather than hours, or an hour rather than a few days. That can accelerate things. We see this in weather forecasting in a number of different ways in which this can happen. If you can generate more candidates and then test them faster, you can imagine the whole R&D process really accelerating.

The business-adoption bottleneck (11:55)

We know that companies are using AI surrogates, deep learning surrogates, already, but is it being applied as many places as possible? No, it isn't.

Does achieving your estimated productivity increases depend more on further technological advances or does it depend more on how companies adopt and implement the technology? Is the bottleneck still in the tech itself, or is it more about business adaptation?

Mostly number two. The technology is going to continue to advance. As a technologist, I love all that stuff, but as usual, a lot of the challenges here are organizational challenges. We know that companies are using AI surrogates, deep learning surrogates, already, but is it being applied as many places as possible? No, it isn't. A lot of these things are organizational. Does it match your strategy, for instance? Do you have the right talent and organization in place?

Let me just give one very specific example. In a lot of R&D organizations we know, there's a separate organization for physical testing and a separate organization for simulations. Simulation, in many cases, us physics-based, but you add these deep-learning surrogates as well. That doesn't make sense at some level. I'm not saying physical testing goes away, but you need to figure out when you should physically test, when you should use which simulation methods, when you should use deep-learning surrogates or AI techniques, et cetera, and that's just one organizational difference that you could make if you were in an organization that was actually taking this whole testing regime seriously, where you're actually parsing out when the optimal amount of physical testing is versus simulation, et cetera. There's a number of things where that's true.

Even before AI, historically, there was a gap between novel, new technologies, what they can do in lab settings, and then how they’re applied in real-world research or in business environments. That gap, I would guess, probably requires companies to rewire how they operate, which takes time.

It is indeed, and it's funny that you use the word “rewiring.” My colleagues wrote a book entitled Rewired, which literally is about the different ways, together, that you need to, as you say, rewire or change the way an organization operates. Only one of those six chapters is around the tech stack. It's still absolutely important. You've got to get all that stuff right. But it is mostly all of the other things surrounding how you change and what organization operates in order to bring the full value of this together to reach scale.

We also talk about pilot purgatory: “We did this cool experiment . . .” but when is it good enough that the CFOs talks about it at the quarterly earnings report? That requires the organization to change the way it operates. That's the learning we've seen all the time.

We've been serving thousands of executives on their use of AI for seven years now. Nearly 80 percent of organizations say they're regularly using AI someplace in the business, but in a separate survey, only one percent say they're mature in that usage. There's this giant gap between just using AI and then actually having the value be created. And by the way, organizations that are creating that value are accelerating their performance difference. If you have a much more productive R&D organization that churns out products that are successful in the market, you're going to be ahead of your competitors, and that's what we're seeing too.

Is there a specific problem that comes up over and over again with companies, either in their implementation of AI, maybe they don't trust it, they may not know how to use it? What do you think is the problem?

Unfortunately, I don't think there's just one thing. My colleagues who do this work on Rewired, for instance — you kind of have to do all those things. You do have to have the right talent and organization in place. You have to figure out scaling, for instance. You have to figure out change management. All of those things together are what underpins outsized performance, so all those things have to be done.

So if companies are successful, what is the productivity impact you see? We're talking about basically the current technology level, give or take. We're not talking about human-level AI, superintelligence, we're talking about AI more or less as it exists today. Everybody wants to accelerate productivity: governments around the world, companies. So give me a feel for that.

There are different measures of productivity, but here what we're talking about is basically: How many new products, successful products, can you put out in the market? Our modeling says, depending on your industry, you could double your productivity, in other words, of R&D. In other words, you could put out double the amount of products and services — new products and services — that you have been previously.

Now, that's not true for every industry. By the way, the impact of that is different for different industries because for some industries you are dependent — In pharmaceuticals, the majority of your value comes from producing new products and services over time because eventually the patent runs out or whatever. There are other industries, we talk about science-based industries like chemicals, for instance. The new-product development process in chemicals is very, very close to the science of chemistry. So these levers that I just talked about — producing more candidates, being able to evaluate them more quickly, and all the other things that LLMs can do, in general, we could see potential doubling in the pace of which innovation happens.

On the other hand, the chemicals industry — let's leave out specialty chemicals, but the commodity chemicals — they'll still produce ethylene, right? So to a certain extent, while the R&D process can be accelerated a great deal, the EBIT [Earnings Before Interest and Taxes] impact on the industry might be lower than it is for pharmaceuticals, for instance. But still, it's valuable. And then, again, if you're in specialty chem, it means a lot to you. So depending on where you sit in your position in the market, it can vary, but the potential is really high.

The man-machine team (18:06)

At least for the medium term, we're not going to be able to get rid of all the people. The people are going to be absolutely important to the process.

Will future R&D look more like researchers augmented by AI or AI systems assisted by researchers? Who's the assistant in this equation? Who’s working for who?

It's “all of the above” and it depends on how you decide to use these technologies, but we even write in our paper that we need to be thoughtful about where you put the human in the loop. Every study, the conditions matter, but there are lots of studies where you say, look, the combination of machines and humans — so AI and researchers — is the most powerful combination. Each brings their respective strengths to it, but the funny thing is that sometimes the human biases actually decrease the performance of the overall system, and so, oh, maybe we should just go with machines. At least for the medium term, we're not going to be able to get rid of all the people. The people are going to be absolutely important to the process.

When is it that people either are necessary to the process or can be helpful? In many cases, it is around things like, when is it that you need to make a decision that's a safety-critical decision, a regulatory decision where you just have to have a person look at it? That's the sort of necessity argument for people in the loop. But also, there are things that machines just don't do well enough yet, and there's a little bit of that.

Are we ready? (19:33)

. . . AI is one of those things that can produce potentially more of those ideas that can underpin, hopefully, an improved quality of life for us and our children.

If we can get more productive R&D, and then businesses get better at incorporating this into their processes and they could potentially generate more products and services, do we have a government ready for that world of accelerated R&D? Can we handle that flow? My bias says probably not, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think one of the interesting things is people talk about AI regulation. In many of these industries, the regulations already exist. We have regulations for what goes out in pharmaceuticals, for instance. We have regulations in the aviation industry, we have regulations in the automobile industry, and in many ways, AI in the R&D process doesn't change that — maybe it should, people talk about, can you actually accelerate the process of approving a drug, for instance, but that wasn't the thing that we studied. In some ways, those processes are applied now, already, so that's something that doesn't necessarily have to change

That said, are some of these potential innovations gated by approval processes or clinical trials processes? Absolutely. In some of those cases, the clinical trials process gait is not necessarily a regulation, but we know there's a big problem just finding enough potential subjects in order to do clinical trials. That's not a regulatory problem, that's a problem of finding people who are good candidates for actually testing these drugs.

So yes, in some cases, even if we were able to double the amount of candidates that can go through the funnel on a number of these things, there will be these exogenous issues that would constrain society's ability to bring these to market. So that just says, you squeeze the balloon here and it opens up there, but let's go solve each of these problems, and one of the problems that we said that AI can help solve is increasing the number of things that you could potentially put into market if it can get past the other necessities.

For a general public where so much of what they're hearing about AI tends to be about job loss, or are they stealing copyrighted material, or, yeah, people talk about these huge advances, but they're not seeing them yet. What is your elevator optimistic pitch why you may be worried about the impact of AI, but here's why I'm excited about it? Why are you excited by it?

By the way, I think all those things are really important. All of those concerns, and how do we reskill the workforce, all those things, and we've done work on that as well. But the thing that I'm excited about is we need innovation, we need new ideas, we need scientific advancements, and engineering that turns them into products in order for us to improve their human condition, whether it's living longer lives, or living higher quality life, whether it's having the energy, whether it's to be able to support that in a way that doesn't cause other problems. All of those things, we need to have them, and what we've discovered is AI is one of those things that can produce potentially more of those ideas that can underpin, hopefully, an improved quality of life for us and our children.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* The Tariffs Kicked In. The Sky Didn’t Fall. Were the Economists Wrong? - NYT Opinion

* AI Disruption Is Coming for These 7 Jobs, Microsoft Says - Barron's

* One Way to Ease the US Debt Crisis? Productivity - Bberg Opinion

* So far, only one-third of Americans have ever used AI for work - Ars

▶ Business

* Meta and Microsoft Keep Their License to Spend - WSJ

* Meta Pivots on AI Under the Cover of a Superb Quarter - Bberg Opinion

* Will Mark Zuckerberg’s secret, multibillion-dollar AI plan win over Wall Street? - FT

* The AI Company Capitalizing on Our Obsession With Excel - WSJ

* $15 billion in NIH funding frozen, then thawed Tuesday in ongoing power war - Ars

* Mark Zuckerberg promises you can trust him with superintelligent AI - The Verge

* AI Finance App Ramp Is Valued at $22.5 Billion in Funding Round - WSJ

▶ Policy/Politics

* Trump’s Tariff Authority Is Tested in Court as Deadline on Trade Deals Looms - WSJ

* China is betting on a real-world use of AI to challenge U.S. control - Wapo

▶ AI/Digital

* ‘Superintelligence’ Will Create a New Era of Empowerment, Mark Zuckerberg Says - NYT

* How Exposed Are UK Jobs to Generative AI? Developing and Applying a Novel Task-Based Index - Arxiv

* Mark Zuckerberg Details Meta’s Plan for Self-Improving, Superintelligent AI - Wired

* A Catholic AI app promises answers for the faithful. Can it succeed? - Wapo

* Power Hungry: How Ai Will Drive Energy Demand - SSRN

* The two people shaping the future of OpenAI’s research - MIT

* Task-based returns to generative AI: Evidence from a central bank - CEPR

▶ Biotech/Health

* How to detect consciousness in people, animals and maybe even AI - Nature

* Why living in a volatile age may make our brains truly innovative - NS

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* The US must return to its roots as a nation of doers - FT

* How Trump Rocked EV Charging Startups - Heatmap

* Countries Promise Trump to Buy U.S. Gas, and Leave the Details for Later - NYT

* Startup begins work on novel US fusion power plant. Yes, fusion. - E&E

* Scientists Say New Government Climate Report Twists Their Work - Wired

▶ Robotics/Drones/AVs

* The grand challenges of learning medical robot autonomy - Science

* Coal-Powered AI Robots Are a Dirty Fantasy - Bberg Opinion

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* A Revolutionary Reflection - WSJ Opinion

* Why Did the Two Koreas Diverge? - SSRN

* The best new science fiction books of August 2025 - NS

* As measles spreads, old vaccination canards do too - FT

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

With tariff and immigration policies uncertain, and the emerging AI revolution continuing to emerge, there’s plenty to speculate about when it comes to the US economy. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I invite Joseph Politano to help us try and make sense of it all.

He is the author of the popular Apricitas Economics Substack newsletter. Politano previously worked as an analyst at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In This Episode

* Trade and immigration headwinds (1:03)

* Unpredictable trade policy (7:32)

* Tariffs as a political tool (12:10)

* The goal: higher tariffs (17:53)

* An AI tailwind (20:42)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Trade and immigration headwinds (1:03)

You're going to have what is probably the largest one-year change in immigration in US history.

Pethokoukis: What are the main economic headwinds that you're tracking right now? Or is it just trade, trade, trade?

Politano: It’s hard for me to not say it’s trade, trade, trade because that's what my newsletter has been covering since the start of this administration and I think it's where the biggest change in longstanding policy is. If you look back on, say, the last 100 years of economic history in the United States, that's the kind of level you have to go to find a similar period where tariffs and trade restrictions were this high in the United States.

At the start of this year, we were at a high compared to the early 2000s, but it was not that large compared to the 1970s, 1960s, the early post-war era. Most of that, especially in Trump's first term, was concentrated in China, and then a couple of specific sectors like steel or cars from Mexico. Now we have one, you had the big jump in the baseline — there's ten percent tariffs on almost all goods that come to the United States, with some very important exceptions, but ten percent for most things that go into the US. Then, on top of that, you have very large tariffs on, say, cars are 25 percent, steel and aluminum right now are 50 percent. China was up to 20 percent then went to the crazy 150 percent tariffs we had for about a month, and now it's back down to only 30 percent. That's still the highest trade war in American history. I think that is a big headwind.

The headwind that I don't spend as much time covering, just because it's more consistent policy — even if it is, in my opinion, bad policy — is on the immigration stuff. You're going to have what is probably the largest one-year change in immigration in US history. So we're going to go from about 2.8 million net immigration to a year, to people like Stan Veuger projecting net-zero immigration this year in the United States, which would be not entirely unprecedented — but again, the biggest shift in modern American history. I think those are the two biggest headwinds for the US economy right now.

You’re highlighting two big drivers of the US economy: trade and immigration. But analyzing them is tricky because recent examples are limited. To understand the effects of these changes, you often have to look back 50 or 100 years, when the economic landscape was very different. I would think that would make drawing clear conclusions more difficult and pose a real challenge for you as an analyst.

Again, I'm going to start with trade because that's where I focused a lot of my energy here, but the key thing I’m trying to communicate to people — when people think of the protectionist era in US history, the number one thing people think about is Smoot-Hawley, which were the very large tariffs right before the Great Depression — in my opinion, obviously did not cause the Great Depression, but were part of the bad policy packages that exacerbated the Great Depression. That is an era in which one, the US is not a big net importer to the same degree; and two, trade was just a much smaller share of the economy, even though goods were a much larger share of the economy.

This is pre- the really big post-war globalization and pre- the now technology-era globalization. So if you're doing tariffs in 1930 or prior, you're hitting a more important sector. Manufacturing is a much larger share of the economy, construction is a larger share of the economy, but conversely, you're hitting it less hard. And now you have this change of going from a globalized world in which trade is a much larger share of GDP and hitting that with very large tariffs.

The immigration example is hard to find. I think the gap is America has not done . . . let's call it extensive interior enforcement in a long time. There's obviously been changes to immigration policy. Legally the tariffs have gone up. Legally, lot of immigration policy has not changed. We don't pass bills on immigration in the same way. We don't pass bills on tariffs, but we do pass bills on tax policy. So immigration has changed mostly through the enforcement mechanisms, primarily at the border, and then secondarily, but I think this is the bigger change, is the kind of aggressive interior enforcement.

The Steven Miller quote that was in the Wall Street Journal is what I think about, like, why aren't you going to Home Depot to try to deport people who are here undocumented? That's a really big change in economic policy from the first term where it was like, “Okay, we are going to restrict the flow of legal and undocumented immigrants at the border, and then mostly the people who are in the interior of the United States, we're only going to focus on people who've committed some other crime.” They got picked up by local law enforcement doing something else, and then we're going to deport them because of that.

This is very different, and I think also very different tonally. In the first term, there was a lot of, “People don't want refugees.” Refugee resettlement was cut a lot, but there was a rhetorical push for, “We should let some people in from Venezuela or Cuba, people who were fleeing socialist dictatorships.” That program [was] also very much torn up. So it's hard to find examples, in that case, where you’ve got to go back to 1924 immigration policy, you’ve got to go back to 1930 trade policy for the closest analogs.

Unpredictable trade policy (7:32)

People notice if the specific things that they associate with other countries go up in price, even if those aren't their most important export.

Trade policy seems especially difficult to analyze these days because it's been so mercurial and it’s constantly evolving. It's not like there's one or two clear policy shifts you can study — new announcements and reversals happen daily, or weekly. I think that unpredictability itself creates uncertainty, which many analysts see as a drag on growth, often as much as the tariffs themselves.

I think that's exactly right. I used to joke that there were three people in Washington, DC who know what the current tariff levels are, and I'm not sure any of them are in the White House, because they do change them extremely frequently. I'm going to give an example of the last 24 hours: We had the announced rate on imports from the Philippines from 20 percent to 19 percent, the rate on imports from Indonesia went from 32 to 19, the rate on Japan went from 25 to 15. None of those are legal changes. They've not published, “Here's the comprehensive list of exactly what we're changing, exactly when these are going to go into effect, yada, yada, yada.” It's just stuff that administration officials or Trump, in particular, said. So it's really hard to know with any certainty what's going on.

Even just this morning, the Financial Times had a good article basically saying that the US and the European Union are close to a quote-unquote “deal” where the tariffs on the EU would be at 15 percent. Then literally 30 minutes ago, Peter Navarro is on TV and he's like, “I would take that with a grain of salt.” So I don't know. Clearly some people internally know. This is actually the longest period of time that Trump has gone without legally changing the tariffs since he was inaugurated. 28 days was the previous record.

Normally — I'll give an example of the last Trump administration — what would happen is you'd have, “Hey, we are doing this Section 301 investigation against China. This is a legal procedure that you say that the Chinese government is doing ABC, XYZ unfair trade practices and we're going to retaliate by putting tariffs on these specific goods.” But you would have a very long list of goods at least a couple of months before the tariffs would take effect.

It wasn't quite to this degree, I don't want to make it sound like Trump won, everything was peachy keen, and there was no uncertainty. Trump would occasionally say something and then it would change the next week, but it was much more contained, and now it's like all facets of trade policy.

I think a really good example was when they did the tariffs on China going from 10 to 20 to then 145 percent, and then they had to come back a week later and be like, “We're exempting smartphones and certain types of computers.” And then they came back a week after that and were like, “We're exempting other types of electronics and electronic parts.” It does not take an expert to know that smartphones come from China. It's on the package that Apple sends you. And if you were very strategically planning this out, if you were like, “Well, are going to do 150 percent tariffs on China,” that would be one of the first questions someone would be like, “Well, people are going to notice if their iPhone prices go up. Have we thought about exempting them?”

During Trump's first term — again, you can take this as political or economic strategy — they mostly focused a lot of the tariffs on intermediate goods: computer parts, but not computers; brakes, not cars. That has more complicated economic costs. It, on balance, hurts manufacturing in the United States more and hurts consumers less, but it's clearly trying to set up a political salience. It's trying to solve a political salience problem. People notice if the specific things that they associate with other countries go up in price, even if those aren't their most important export. There's been much less of that this time around.

We're doing tariffs on coffee and bananas. I complain about that all the time, but I think it is useful symbolism because, in an administration that was less concerned about political blowback, you'd be like, “Oh yeah, give me a list of common grocery items to exempt.” This is much less concerned with that blowback and much more slap-dash.

Tariffs as a political tool (12:10)

. . . we're now in the process of sending out these quote-unquote “letters” to other countries threatening higher tariffs. It doesn't seem to me like there's a rhyme or reason why some countries are getting a letter or some countries aren't.

I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in interpreting administration statements, since they can change basically overnight. Even if the policy seems settled, unexpected events — like, oh, I don’t know, a there’s a trial of a politician who Trump likes in another country and all of a sudden there’s a tariff to nudge that country to let that politician go. If the president views tariffs as a universal tool, he may use them for unpredictable, non-economic reasons, making it even harder to analyze, I would think.

I think that's exactly right, and if you remember very early on in the Trump administration, the Columbian government did not want to take deportees on military aircraft. They viewed this as unjust treatment of Columbian nationals, and then Trump was like, “I'm going to do a 20, 30 percent tariff,” whatever the number was, and then that was resolved the next day, and then we stopped doing the military flights two weeks after that. I think that was a clear example . . . Columbia is an important US trading partner, but there's a lot more who are larger economies, unfortunately for Columbia.

The example you're giving about Brazil is one of the funnier ones because . . . on April 2nd, Trump comes out and says, “We're doing reciprocal tariffs.” If you take that idea seriously, we should do tariffs against countries that employ unfair trade practices against US exports. You take that idea seriously, Brazil should be in your top offender categories. They have very high trade barriers, they have very high tariffs, they have domestic industrial policy that's not super successful, but does clearly hurt US exports to the region. They got one of the lowest tariff rates because they didn't actually do it by trade barriers, they did it by a formula, and Brazil happens to export some oil, and coffee, and cashews, and orange juice to the United States more than they buy from us. That was the bad formula they did looking at the bilateral trade deficit.

So you come back, and we're now in the process of sending out these quote-unquote “letters” to other countries threatening higher tariffs. It doesn't seem to me like there's a rhyme or reason why some countries are getting a letter or some countries aren't. We sent one to Libya, which is not an important trading partner, and we sent one to the Philippines, which is. But the letter to Brazil is half, “Okay, now we remembered that we have these unfair trade practices that we're complaining about,” and then it's half, “You have to let Jair Bolsonaro go and stop prosecuting him for the attempt to stay in power when he lost the election.”

It's really hard to say, okay, what is Lula supposed to do? It's one thing to be like, economically, a country like Brazil could lower its tariffs and then the United States would lower its tariff threat. You'd still be worse off than you were at the start of the year. Tariffs would still be higher, trade barriers would still be higher, but they'd at least not be as bad as they could be. But tying it up in this political process makes it much less clear and it's much harder to find an internally consistent push on the political thing. There are out-and-out dictatorships that we have very normal trade relationships with. I think you could say we should just trade with everybody regardless their internal politics, or you could say trade is a tool of specific political grievances that we have, but neither of those principles are being applied consistently.

As a business owner, totally separate from the political considerations, is it safe to import something from Mexico? Is Trump going to get upset at Claudia Sheinbaum over internal political matters? I don't know. He was upset with Justin Trudeau for a long period of time. Trudeau got replaced with Mark Carney, who is not exactly the same political figure, but they're in the same party, they're very similar people, and the complaints from Trump have dropped off a cliff. So it's hard to tell what the actual impulse is. I follow this stuff every day, and I have been wrong so many times, it is hard to count. I'll give an example: I thought Trump, last month, was like, “We're going to do 50 percent tariffs on the European Union.” And in my head I was like, “Oh, this makes sense.”

With every other major trading partner, we go from a baseline level, we raise to a very large level, we keep that on for a very short amount of time, and then we lower back down to a level that is much higher than what we started at, but much lower than what was in practice. We went from average 20 percent-ish tariffs on China, we went from that to average 40 percent-ish tariffs, and then we went into the mid-100s, and now we're back down to average 50 percent-ish tariffs on China if you count stuff from Trump's first term.

So I was like, “Oh, they paused this for 90 days, they're going to come back and they're going to say, ‘Well, everyone except the European Union, everyone except Japan, everyone except Brazil is doing really well in negotiations. We're going to raise tariffs on Brazil to 50 percent for a week and then we're going to lower them back.’” And that was obviously just wrong. They just kicked the can down the road unceremoniously.

The goal: higher tariffs (17:53)

It's not as though Donald Trump has a specific vision of what he wants the tariff rates to look like in five years, at a number level, per country per good. It's that he wants them to be higher.

Do you feel that you have a good understanding, at this point, about what the president wants, ultimately, out of his trade policy?

I do. In one word, he wants tariffs to be higher. Beyond that, all of the secondary goals are fungible. Recently, the White House has been saying, “Oh, tariffs don't raise prices,” which is an economic conjecture I think is empirically wrong. You can look at pre- and post-tariff import prices, post-tariff prices are up. It's not a 100 percent being passed through to consumers, but you can see some of that passed through in stuff like toys, and audio equipment, and coffee, and yada, yada.

Point being, if you believe that conjecture, then it really can't industrialize the nation because it's implying that foreigners are just absorbing the costs to continue passing products that they make in Japan, or China, or Canada, into the United States. And then inversely, they'll say, “Well, it is industrializing the nation. Look at this investment, this factory that's being built, and we think it's because of the tariffs.”

Well, if that's happening, it can't raise revenue. And then they'll come back and say, “Well, actually, it's fixing the budget deficit.” If that's happening, then you're in the worst of both worlds because it’s raising prices and you're still importing stuff. So it's hard to find an internally consistent justification.

Part of my mental model of how this White House works is that there's different camps on every issue, and it's very much not a consensus institution on policy, but it's also not a top-down institution. It's not as though Donald Trump has a specific vision of what he wants the tariff rates to look like in five years, at a number level, per country per good. It's that he wants them to be higher.

He has this general impulse that he wants to reduce trade openness, and then somebody comes up to Trump and goes, “Hey, Mr. President, we should do 25 percent tariffs on cars. Remember where they come from?” And he goes, “That's a good idea.”

And then somebody comes up to him and goes, “Hey, Mr. President, we should do a 10 percent baseline tariff on everything that comes into the United States.” And he goes, “That's a good idea.”

And then somebody goes and says, “Hey, Mr. President, we should do a tariff that's reciprocal that's based on other countries trade barriers.” And he goes, “That's actually a good idea.”

Those are very, very wildly different goals that are conflicting, even in just that area. But it's not that there's one vision that's being spread across all these policies, it's that there's multiple competing visions that are all getting partially implemented.

An AI tailwind (20:42)

This is the one area where it's only American companies that dominate, and the depth is so high that [other countries] feel like they're not even competing.

I see AI as a potential tailwind toward productivity gains, but my concern is that any positive impact may only cancel out the headwinds of current trade and immigration policies, rather than accelerating growth. Is it a big enough tailwind?

I do think it's a tailwind, and the US has several distinct advantages specific to AI. The first being that most of the companies that are major players, both from a software-development and from an infrastructure-development point of view, are in the United States. We are here in the DMV, and this is the largest data center cluster on planet Earth, which is kind of crazy that it's in Loudoun County. But that kind of stuff is actually very important. Secondarily, that we have the depth of financing and the expertise that exists in Silicon Valley that is so rare across the rest of the world. So I am optimistic that it will increase GDP growth, increase productivity, maybe not show up as a growth in productivity growth immediately, if that makes sense. Not quite an acceleration, but definitely a positive tailwind and a tailwind that is more beneficial in the United States than it is in other countries.

The counter to that is that the AI stuff is obviously not constrained by borders to even a nominal degree, at this point. The fact that everyone talks about DeepSeek, for obvious reasons, but there are tons of models in the Gulf States, in Western Europe, in Australia, and you can access them all from anywhere. The fact that you can access ChatGPT from Europe means that not all the benefits are just captured in the narrow area around open AI headquarters in San Francisco.

The secondary thing is that, in my opinion, one of the most important reasons why the United States continues to benefit from this high-tech economy that most other high-income countries are extremely jealous of — you talk to people from Europe, and Japan, and even places like Canada, the prize that they're jealous of is the stuff in Silicon Valley, because they feel like, reasonably, they can make cars and do finance just as well as the Americans. This is the one area where it's only American companies that dominate, and the depth is so high that they feel like they're not even competing. Anyone who wants to found a company moves to San Francisco immediately, but that relies on both a big research ecosystem and also a big immigration ecosystem. I don't know if you saw the Facebook superstars that they're paying, but I believe it was 50 percent non-American-born talent. That's a really big advantage in the United States’ case that lots of people want to move to the US to found a company to work for some of these big companies. I don't think that's demolished, but it's clearly partially under threat by a lot of these immigration restrictions.

The other important thing to remember is that even though the president's most controversial immigration policies are all about undocumented immigrants, and then to a lesser extent, people who are documented asylees, people who are coming from Haiti, and El Salvador, Venezuela, et cetera, the biggest direct power that they have is over legal immigration, just from a raw numerical standpoint. So the idea that they want to cut back on student visas, they want to cut back on OPT, which is the way that student visas basically start working in the United States, they want to add more intensive restrictions to the H-1B program, those are all going to undermine the benefits that the US will get from having this lead in artificial intelligence.

The last thing that I'll say to wrap a big bow around this: We talked about it before, I think that when Trump was like, “We're doing infinity tariffs April 2nd,” there were so many bits of the computer ecosystem that were still tariffed. You would've had a very large tariff on Taiwanese computer parts, which mostly is very expensive TSMC equipment that goes into US data centers. I think that Jensen Huang — I don’t know if he personally did this . . . or it was the coalition of tech people, but I am using him as a representative here — I think Jensen Huang went in and was like, “We really badly need this,” and they got their exemption. The Trump administration had been talking about doing tariffs on semiconductors at some point, I'm sure they will come up with something, but in the meantime, right now, we are importing absolute record amounts of large computers. It's at a run-rate of close to $150 billion a year.

This is not all computers, this is specific to the kind of large computers that go into data centers and are not for personal or normal business use. I don't know what happens to that, let's say a year and a half from now, if the tariffs are 25 percent, considering how much of the cost of a data center is in the semiconductors. If you're going to have to then say, “Well, we would really like to put this somewhere in Virginia, somewhere in Pennsylvania, somewhere in Arizona, but you have a 25 percent premium on all this stuff, we're going to put it in Vancouver. We're going to put it in somewhere in the Gulf States,” or what I think the administration is very worried about is, “We're going to put it somewhere in China.” That chart of US computer imports, in trade policy, it’s really rare to get a chart that is just a straight line up, and this is just a straight line up.

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

The 1990s and the dawn of the internet were a pivotal time for America and the wider world. The history of human progress is a series of such pivotal moments. As Peter Leyden points out, it seems we’re facing another defining era as society wrestles with three new key technologies: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Leyden about American leadership in emerging technology and the mindset shifts we must undergo to bring about the future we dream of.

Leyden is a futurist and technology expert. He is a speaker, author, and founder of Reinvent Futures. Thirty years ago, he worked with the founders of WIRED magazine, and now authors his latest book project via Substack: The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.

In This Episode

* Eras of transformation (1:38)

* American risk tolerance (11:15)

* Facing AI pessimism (15:38)

* The bioengineering breakthrough (24:24)

* Demographic pressure (28:52)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Eras of transformation (1:38)

I think we Americans tend to reset the clock in which we get in these dead ends, we get in these old patterns, these old systems, and the things are all falling apart, it's not working. And then there is a kind of a can-do reinvention phase . . .

Pethokoukis: Since World War II, as I see it, we have twice been on the verge of a transformational leap forward, economically and technologically. I would say that was right around 1970 and then right around 2000, and the periods of time after that, I think, certainly relative to the expectations then, was disappointing.

It is my hope, and I know it's your hope as well, that we are at another such moment of transformation. One, do you accept my general premise, and two, why are we going to get it right this time?

If I'm hearing you right, you're kind of making two junctures there. I do believe we're in the beginning of what would be much more thought of as a transformation. I would say the most direct parallel is closer to what happened coming off of World War II. I also think, if you really go back in American history, it's what came off of Civil War and even came off of the Founding Era. I think there's a lot of parallels there I can go into, I've written about in my Substack and it's part of the next book I'm writing, so there's a bigger way that I think about it. I think both those times that you're referring to, it seems to me we were coming off a boom, or what seemed to be an updraft or your “Up Wing” kind of periods that you think of — and then we didn't.

I guess I think of it this way: the ’50s, ’60s, and ’90s were exciting times that made it feel like the best was yet to come — but then that momentum stalled. I’m hopeful we’re entering another such moment now, with so much happening, so much in motion, and I just hope it all comes together.

The way I think about it in a bigger lens, I would just push back a little bit, which is, it's true coming off the ’90s — I was at WIRED magazine in the ’90s. I was watching the early ’90s internet and the Digital Revolution and I sketched out at that time, in my first book but also cover stories in WIRED, trying to rough out what would happen by the year 2020. And it is true that coming off the ’90s there was a Dot Com crash, but temporarily, honestly, that with the Web 2.0 and others, a lot of those trends we were talking about in the ’90s actually just kept picking up.

So depending how big the lens is, I would argue that, coming off the ’90s, the full digital revolution and the full globalization that we were starting to see in the early to mid-’90s in some respects did come to fruition. It didn't play out the way we all wanted it to happen — spreading wealth all through the society and blah, blah, blah, and many of the things that people complain about and react to now — but I would argue that a lot of what we were saying in those ’90s, and had begun in the ’90s with the ’90s boom, continued after a temporary pause, for sure.

The Dot Com boom was just frothy investment. It crashed, but the companies that come out of that crash are literally trillion-dollar companies dominating the global economy now here on the west coast. That was some of the things we could see happening from the mid-’90s. The world did get connected through the internet, and globalization did, from a lens that's beyond America, we took 800 million peasants living on two bucks a day in China and brought them into the global economy. There's all kinds of positive things of what happened in the last 25 years, depending on how big your lens is.

I would say that we've been through a largely successful — clearly some issues, “Oh my gosh, we didn't anticipate social media and that stuff,” but in general, the world that we were actually starting to envision in the ’90s came about, at some level — with some flaws, and some issues, and we could have done better, but I'm saying now I think AI is bigger than the internet. I think the idea that humans are now working side-by-side with intelligent machines and being augmented by intelligent machines is a world historical event that is going to go beyond just connecting everybody on the planet through the internet, which is kind of what the ’90s was, and the early Digital Revolution.

This is a bigger deal, and I do think this transformation has the potential to be way bigger too. If we manage it right — including how we did it positively or negatively in the last 25, 30 years off the ’90s — if we do this right, we could really pull off what I think is a reinvention of America and a much better world going beyond this. That’s not a prediction that we're going to do that, but I think we certainly have the potential there.

While I was preparing for our chat, I recalled a podcast I did with Marc Andreessen where we discussed AI — not just its potential to solve big problems and drive progress, but also about the obstacles, especially regulatory ones. He pointed out that those barriers are why we don’t have things like widespread nuclear power, let alone fusion reactors.

When I asked why he thought we could overcome those barriers this time around, he said we probably won’t — that failure should be the baseline because these obstacles are deeply rooted in a risk-averse American society. Now, why isn't that your baseline?

My baseline is that America — again, I'm taking a bigger lens here, which is we periodically come to these junctures in history in which you could say, from left and right, there's kind of an ossification of the old system. What happens is the old ways of doing things, the old systems, essentially get kind of stuck, and ossified, and just defunct, and long in the tooth, and all different ways you can describe it. But what happens at these junctures — and it happened coming off World War II, it happened after the Civil War, I happened after in the Founding Era too, coming off the colonial world — there is an incredible period of explosion of progress, essentially, and they usually are about 25 years, which is why I'm thinking about the next 25 years.

I think we Americans tend to reset the clock in which we get in these dead ends, we get in these old patterns, these old systems, and the things are all falling apart, it's not working. And then there is a kind of a can-do reinvention phase that, frankly, is beyond Europe now. The great hope of the West is still going to be America here. But I think we're actually entering it and I think this is what's happening, and . . . I've read your book, The Conservative Futurist, I would call myself more of a “Progressive Futurist,” but I would say both left and right in this country have gone too extreme. The right is critiquing “government can't do anything right,” and the left is critiquing “the market, corporations can't do anything right.”

The actual American framework is the Hamiltonian government, coming off Lincoln's government, the FDR government. There is a role for government, a vigorous kind of government presence that can drive change, but there's also a great role for the market too.

There’s this center left and center right that has now got to recalibrate for this next era of America. I think because the old system — and from the right, the old system might be big bureaucratic government that was born out of World War II, the great welfare state bureaucracies, also the Pax Americana. Trump is kind of banging against, dismantling that old thing that's been going for 80 years and, frankly, is kind of run out of steam. It's not really working. But the left is also coming out, carbon energy, and drilling for oil, and industrial pollution, and all that other stuff that was coming off of that scaling of the 20th century economy is also not working for the 21st century. We’ve also got to dismantle those systems. But together, looking forward, you could imagine a complete reinvention around these new technologies. AI is a huge one. Without question, the first among equals it's going to be the game changer around every field, every industry.

Also clean energy technologies, I would argue, are just hitting the point of tipping points of scale that we could imagine a shift in the energy foundation. We could see abundant clean energy, including nuclear. I think there's a new re-appreciation of nuclear coming even from left-of-center, but also potential fusion on the horizon.

I also think bioengineering is something that we haven't really got our heads into, but in terms of the long-term health of the planet, and all kinds of synthetic biology, and all kinds of things that are happening, we are now past the tipping point, and we know how to do this.

I think there's three world historic technologies that America could get reinvented around in the next 25 years. I think the old system, left and right, is now done with this old thing that isn't working, but that opens up the potential for the future. So yes, what Andreessen's talking about is the late stage of the last gummed-up system that wasn't working. For that matter, the same thing from the left is complaining about the inequality, and the old system isn't working now the way it was, circulating wealth through society. But I think there's a way to reinvent that and I actually think we're on the verge of doing it, and that's what I'm trying to do for my project, my book, my Substack stuff.

American risk tolerance (11:15)

I think there is an elite on the right-of-center tech and the left-of-center tech that sees the same commonalities about the potential of the technology, but also the potential for transformation going forward, that would be healthy.

Do you feel that there's enough ferment happening that, institutionally, there will be enough space for these technologies to flourish as you hope? That the first time that there's a problem with an AI model where people die because some system failed, we're not going to be like, “We need to pause AI.” That the next time with one of these restarted nuclear reactors, if there's some minor problem, we're not going to suddenly panic and say, “That's it, nuclear is gone again.” Do you think we have that kind of societal resilience to deal? I think we've had too little of that, but do you think there's enough now, for the reasons you're talking about, that we will continue to push forward?

I think there's absolutely the chance that can happen. Now, like Andreessen said, it's not a prediction like, “Oh, this will be fine, it’s all going to work out.” We could also go the way of Europe, which is we could get over-regulated, over-ossified, go back to the old days, be this nice tourist spot that, whatever, we look at our old buildings and stuff and we figure out a way to earn a living, but it's just getting more and more and more in the past. That's also a possibility, and I suppose if you had to bet, maybe that's the greater possibility, in default.

But I don't think that's going to happen because I do believe more in America. I'm also living in Northern California here. I'm surrounded for the last 30 years, people are just jam packed with new ideas. There's all kinds of s**t happening here. It's just an explosive moment right now. We are attracting the best and the brightest from all over the country, all over the world. There is no other place in the world, bar none, around AI than San Francisco right now, and you cannot be here and not just get thrilled at the possibility of what's happening. Now, does that mean that we're going to be able to pull this off through the whole country, through the whole world? I don’t know, there is a lot of ambiguity there and this is why you can't predict the future with certainty.

But I do believe we have the potential here to rebuild fundamentally. I think there is an elite on the right-of-center tech and the left-of-center tech that sees the same commonalities about the potential of the technology, but also the potential for transformation going forward, that would be healthy. For example, I know Andreessen, you talk about Andreessen . . . I was also rooted in the whole Obama thing, there was a ton of tech people in the Obama thing, and now there's a ton of tech people who are kind of tech-right, but it's all kind of washes together. It's because we all see the potential of these technologies just emerging in front of us. The question is . . . how do you get the systems to adapt?

Now, to be fair, California, yes, it's been gummed up with regulations and overthink, but on the other hand, it's opened itself up. It just went through historic shifts in rolling back environmental reviews and trying to drive more housing by refusing to let the NIMBY shut it down. There's a bunch of things that even the left-of-center side is trying to deal with this gummed-up system, and the right-of-center side is doing their version of it in DC right now.

Anyhow, the point is, we see the limits on both left-of-center and right-of-center of what's currently happening and what has happened. The question is, can we get aligned on a relatively common way forward, which is what America did coming off the war for 25 years, which is what happened after the Civil War. There were issues around the Reconstruction, but there was a kind of explosive expansion around American progress in the 25 years there. And we did it off the Revolution too. There are these moments where left-of-center and right-of-center align and we kind of build off of a more American set of values: pluralism, meritocracy, economic growth, freedom, personal freedom, things that we all can agree on, it's just they get gummed up in these old systems and these old ideologies periodically and we’ve just got to blow through them and try something different. I think the period we're in right now.

Facing AI pessimism (15:38)

The world of AI is so foreign to them, it's so bizarre to them, it's so obscure to them, that they're reacting off it just like any sensible human being. You’re scared of a thing you don't get.

I feel like you are very optimistic.

Yes, that is true.

I like to think that I am very optimistic. I think we're both optimistic about what these technologies can do to make this country and this world a richer world, a more sustainable world, a healthier world, create more opportunity. I think we're on the same page. So it's sad to me that I feel like I've been this pessimistic so far throughout our conversation and this next question, unfortunately, will be in that vein.

Okay, fair enough.

I have a very clear memory of the ’90s tech boom, and the excitement, and this is the most excited I've been since then, but I know some people aren't excited, and they're not excited about AI. They think AI means job loss, it means a dehumanization of society where we only interact with screens, and they think all the gains from any added economic growth will only go to the super rich, and they're not excited about it.

My concern is that the obvious upsides will take long enough to manifest that the people who are negative, and the downsides — because there will be downsides with any technology or amazing new tool, no matter how amazing it is — that our society will begin to focus on the downsides, on, “Oh, this company let go of these 50 people in their marketing department,” and that's what will be the focus, and we will end up overregulating it. There will be pressure on companies, just like there's pressure on film companies not to use AI in their special effects or in their advertising, that there will be this anti-AI, anti-technology backlash — like we've seen with trade — because what I think are the obvious upsides will take too long to manifest. That is one of my concerns.

I agree with that. That is a concern. In fact, right now if you look at the polling globally, about a third of Americans are very negative and down on AI, about a third are into AI, and about a third, don't what the hell what to make of it. But if you go to China, and Japan, and a lot of Asian countries, it's like 60 percent, 70 percent positive about AI. You go to Europe and it’s similar to the US, if not worse, meaning there is a pessimism.

To be fair, from a human planet point of view, the West has had a way privileged position in the last 250 years in terms of the wealth creation, in terms of the spoils of globalization, and the whole thing. So you could say — which is not a popular thing to say in America right now — that with globalization in the last 25 years, we actually started to rectify, from a global point of view, a lot of these inequities in ways that, from the long view, is not a bad thing to happen, that everybody in the planet gets lifted up and we can move forward as eight billion people on the planet.

I would say so there is a negativity in the West because they're coming off a kind of an era that they were always relatively privileged. There is this kind of baked-in “things are getting worse” feeling for a lot of people. That's kind of adding to this pessimism, I think. That's a bad thing.

My next book, which is coming out with Harper Collins and we just cracked the contract on that, I got a big advance —

Hey, congratulations.

But the whole idea of this book is kind of trying to create a new grand narrative of what's possible now, in the next 25 years, based on these new technologies and how we could reorganize the economy and society in ways that would work better for everybody. The reason I'm kind of trying to wrap this up, and the early pieces of this are in my Substack series of these essays I'm writing, is because I think what's missing right now is people can't see the new way forward. That's the win-win way forward. They actually are only operating on this opaque thing. The world of AI is so foreign to them, it's so bizarre to them, it's so obscure to them, that they're reacting off it just like any sensible human being. You’re scared of a thing you don't get.

What's interesting about this, and again what's useful, is I went through this exact same thing in the ’90s. It's a little bit different, and I'll tell you the differentiation in a minute, but basically back in the ’90s when I was working at the early stage with the founders of WIRED magazine, it was the early days of WIRED, basically meaning the world didn't know what email was, what the web was, people were saying there's no way people would put their credit cards on the internet, no one's going to buy anything on there, you had to start with square one. What was interesting about it is they didn't understand what's possible. A lot of the work I was doing back then at WIRED, but also with my first book then, went into multiple languages, all kinds of stuff, was trying to explain from the mid-’90s, what the internet and the Digital Revolution tied with globalization might look like in a positive way to the year 2020, which is a 25-year lookout.

That was one of the popularities of the book, and the articles I was doing on that, and the talks I was doing — a decade speaking on this thing — because people just needed to see it: “Oh! This is what it means when you connect up everybody! Oh! I could see myself in my field living in a world where that works. Oh, actually, the trade of with China might work for my company, blah, blah, blah.” People could kind of start to see it in a way that they couldn't in the early to mid-’90s. They were just like, “I don't even know, what's an Amazon? Who cares if they're selling books on it? I don't get it.” But you could rough it out from a technological point of view and do that.

I think it’s the same thing now. I think we need do this now. We have to say, “Hey dudes, you working with AI is going to make you twice as productive. You're going to make twice as much money.” The growth rate of the economy — and you're good with this with your Up Wing stuff. I'm kind of with you on that. It could be like we're all actually making more money, more wealth pulsing through society. Frankly, we're hurting right now in terms of, we don't have enough bodies doing stuff and maybe we need some robots. There's a bunch of ways that you could reframe this in a bigger way that people could say, “Oh, maybe I could do that better,” and in a way that I think I saw the parallels back there.

Now the one difference now, and I'll tell you the one difference between the ’90s, and I mentioned this earlier, in the ’90s, everybody thought these goofy tech companies and stuff were just knucklehead things. They didn't understand what they were. In fact, if anything, the problem was the opposite. You get their attention to say, “Hey, this Amazon thing is a big deal,” or “This thing called Google is going to be a big thing.” You couldn't even get them focused on that. It took until about the 20-teens, 2012, -13, -14 till these companies got big enough.

So now everybody's freaked out about the tech because they're these giant gargantuan things, these trillion-dollar companies with global reach in ways that, in the ’90s, they weren't. So there is a kind of fear-factor baked into tech. The last thing I'll say about that, though, is I know I've learned one thing about tech is over the years, and I still believe it's true today, that the actual cutting-edge of technology is not done in the legacy companies, even these big legacy tech companies, although they'll still be big players, is that the actual innovation is going to happen on the edges through startups and all that other thing, unless I'm completely wrong, which I doubt. That's been the true thing of all these tech phases. I think there's plenty of room for innovation, plenty of room for a lot of people to be tapped into this next wave of innovation, and also wealth creation, and I think there is a way forward that I think is going to be less scary than people right now think. It's like they think that current tech setup is going to be forever and they're just going to get richer, and richer, and richer. Well, if they were in the ’90s, those companies, Facebook didn't exist, Google didn't exist, Amazon didn't exist. Just like we all thought, “Oh, IBM is going to run everything,” it's like, no. These things happen at these junctures, and I think we're in another one of the junctures, so we’ve got to get people over this hump. We’ve got to get them to see, “Hey, there's a win-win way forward that America can be revitalized, and prosperous, and wealth spread.”

The bioengineering breakthrough (24:24)

Just like we had industrial production in the Industrial Revolution that scaled great wealth and created all these products off of that we could have a bio-economy, a biological revolution . . .

I think that's extraordinarily important, giving people an idea of what can be, and it's not all negative. You've talked a little bit about AI, people know that's out there and they know that some people think it's going to be big. Same thing with clean energy.

To me, of your three transformer technologies, the one we I think sometimes hear less about right now is bioengineering. I wonder if you could just give me a little flavor of what excites you about that.

It is on a delay. Clean energy has been going for a while here and is starting to scale on levels that you can see the impact of solar, the impact of electric cars and all kinds stuff, particularly from a global perspective. Same thing with AI, there's a lot of focus on that, but what's interesting about bioengineering is there were some world historic breakthroughs basically in the last 25 years.

One is just cracking the human genome and driving the cost down to, it's like a hundred bucks now to get anybody's genome processed. That's just crazy drop in price from $3 million on the first one 20 years ago to like a hundred bucks now. That kind of dramatic change. Then the CRISPR breakthrough, which is essentially we can know how to cheaply and easily edit these genomes. That's a huge thing. But it's not just about the genomics. It's essentially we are understanding biology to the point where we can now engineer living things.

Just think about that: Human beings, we've been in the Industrial Revolution, everything. We've learned how to engineer inert things, dig up metals, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and engineer a thing. We didn't even know how living things worked, or we didn't even know what DNA was until the 1950s, right? The living things has been this opaque world that we have no idea. We've crossed that threshold. We now understand how to engineer living things, and it's not just the genetic engineering. We can actually create proteins. Oh, we can grow cultured meat instead of waiting for the cow to chew the grass to make the meat, we can actually make it into that and boom, we know how it works.

This breakthrough of engineering living things is only now starting to kind of dawn on everyone . . . when you talk about synthetic biology, it's essentially man-made biology, and that breakthrough is huge. It's going to have a lot of economic implications because, across this century, it depends how long it takes to get past the regulation, and get the fear factor of people, which is higher than even AI, probably, around genetic engineering and cloning and all this stuff. Stem cells, there's all kinds of stuff happening in this world now that we could essentially create a bio-economy. Just like we had industrial production in the Industrial Revolution that scaled great wealth and created all these products off of that we could have a bio-economy, a biological revolution that would allow, instead of creating plastic bottles, you could design biological synthetic bottles that dissolve after two weeks in the ocean from saltwater or exposure to sunlight and things like that. Nature knows how to both create things that work and also biodegrade them back to nothing.

There's a bunch of insights that we now can learn from Mother Nature about the biology of the world around us that we can actually design products and services, things that actually could do it and be much more sustainable in terms of the long-term health of the planet, but also could be better for us and has all kinds of health implications, of course. That's where people normally go is think, “Oh my god, we can live longer” and all kinds of stuff. That's true, but also our built world could actually be redesigned using super-hard woods or all kinds of stuff that you could genetically design differently.

That's a bigger leap. There's people who are religious who can't think of touching God's work, or a lot of eco-environmentalists like, “Oh, we can't mess with Mother Nature.” There's going to be some issues around that, but through the course of the century, it's going to absolutely happen and I think it could happen in the next 25 years, and that one could actually be a huge thing about recreating essentially a different kind of economy around those kinds of insights.

So we’ve got three world-historic technologies: AI, clean energy, and now bioengineering, and if America can't invent the next system, who the hell is going to do that? You don't want China doing it.

Demographic pressure (28:52)

We are going to welcome the robots. We are going to welcome the AI, these advanced societies, to create the kind of wealth, and support the older people, and have these long lives.

No, I do not. I do not. Two things I find myself writing a lot about are falling birth rates globally, and I also find myself writing about the future of the space economy. Which of those topics, demographic change or space, do you find intellectually more interesting?

I think the demographic thing is more interesting. I mean, I grew up in a period where everyone was freaked out about overpopulation. We didn't think the planet would hold enough people. It's only been in the last 10 years that, conventionally, people have kind of started to shift, “Oh my God, we might not have enough people.” Although I must say, in the futurist business, I've been watching this for 30 years and we've been talking about this for a long time, about when it’s going to peak humans and then it's going to go down. Here's why I think that's fantastic: We are going to welcome the robots. We are going to welcome the AI, these advanced societies, to create the kind of wealth, and support the older people, and have these long lives. I mean long lives way beyond 80, it could be 120 years at some level. Our kids might live to that.

The point is, we're going to need artificial intelligence, and robotics, and all these other things, and also we're going to need, frankly, to move the shrinking number of human beings around the planet, i.e. immigration and cross-migration. We're going to need these things to solve these problems. So I think about this: Americans are practical people. At its core, we're practical people. We're not super ideological. Currently, we kind of think we're ideological, but we're basically common-sense, practical people. So these pressures, the demographic pressures, are going to be one of the reasons I think we are going to migrate to this stuff faster than people think, because we're going to realize, “Holy s**t, we've got to do this.” When social security starts going broke and the boomers are like 80 and 90 and it is like, okay, let alone the young people thinking, “How the hell am I going to get supported?” we're going to start having to create a different kind of economy where we leverage the productivity of the humans through these advanced technologies, AI and robotics, to actually create the kind of world we want to live in. It could be a better world than the world we’ve got now, than the old 20th-century thing that did a good shot. They lifted the bar from the 19th century to the 20th. Now we’ve got to lift it in the 21st. It's our role, it's what we do. America, [let’s] get our s**t together and start doing it. That's the way I would say it.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they’re here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly even picture today. But progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t the result of any one breakthrough.

As Jamie Metzl explains in his new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform our Lives, Work, and World, tech innovations work alongside and because of one another, bringing about the future right under our noses.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Metzl about how humans have been radically reshaping the world around them since their very beginning, and what the latest and most disruptive technologies mean for the not-too-distant future.

Metzl is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and a faculty member of NextMed Health. He has previously held a series of positions in the US government, and was appointed to the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019. He is the author of several books, including two sci-fi thrillers and his international bestseller, Hacking Darwin.

In This Episode

* Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)

* Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)

* Engineering intelligence (13:53)

* Distrust of disruption (19:44)

* Risk tolerance (24:08)

* What is a “newnimal”? (13:11)

* Inspired by curiosity (33:42)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)

The name of the game for all of this . . . is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”

Pethokoukis: Are you telling a story of unstoppable technological momentum or are you telling a story kind of like A Christmas Carol, of a future that could be if we do X, Y, and Z, but no guarantees?

Metzl: The future of technological progress is like the past: It is unstoppable, but that doesn't mean it's predetermined. The path that we have gone over the last 12,000 years, from the domestication of crops to building our civilizations, languages, industrialization — it's a bad metaphor now, but — this train is accelerating. It's moving faster and faster, so that's not up for grabs. It is not up for grabs whether we are going to have the capacities to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life — we are doing both of those things now in the early days.

What is up for grabs is how these revolutions will play out, and there are better and worse scenarios that we can imagine. The name of the game for all of this, the reason why I do the work that I do, why I write the books that I write, is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”

Progress has been sort of unstoppable for all that time, though, of course, fits and starts and periods of stagnation —

— But when you look back at those fits and starts — the size of the Black Plague or World War II, or wiping out Berlin, and Dresden, and Tokyo, and Hiroshima, and Nagasaki — in spite of all of those things, it's one-directional. Our technologies have gotten more powerful. We've developed more capacities, greater ability to manipulate the world around us, so there will be fits and starts but, as I said, this train is moving. That's why these conversations are so important, because there's so much that we can, and I believe must, do now.

There’s a widely held opinion that progress over the past 50 years has been slower than people might have expected in the late 1960s, but we seem to have some technologies now for which the momentum seems pretty unstoppable.

Of course, a lot of people thought, after ChatGPT came out, that superintelligence would happen within six months. That didn’t happen. After CRISPR arrived, I’m sure there were lots of people who expected miracle cures right away.

What makes you think that these technologies will look a lot different, and our world will look a lot different than they do right now by decade’s end?

They certainly will look a lot different, but there's also a lot of hype around these technologies. You use the word “superintelligence,” which is probably a good word. I don't like the words “artificial intelligence,” and I have a six-letter framing for what I believe about AGI — artificial general intelligence — and that is: AGI is BS. We have no idea what human intelligence is, if we define our own intelligence so narrowly that it's just this very narrow form of thinking and then we say, “Wow, we have these machines that are mining the entirety of digitized human cultural history, and wow, they're so brilliant, they can write poems — poems in languages that our ancestors have invented based on the work of humans.” So we humans need to be very careful not to belittle ourselves.

But we're already seeing, across the board, if you say, “Is CRISPR on its own going to fundamentally transform all of life?” The answer to that is absolutely no. My last book was about genetic engineering. If genetic engineering is a pie, genome editing is a slice and CRISPR is just a tiny little sliver of that slice. But the reason why my new book is called Superconvergence, the entire thesis is that all of these technologies inspire, and influence, and are embedded in each other. We had the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, as I mentioned. That's what led to these other innovations like civilization, like writing, and then the ancient writing codes are the foundation of computer codes which underpin our machine learning and AI systems that are allowing us to unlock secrets of the natural world.

People are imagining that AI equals ChatGPT, but that's really not the case (AI equals ChatGPT like electricity equals the power station). The story of AI is empowering us to do all of these other things. As a general-purpose technology, already AI is developing the capacity to help us just do basic things faster. Computer coding is the archetypal example of that. Over the last couple of years, the speed of coding has improved by about 50 percent for the most advanced human coders, and as we code, our coding algorithms are learning about the process of coding. We're just laying a foundation for all of these other things.

That's what I call “boring AI.” People are imagining exciting AI, like there's a magic AI button and you just press it and AI cures cancer. That's not how it's going to work. Boring AI is going to be embedded in human resource management. It's going to be embedded just giving us a lot of capabilities to do things better, faster than we've done them before. It doesn't mean that AIs are going to replace us. There are a lot of things that humans do that machines can just do better than we are. That's why most of us aren't doing hunting, or gathering, or farming, because we developed machines and other technologies to feed us with much less human labor input, and we have used that reallocation of our time and energy to write books and invent other things. That's going to happen here.

The name of the game for us humans, there's two things: One is figuring out what does it mean to be a great human and over-index on that, and two, lay the foundation so that these multiple overlapping revolutions, as they play out in multiple fields, can be governed wisely. That is the name of the game. So when people say, “Is it going to change our lives?” I think people are thinking of it in the wrong way. This shirt that I'm wearing, this same shirt five years from now, you'll say, “Well, is there AI in your shirt?” — because it doesn't look like AI — and what I'm going to say is “Yes, in the manufacturing of this thread, in the management of the supply chain, in figuring out who gets to go on vacation, when, in the company that's making these buttons.” It's all these little things. People will just call it progress. People are imagining magic AI, all of these interwoven technologies will just feel like accelerating progress, and that will just feel like life.

Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)

20, 30 years ago we didn't have the internet. I think things get so normalized that this just feels like life.

What you're describing is a technology that economists would call a general-purpose technology. It's a technology embedded in everything, it's everywhere in the economy, much as electricity.

What you call “boring AI,” the way I think about it is: I was just reading a Wall Street Journal story about Applebee's talking about using AI for more efficient customer loyalty programs, and they would use machine vision to look at their tables to see if they were cleaned well enough between customers. That, to people, probably doesn't seem particularly science-fictional. It doesn't seem world-changing. Of course, faster growth and a more productive economy is built on those little things, but I guess I would still call those “boring AI.”

What to me definitely is not boring AI is the sort of combinatorial aspect that you're talking about where you're talking about AI helping the scientific discovery process and then interweaving with other technologies in kind of the classic Paul Romer combinatorial way.

I think a lot of people, if they look back at their lives 20 or 30 years ago, they would say, “Okay, more screen time, but probably pretty much the same.”

I don't think they would say that. 20, 30 years ago we didn't have the internet. I think things get so normalized that this just feels like life. If you had told ourselves 30 years ago, “You're going to have access to all the world's knowledge in your pocket.” You and I are — based on appearances, although you look so youthful — roughly the same age, so you probably remember, “Hurry, it's long distance! Run down the stairs!”

We live in this radical science-fiction world that has been normalized, and even the things that you are mentioning, if you see open up your newsfeed and you see that there's this been incredible innovation in cancer care, and whether it's gene therapy, or autoimmune stuff, or whatever, you're not thinking, “Oh, that was AI that did that,” because you read the thing and it's like “These researchers at University of X,” but it is AI, it is electricity, it is agriculture. It's because our ancestors learned how to plant seeds and grow plants where you're stationed and not have to do hunting and gathering that you have had this innovation that is keeping your grandmother alive for another 10 years.

What you're describing is what I call “magical AI,” and that's not how it works. Some of the stuff is magical: the Jetsons stuff, and self-driving cars, these things that are just autopilot airplanes, we live in a world of magical science fiction and then whenever something shows up, we think, “Oh yeah, no big deal.” We had ChatGPT, now ChatGPT, no big deal?

If you had taken your grandparents, your parents, and just said, “Hey, I'm going to put you behind a screen. You're going to have a conversation with something, with a voice, and you're going to do it for five hours,” and let's say they'd never heard of computers and it was all this pleasant voice. In the end they said, “You just had a five-hour conversation with a non-human, and it told you about everything and all of human history, and it wrote poems, and it gave you a recipe for kale mush or whatever you're eating,” you'd say, “Wow!” I think that we are living in that sci-fi world. It's going to get faster, but every innovation, we're not going to say, “Oh, AI did that.” We're just going to say, “Oh, that happened.”

Engineering intelligence (13:53)

I don't like the word “artificial intelligence” because artificial intelligence means “artificial human intelligence.” This is machine intelligence, which is inspired by the products of human intelligence, but it's a different form of intelligence . . .

I sometimes feel in my own writing, and as I peruse the media, like I read a lot more about AI, the digital economy, information technology, and I feel like I certainly write much less about genetic engineering, biotechnology, which obviously is a key theme in your book. What am I missing right now that's happening that may seem normal five years from now, 10 years, but if I were to read about it now or understand it now, I’d think, “Well, that is kind of amazing.”

My answer to that is kind of everything. As I said before, we are at the very beginning of this new era of life on earth where one species, among the billions that have ever lived, suddenly has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life.

We have evolved by the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection, and we are beginning a new phase of life, a new Cambrian Revolution, where we are creating, certainly with this novel intelligence that we are birthing — I don't like the word “artificial intelligence” because artificial intelligence means “artificial human intelligence.” This is machine intelligence, which is inspired by the products of human intelligence, but it's a different form of intelligence, just like dolphin intelligence is a different form of intelligence than human intelligence, although we are related because of our common mammalian route. That's what's happening here, and our brain function is roughly the same as it's been, certainly at least for tens of thousands of years, but the AI machine intelligence is getting smarter, and we're just experiencing it.

It's become so normalized that you can even ask that question. We live in a world where we have these AI systems that are just doing more and cooler stuff every day: driving cars, you talked about discoveries, we have self-driving laboratories that are increasingly autonomous. We have machines that are increasingly writing their own code. We live in a world where machine intelligence has been boxed in these kinds of places like computers, but very soon it's coming out into the world. The AI revolution, and machine-learning revolution, and the robotics revolution are going to be intersecting relatively soon in meaningful ways.

AI has advanced more quickly than robotics because it hasn't had to navigate the real world like we have. That's why I'm always so mindful of not denigrating who we are and what we stand for. Four billion years of evolution is a long time. We've learned a lot along the way, so it's going to be hard to put the AI and have it out functioning in the world, interacting in this world that we have largely, but not exclusively, created.

But that's all what's coming. Some specific things: 30 years from now, my guess is many people who are listening to this podcast will be fornicating regularly with robots, and it'll be totally normal and comfortable.

. . . I think some people are going to be put off by that.

Yeah, some people will be put off and some people will be turned on. All I'm saying is it's going to be a mix of different —

Jamie, what I would like to do is be 90 years old and be able to still take long walks, be sharp, not have my knee screaming at me. That's what I would like. Can I expect that?

I think this can help, but you have to decide how to behave with your personalized robot.

That's what I want. I'm looking for the achievement of human suffering. Will there be a world of less human suffering?

We live in that world of less human suffering! If you just look at any metric of anything, this is the best time to be alive, and it's getting better and better. . . We're living longer, we're living healthier, we're better educated, we're more informed, we have access to more and better food. This is by far the best time to be alive, and if we don't massively screw it up, and frankly, even if we do, to a certain extent, it'll continue to get better.

I write about this in Superconvergence, we're moving in healthcare from our world of generalized healthcare based on population averages to precision healthcare, to predictive and preventive. In education, some of us, like myself, you have had access to great education, but not everybody has that. We're going to have access to fantastic education, personalized education everywhere for students based on their own styles of learning, and capacities, and native languages. This is a wonderful, exciting time.

We're going to get all of those things that we can hope for and we're going to get a lot of things that we can't even imagine. And there are going to be very real potential dangers, and if we want to have the good story, as I keep saying, and not have the bad story, now is the time where we need to start making the real investments.

Distrust of disruption (19:44)

Your job is the disruption of this thing that's come before. . . stopping the advance of progress is just not one of our options.

I think some people would, when they hear about all these changes, they’d think what you're telling them is “the bad story.”

I just talked about fornicating with robots, it’s the bad story?

Yeah, some people might find that bad story. But listen, we live at an age where people have recoiled against the disruption of trade, for instance. People are very allergic to the idea of economic disruption. I think about all the debate we had over stem cell therapy back in the early 2000s, 2002. There certainly is going to be a certain contingent that, what they're going to hear what you're saying is: you're going to change what it means to be a human. You're going to change what it means to have a job. I don't know if I want all this. I'm not asking for all this.

And we've seen where that pushback has greatly changed, for instance, how we trade with other nations. Are you concerned that that pushback could create regulatory or legislative obstacles to the kind of future you're talking about?

All of those things, and some of that pushback, frankly, is healthy. These are fundamental changes, but those people who are pushing back are benchmarking their own lives to the world that they were born into and, in most cases, without recognizing how radical those lives already are, if the people you're talking about are hunter-gatherers in some remote place who've not gone through domestication of agriculture, and industrialization, and all of these kinds of things, that's like, wow, you're going from being this little hunter-gatherer tribe in the middle of Atlantis and all of a sudden you're going to be in a world of gene therapy and shifting trading patterns.

But the people who are saying, “Well, my job as a computer programmer, as a whatever, is going to get disrupted,” your job is the disruption. Your job is the disruption of this thing that's come before. As I said at the start of our conversation, stopping the advance of progress is just not one of our options.

We could do it, and societies have done it before, and they've lost their economies, they've lost their vitality. Just go to Europe, Europe is having this crisis now because for decades they saw their economy and their society, frankly, as a museum to the past where they didn't want to change, they didn't want to think about the implications of new technologies and new trends. It's why I am just back from Italy. It's wonderful, I love visiting these little farms where they're milking the goats like they've done for centuries and making cheese they've made for centuries, but their economies are shrinking with incredible rapidity where ours and the Chinese are growing.

Everybody wants to hold onto the thing that they know. It's a very natural thing, and I'm not saying we should disregard those views, but the societies that have clung too tightly to the way things were tend to lose their vitality and, ultimately, their freedom. That's what you see in the war with Russia and Ukraine. Let's just say there are people in Ukraine who said, “Let's not embrace new disruptive technologies.” Their country would disappear.

We live in a competitive world where you can opt out like Europe opted out solely because they lived under the US security umbrella. And now that President Trump is threatening the withdrawal of that security umbrella, Europe is being forced to race not into the future, but to race into the present.

Risk tolerance (24:08)

. . . experts, scientists, even governments don't have any more authority to make these decisions about the future of our species than everybody else.

I certainly understand that sort of analogy, and compared to Europe, we look like a far more risk-embracing kind of society. Yet I wonder how resilient that attitude — because obviously I would've said the same thing maybe in 1968 about the United States, and yet a decade later we stopped building nuclear reactors — I wonder how resilient we are to anything going wrong, like something going on with an AI system where somebody dies. Or something that looks like a cure that kills someone. Or even, there seems to be this nuclear power revival, how resilient would that be to any kind of accident? How resilient do you think are we right now to the inevitable bumps along the way?

It depends on who you mean by “we.” Let's just say “we” means America because a lot of these dawns aren't the first ones. You talked about gene therapy. This is the second dawn of gene therapy. The first dawn came crashing into a halt in 1999 when a young man at the University of Pennsylvania died as a result of an error carried out by the treating physicians using what had seemed like a revolutionary gene therapy. It's the second dawn of AI after there was a lot of disappointment. There will be accidents . . .

Let's just say, hypothetically, there's an accident . . . some kind of self-driving car is going to kill somebody or whatever. And let's say there's a political movement, the Luddites that is successful, and let's just say that every self-driving car in America is attacked and destroyed by mobs and that all of the companies that are making these cars are no longer able to produce or deploy those cars. That's going to be bad for self-driving cars in America — it's not going to be bad for self-driving cars. . . They're going to be developed in some other place. There are lots of societies that have lost their vitality. That's the story of every empire that we read about in history books: there was political corruption, sclerosis. That's very much an option.

I'm a patriotic American and I hope America leads these revolutions as long as we can maintain our values for many, many centuries to come, but for that to happen, we need to invest in that. Part of that is investing now so that people don't feel that they are powerless victims of these trends they have no influence over.

That's why all of my work is about engaging people in the conversation about how do we deploy these technologies? Because experts, scientists, even governments don't have any more authority to make these decisions about the future of our species than everybody else. What we need to do is have broad, inclusive conversations, engage people in all kinds of processes, including governance and political processes. That's why I write the books that I do. That's why I do podcast interviews like this. My Joe Rogan interviews have reached many tens of millions of people — I know you told me before that you're much bigger than Joe Rogan, so I imagine this interview will reach more than that.

I'm quite aspirational.

Yeah, but that's the name of the game. With my last book tour, in the same week I spoke to the top scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the seventh and eighth graders at the Solomon Schechter Hebrew Academy of New Jersey, and they asked essentially the exact same questions about the future of human genetic engineering. These are basic human questions that everybody can understand and everybody can and should play a role and have a voice in determining the big decisions and the future of our species.

To what extent is the future you're talking about dependent on continued AI advances? If this is as good as it gets, does that change the outlook at all?

One, there's no conceivable way that this is as good as it gets because even if the LLMs, large language models — it's not the last word on algorithms, there will be many other philosophies of algorithms, but let's just say that LLMs are the end of the road, that we've just figured out this one thing, and that's all we ever have. Just using the technologies that we have in more creative ways is going to unleash incredible progress. But it's certain that we will continue to have innovations across the field of computer science, in energy production, in algorithm development, in the ways that we have to generate and analyze massive data pools. So we don't need any more to have the revolution that's already started, but we will have more.

Politics always, ultimately, can trump everything if we get it wrong. But even then, even if . . . let's just say that the United States becomes an authoritarian, totalitarian hellhole. One, there will be technological innovation like we're seeing now even in China, and two, these are decentralized technologies, so free people elsewhere — maybe it'll be Europe, maybe it'll be Africa or whatever — will deploy these technologies and use them. These are agnostic technologies. They don't have, as I said at the start, an inevitable outcome, and that's why the name of the game for us is to weave our best values into this journey.

What is a “newnimal”? (30:11)

. . . we don't live in a state of nature, we live in a world that has been massively bio-engineered by our ancestors, and that's just the thing that we call life.

When I was preparing for this interview and my research assistant was preparing, I said, “We have to have a question about bio-engineered new animals.” One, because I couldn't pronounce your name for these . . . newminals? So pronounce that name and tell me why we want these.

It's a made up word, so you can pronounce it however you want. “Newnimals” is as good as anything.

We already live in a world of bio-engineered animals. Go back 50,000 years, find me a dog, find me a corn that is recognizable, find me rice, find me wheat, find me a cow that looks remotely like the cow in your local dairy. We already live in that world, it's just people assume that our bioengineered world is some kind of state of nature. We already live in a world where the size of a broiler chicken has tripled over the last 70 years. What we have would have been unrecognizable to our grandparents.

We are already genetically modifying animals through breeding, and now we're at the beginning of wanting to have whatever those same modifications are, whether it's producing more milk, producing more meat, living in hotter environments and not dying, or whatever it is that we're aiming for in these animals that we have for a very long time seen not as ends in themselves, but means to the alternate end of our consumption.

We're now in the early stages xenotransplantation, modifying the hearts, and livers, and kidneys of pigs so they can be used for human transplantation. I met one of the women who has received — and seems to so far to be thriving — a genetically modified pig kidney. We have 110,000 people in the United States on the waiting list for transplant organs. I really want these people not just to survive, but to survive and thrive. That's another area we can grow.

Right now . . . in the world, we slaughter about 93 billion land animals per year. We consume 200 million metric tons of fish. That's a lot of murder, that's a lot of risk of disease. It's a lot of deforestation and destruction of the oceans. We can already do this, but if and when we can grow bioidentical animal products at scale without having all of these negative externalities of whether it's climate change, environmental change, cruelty, deforestation, increased pandemic risk, what a wonderful thing to do!

So we have these technologies and you mentioned that people are worried about them, but the reason people are worried about them is they're imagining that right now we live in some kind of unfettered state of nature and we're going to ruin it. But that's why I say we don't live in a state of nature, we live in a world that has been massively bio-engineered by our ancestors, and that's just the thing that we call life.

Inspired by curiosity (33:42)

. . . the people who I love and most admire are the people who are just insatiably curious . . .

What sort of forward thinkers, or futurists, or strategic thinkers of the past do you model yourself on, do you think are still worth reading, inspired you?

Oh my God, so many, and the people who I love and most admire are the people who are just insatiably curious, who are saying, “I'm going to just look at the world, I'm going to collect data, and I know that everybody says X, but it may be true, it may not be true.” That is the entire history of science. That's Galileo, that's Charles Darwin, who just went around and said, “Hey, with an open mind, how am I going to look at the world and come up with theses?” And then he thought, “Oh s**t, this story that I'm coming up with for how life advances is fundamentally different from what everybody in my society believes and organizes their lives around.” Meaning, in my mind, that's the model, and there are so many people, and that's the great thing about being human.

That's what's so exciting about this moment is that everybody has access to these super-empowered tools. We have eight billion humans, but about two billion of those people are just kind of locked out because of crappy education, and poor water sanitation, electricity. We're on the verge of having everybody who has a smartphone has the possibility of getting a world-class personalized education in their own language. How many new innovations will we have when little kids who were in slums in India, or in Pakistan, or in Nairobi, or wherever who have promise can educate themselves, and grow up and cure cancers, or invent new machines, or new algorithms. This is pretty exciting.

The summary of the people from the past, they're kind of like the people in the present that I admire the most, are the people who are just insatiably curious and just learning, and now we have a real opportunity so that everybody can be their own Darwin.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* AI Hype Is Proving to Be a Solow's Paradox - Bberg Opinion

* Trump Considers Naming Next Fed Chair Early in Bid to Undermine Powell - WSJ

* Who Needs the G7? - PS

* Advances in AI will boost productivity, living standards over time - Dallas Fed

* Industrial Policy via Venture Capital - SSRN

* Economic Sentiment and the Role of the Labor Market - St. Louis Fed

▶ Business

* AI valuations are verging on the unhinged - Economist

* Nvidia shares hit record high on renewed AI optimism - FT

* OpenAI, Microsoft Rift Hinges on How Smart AI Can Get - WSJ

* Takeaways From Hard Fork’s Interview With OpenAI’s Sam Altman - NYT

* Thatcher’s legacy endures in Labour’s industrial strategy - FT

* Reddit vows to stay human to emerge a winner from artificial intelligence - FT

▶ Policy/Politics

* Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models - Ars

* Don’t Let Silicon Valley Move Fast and Break Children’s Minds - NYT Opinion

* Is DOGE doomed to fail? Some experts are ready to call it. - Ars

* The US is failing its green tech ‘Sputnik moment’ - FT

▶ AI/Digital

* Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce - Arxiv

* Is the Fed Ready for an AI Economy? - WSJ Opinion

* How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use? I Went to a Data Center to Find Out. - WSJ

* Meta Poaches Three OpenAI Researchers - WSJ

* AI Agents Are Getting Better at Writing Code—and Hacking It as Well - Wired

* Exploring the Capabilities of the Frontier Large Language Models for Nuclear Energy Research - Arxiv

▶ Biotech/Health

* Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work - MIT

* Does using ChatGPT change your brain activity? Study sparks debate - Nature

* We cure cancer with genetic engineering but ban it on the farm. - ImmunoLogic

* ChatGPT and OCD are a dangerous combo - Vox

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Is It Too Soon for Ocean-Based Carbon Credits? - Heatmap

* The AI Boom Can Give Rooftop Solar a New Pitch - Bberg Opinion

▶ Robotics/Drones/AVs

* Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Shows Google’s Waymo Is Worth More Than $45 Billion - WSJ

* OpenExo: An open-source modular exoskeleton to augment human function - Science Robotics

▶ Space/Transportation

* Bezos and Blue Origin Try to Capitalize on Trump-Musk Split - WSJ

* Giant asteroid could crash into moon in 2032, firing debris towards Earth - The Guardian

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* New Yorkers Vote to Make Their Housing Shortage Worse - WSJ

* We Need More Millionaires and Billionaires in Latin America - Bberg Opinion

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Student visas are a critical pipeline for high-skilled, highly-paid talent - Agglomerations

State Power Without State Capacity - Breakthrough Journal

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

America is embarking upon a New Space Age, with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin ready to partner with NASA to take Americans to a new frontier — possibly as far as Mars. Lately, however, the world is witnessing uncertainty surrounding NASA leadership and even an odd feud between SpaceX boss Elon Musk and the White House. At a critical time for US space competition, let’s hope key players can stick the landing.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with James Meigs about the SLS rocket, NASA reforms, and the evolving private sector landscape.

Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is a contributing editor of City Journal and writer of the Tech Commentary column at Commentary magazine. He is also the former editor of Popular Mechanics.

Meigs is the author of a recent report from the Manhattan Institute, U.S. Space Policy: The Next Frontier.

In This Episode

* So long, Jared Isaacman (1:29)

* Public sector priorities (5:36)

* Supporting the space ecosystem (11:52)

* A new role for NASA (17:27)

* American space leadership (21:17)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

So long, Jared Isaacman (1:29)

The withdrawal of Jared Isaacman . . . has really been met with total dismay in the space community. Everyone felt like he was the right kind of change agent for the agency that desperately needs reform, but not destruction.

Pethokoukis: We're going to talk a lot about your great space policy report, which you wrote before the withdrawal of President Trump's NASA nominee, Jared Isaacman.

What do you think of that? Does that change your conclusions? Good move, bad move? Just sort of your general thoughts apart from the surprising nature of it.

Meigs: I worked sort of on and off for about a year on this report for the Manhattan Institute about recommendations for space policy, and it just came out a couple of months ago and already it's a different world. So much has happened. The withdrawal of Jared Isaacman — or the yanking of his nomination — has really been met with total dismay in the space community. Everyone felt like he was the right kind of change agent for the agency that desperately needs reform, but not destruction.

Now, it remains to be seen what happens in terms of his replacement, but it certainly pulled the rug out from under the idea that NASA could be reformed and yet stay on track for some ambitious goals. I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic that some of these things will happen, but my sense is that the White House is not particularly interested in space.

Interestingly, Musk wasn't really that involved in his role of DOGE and stuff. He didn't spend that much time on NASA. He wasn't micromanaging NASA policy, and I don't think Isaacman would've been just a mouthpiece for Musk either. He showed a sense of independence. So it remains to be seen, but my recommendations . . . and I share this with a lot of people advocating reform, is that NASA more or less needs to get out of the rocket-building business, and the Space Launch System, this big overpriced rocket they've been working on for years — we may need to fly it two more times to get us back to the moon, but after that, that thing should be retired. If there's a way to retire it sooner, that would be great. At more than $4 billion a launch, it's simply not affordable, and NASA will not be an agency that can routinely send people into space if we're relying on that white elephant.

To me what was exciting about Isaacman was his genuine enthusiasm about space. It seemed like he understood that NASA needed reform and changes to the budget, but that the result would be an agency that still does big things. Is there a fear that his replacement won’t be interested in NASA creative destruction, just destruction?

We don't know for sure, but the budget that's been proposed is pretty draconian, cutting NASA's funding by about a quarter and recommending particularly heavy cuts in the science missions, which would require cutting short some existing missions that are underway and not moving ahead with other planned missions.

There is room for saving in some of these things. I advocate a more nimble approach to NASA's big science missions. Instead of sending one $4 billion rover to Mars every 20 years, once launch costs come down, how about we send ten little ones and if a couple of them don't make it, we could still be getting much more science done for the same price or less. So that's the kind of thing Isaacman was talking about, and that's the kind of thing that will be made possible as launch costs continue to fall, as you've written about, Jim. So it requires a new way of thinking at NASA. It requires a more entrepreneurial spirit and it remains to be seen whether another administrator can bring that along the way. We were hoping that Isaacman would.

Public sector priorities (5:36)

Congress has never deviated from focusing more on keeping these projects alive than on whether these projects achieve their goals.

It seems to me that there are only two reasons, at this point, to be in favor of the SLS rocket. One: There’s a political pork jobs aspect. And the other is that it’s important to beat China to the moon, which the Artemis program is meant to do. Does that seem accurate?

Pretty much, yeah. You can be for beating China the moon and still be against the SLS rocket, you kind of just grit your teeth and say, okay, we've got to fly it two more times because it would be hard to cobble together, in the timeframe available, a different approach — but not impossible. There are other heavy lift rockets. Once you can refuel in orbit and do other things, there's a lot of ways to get a heavy payload into orbit. When I started my report, it looked like SLS was the only game in town, but that's really not the case. There are other options.

The Starship has to quit blowing up.

I would've loved to have seen the last couple of Starship missions be a little more successful. That's unfortunate. The pork part of SLS just can't be underestimated. From the get go, going way back to when the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and even before to when after the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster — that's the second disaster — there was a really big effort to figure out how to replace the space shuttle, what would come next. There was a strong movement in Congress at that time to say, “Well, whatever you build, whatever you do, all the factories that are involved in working on the Space Shuttle, all of the huge workforces in NASA that work on the space shuttle, all of this manpower has to be retained.” And Congress talked a lot about keeping the experience, the expertise, the talent going.

I can see some legitimacy to that argument, but if you looked at the world that way, then you would always focus on keeping the jobs of the past viable instead of the jobs of the future: What are we going to do with the blacksmiths who shoe horses? If we lose all this technological capability of shoeing horses . . . we’d better not bring in all these cars! That's an exaggeration, but as a result, first they aim to replace the Space Shuttle with a rocket called Constellation that would recycle some of the Shuttle components. And then eventually they realized that that was just too bloated, too expensive. That got canceled during the Obama administration replaced with the Space Launch System, which is supposed to be cheaper, more efficient, able to be built in a reasonable amount of time.

It wound up being just as bloated and also technologically backward. They're still keeping technology from the Shuttle era. The solid fuel engines, which, as we recall from the first Shuttle disaster, were problematic, and the Shuttle main engine design as well. So when SLS flies with humans on board for the first time, supposedly next year, it'll be using technology that was designed before any of the astronauts were even born.

In this day and age, that's kind of mind-blowing, and it will retain these enormous workforces in these plants that happen to be located in states with powerful lawmakers. So there's an incredible incentive to just keep it all going, not to let things change, not to let anything be retired, and to keep that money flowing to contractors, to workers and to individual states. Congress has never deviated from focusing more on keeping these projects alive than on whether these projects achieve their goals.

I've seen a video of congressional hearings from 15 years ago, and the hostility toward the idea of there being a private-sector alternative to NASA, now it seems almost inexplicable seeing that even some of these people were Republicans from Texas.

Seeing where we are now, it’s just amazing because now that we have the private sector, we're seeing innovation, we're seeing the drop in launch costs, the reusability — just a completely different world than what existed 15, 16, 17 years ago.

I don't think people really realize how revolutionary NASA's commercial programs were. They really sort of snuck them in quietly at first, starting as far back as 2005, a small program to help companies develop their own space transportation systems that could deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

SpaceX was initially not necessarily considered a leader in that. It was a little startup company nobody took very seriously, but they wound up doing the best job. Then later they also led the race to be the first to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station, saved NASA billions of dollars, and helped launch this private-industry revolution in space that we're seeing today that's really exciting.

It's easy to say, “Oh, NASA's just this old sclerotic bureaucracy,” and there's some truth to that, but NASA has always had a lot of innovative people, and a lot of the pressure of the push to move to this commercial approach where NASA essentially charters a rocket the way you would charter a fishing boat rather than trying to build and own its own equipment. That's the key distinction. You’ve got to give them credit for that and you also have to give SpaceX enormous credit for endless technological innovation that has brought down these prices.

So I totally agree, it's inconceivable to think of trying to run NASA today without their commercial partners. Of course, we'd like to see more than just SpaceX in there. That's been a surprise to people. In a weird way, SpaceX's success is a problem because you want an ecosystem of competitors that NASA can choose from, not just one dominant supplier.

Supporting the space ecosystem (11:52)

There's a reason that the private space industry is booming in the US much more than elsewhere in the world. But I think they could do better and I'd like to see reform there.

Other than the technical difficulty of the task, is there something government could be doing or not doing, perhaps on the regulatory side, to encourage a more sort of a bigger, more vibrant space ecosystem.

In my Manhattan Institute report, I recommend some changes, particularly, the FAA needs to continue reforming its launch regulations. They’re more restrictive and take longer than they should. I think they're making some progress. They recently authorized more launches of the experimental SpaceX Starship, but it shouldn't take months to go through the paperwork to authorize the launch of a new spacecraft.

I think the US, we’re currently better than most countries in terms of allowing private space. There's a reason that the private space industry is booming in the US much more than elsewhere in the world. But I think they could do better and I'd like to see reform there.

I also think NASA needs to continue its efforts to work with a wide range of vendors in this commercial paradigm and accept that a lot of them might not pan out. We've seen a really neat NASA program to help a lot of different companies, but a lot of startups have been involved in trying to build and land small rovers on the moon. Well, a lot of them have crashed.

Not an easy task apparently.

No. When I used to be editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, one of the great things I got to do was hang out with Buzz Aldrin, and Buzz Aldrin talking about landing on the moon — now, looking back, you realize just how insanely risky that was. You see all these rovers designed today with all the modern technology failing to land a much smaller, lighter object safely on the moon, and you just think, “Wow, that was an incredible accomplishment.” And you have so much admiration for the guts of the guys who did it.

As they always say, space is hard, and I think NASA working with commercial vendors to help them, give them some seed money, help them get started, pay them a set fee for the mission that you're asking for, but also build into your planning — just the way an entrepreneur would — that some product launches aren't going to work, some ideas are going to fail, sometimes you're going to have to start over. That's just part of the process, and if you're not spending ridiculous amounts of money, that's okay.

When we talk about vendors, who are we talking about? When we talk about this ecosystem as it currently exists, what do these companies do besides SpaceX?

The big one that everybody always mentions first, of course, is Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's startup that's been around as long as SpaceX, but just moved much more slowly. Partly because when it first started up, it was almost as much of a think tank to explore different ideas about space and less of a scrappy startup trying to just make money by launching satellites for paying customers as soon as possible. That was Musk's model. But they've finally launched. They've launched a bunch of suborbital flights, you've seen where they carry various celebrities and stuff up to the edge of space for a few minutes and they come right back down. That's been a chance for them to test out their engines, which have seemed solid and reliable, but they've finally done one mission with their New Glenn rocket. Like SpaceX, it's a reusable rocket which can launch pretty heavy payloads. Once that gets proven and they've had a few more launches under their belt, should be an important part of this ecosystem.

But you've got other companies, you've got Stoke Aerospace, you've got Firefly . . . You've got a few companies that are in the launch business, so they want to compete with SpaceX to launch mostly satellites for paying customers, also cargo for payloads for governments. And then you have a lot of other companies that are doing various kinds of space services and they're not necessarily going to try to be in the launch business per se. We don't need 40 different companies doing launches with different engines, different designs, different fuels, and stuff like that. Eight or 10 might be great, six might be great. We’ll see how the market sorts out.

But then if you look at the development of the auto industry, it started with probably hundreds of little small shops, hand-building cars, but by the mid-century it had settled down to a few big companies through consolidation. And instead of hundreds of engine designs that were given 1950, there were probably in the US, I don't know, 12 engine designs or something like that. Stuff got standardized — we'll see the same thing happen in space — but you also saw an enormous ecosystem of companies building batteries, tires, transmissions, parts, wipers, all sorts of little things and servicing in an industry to service the automobile. Now, rockets are a lot more centralized and high-tech, but you're going to see something like that in the space economy, and it's already happening.

A new role for NASA (17:27)

I think NASA should get more ambitious in deep-space flight, both crewed and uncrewed.

What do you see NASA should be doing? We don't want them designing rockets anymore, so what should they do? What does that portfolio look like?

That's an excellent question. I think that we are in this pivotal time when, because of the success of SpaceX, and hopefully soon other vendors, they can relieve themselves of that responsibility to build their own rockets. That gets out of a lot of the problems of Congress meddling to maximize pork flowing to their states and all of that kind of stuff. So that's a positive in itself.

Perhaps a bug rather than a feature for Congress.

Right, but it also means that technology will move much, much faster as private companies are innovating and competing with each other. That gives NASA an opportunity. What should they do with it? I think NASA should get more ambitious in deep-space flight, both crewed and uncrewed. Because it'll get much cheaper to get cargo into orbit to get payload up there, as I said, they can launch more science missions, and then when it comes to human missions, I like the overall plan of Artemis. The details were really pulled together during the first Trump administration, which had a really good space policy overall, which is to return to the moon, set up a permanent or long-term habitation on the moon. The way NASA sketches it out, not all the burden is carried by NASA.

They envision — or did envision — a kind of ecosystem on the moon where you might have private vendors there providing services. You might have a company that mines ice and makes oxygen, and fuel, and water for the residents of these space stations. You might have somebody else building habitation that could be used by visiting scientists who are not NASA astronauts, but also used by NASA.

There's all this possibility to combine what NASA does with the private sector, and what NASA should always do is be focused on the stuff the private sector can't yet do. That would be the deep-space probes. That would be sending astronauts on the most daring non-routine missions. As the private sector develops the ability to do some of those things, then NASA can move on to the next thing. That's one set of goals.

Another set of goals is to do the research into technologies, things that are hard for the private sector to undertake. In particular, things like new propulsion for deep-space travel. There’s a couple of different designs for nuclear rocket engines that I think are really promising, super efficient. Sadly, under the current budget cuts that are proposed at NASA, that's one of the programs that's being cut, and if you really want to do deep space travel routinely, ultimately, chemical fuels, they're not impossible, but they're not as feasible because you’ve got to get all that heavy — whatever your fuel is, methane or whatever it is — up into either into orbit or you’ve got to manufacture it on the moon or somewhere. The energy density of plutonium or uranium is just so much higher and it just allows you to do so much more with lighter weight. So I'd like to see them research those kinds of things that no individual private company could really afford to do at this point, and then when the technology is more mature, hand it off to the private sector.

American space leadership (21:17)

Exploration's never been totally safe, and if people want to take risks on behalf of a spirit of adventure and on behalf of humanity at large, I say we let them.

If things go well —reforms, funding, lower launch costs — what does America’s role in space look like in 10 to 15 years, and what’s your concern if things go a darker route, like cutting nuclear engine research you were just talking about?

I'll sketch out the bright scenario. This is very up your alley, Jim.

Yeah, I viewed this as a good thing, so you tell me what it is.

In 15 years I would love to see a small permanent colony at the south pole of the moon where you can harvest ice from the craters and maybe you'd have some habitation there, maybe even a little bit of space tourism starting up. People turn up their nose at space tourism, but it's a great way to help fund really important research. Remember the Golden Age of Exploration, James Cook and Darwin, those expeditions were self-funded. They were funded by rich people. If rich people want to go to space, I say I'm all for it.

So a little base on the moon, important research going on, we're learning how to have people live on a foreign body, NASA is gathering tons of information and training for the next goal, which I think is even more important: I do agree we should get people to Mars. I don't think we should bypass the moon to get to Mars, I don't think that's feasible, that's what Elon Musk keeps suggesting. I think it's too soon for that. We want to learn about how people handle living off-planet for a long period of time closer to home — and how to mine ice and how to do all these things — closer to home, three or four days away, not months and months away. If something goes wrong, they'll be a lot more accessible.

But I'd like to see, by then, some Mars missions and maybe an attempt to start the first long-term habitation of Mars. I don't think we're going to see that in 10 years, but I think that's a great goal, and I don't think it's a goal that taxpayers should be expected to fund 100 percent. I think by then we should see even more partnerships where the private companies that really want to do this — and I'm looking at Elon Musk because he's been talking about it for 20 years — they should shoulder a lot of the costs of that. If they see a benefit in that, they should also bear some of the costs. So that's the bright scenario.

Along with that, all kinds of stuff going on in low-earth orbit: manufacturing drugs, seeing if you can harness solar energy, private space stations, better communications, and a robust science program exploring deep space with unmanned spacecraft. I'd like to see all of that. I think that could be done for a reasonable amount of money with the proper planning.

The darker scenario is that we've just had too much chaos and indecision in NASA for years. We think of NASA as being this agency of great exploration, but they've done very little for 20 years . . . I take that back — NASA's uncrewed space program has had a lot of successes. It's done some great stuff. But when it comes to manned space flight, it's pretty much just been the International Space Station, and I think we've gotten most of the benefit out of that. They're planning to retire that in 2030. So then what happens? After we retired the Space Shuttle, space practically went into a very low-growth period. We haven't had a human being outside of low-earth orbit since Apollo, and that's embarrassing, frankly. We should be much more ambitious.

I'm afraid we're entering a period where, without strong leadership and without a strong focus on really grand goals, then Congress will reassert its desire to use NASA as a piggy bank for their states and districts and aerospace manufacturers will build the stuff they're asked to build, but nothing will move very quickly. That's the worst-case scenario. We'll see, but right now, with all of the kind of disorder in Washington, I think we are in a period where we should be concerned.

Can America still call itself the world’s space leader if its role is mainly launching things into Earth orbit, with private companies running space stations for activities like drug testing or movie production if, meanwhile, China is building space stations and establishing a presence on the Moon? In that scenario, doesn’t it seem like China is the world’s leader in space?

That's a real issue. China has a coherent nationalistic plan for space, and they are pursuing it, they're pouring a lot of resources into it, and they're making a lot of headway. As always, when China rolls out its new, cutting-edge technology, it usually looks a lot like something originally built in the US, and they're certainly following SpaceX's model as closely as they can in terms of reusable rockets right now.

China wants to get to the moon. They see this as a space race the way the Soviets saw a space race. It's a battle for national prestige. One thing that worries me, is under the Artemis plan during the first Trump administration, there was also something called the Artemis Accords — it still exists — which is an international agreement among countries to A) join in where they can if they want, with various American initiatives. So we've got partners that we're planning to build different parts of the Artemis program, including a space station around the moon called Gateway, which actually isn't the greatest idea, but the European Space Agency and others were involved in helping build it.

But also, all these countries, more than 50 countries have signed on to these aspirational goals of the Artemis Accords, which are: freedom of navigation, shared use of space, going for purposes of peaceful exploration, being transparent about what you're doing in space so that other countries can see it, avoiding generating more space junk, space debris, which is a huge problem with all the stuff we've got up there now, including a lot of old decrepit satellites and rocket bodies. So committing to not just leaving your upper-stage rocket bodies drifting around in space. A lot of different good goals, and the fact that all these countries wanted to join in on this shows America's preeminence. But if we back away, or become chaotic, or start disrespecting those allies who've signed on, they're going to look for another partner in space and China is going to roll out the red carpet for them.

You get a phone call from SpaceX. They've made some great leap forwards. That Starship, it's ready to go to Mars. They're going to create a human habitation out there. They need a journalist. By the way, it's a one-way trip. Do you go?

I don't go to Mars. I've got family here. That comes first for me. But I know some people want to do that, and I think that we should celebrate that. The space journalist Rand Simberg wrote a book years ago called Safe Is Not An Option — that we should not be too hung up on trying to make space exploration totally safe. Exploration's never been totally safe, and if people want to take risks on behalf of a spirit of adventure and on behalf of humanity at large, I say we let them. So maybe that first trip to Mars is a one-way trip, or at least a one-way for a couple of years until more flights become feasible and more back-and-forth return flights become something that can be done routinely. It doesn't really appeal to me, but it'll appeal to somebody, and I'm glad we have those kinds of people in our society.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Trump economy shows surprising resilience despite tariff impacts - Wapo

* Supply Chains Become New Battleground in the Global Trade War - WSJ

* This A.I. Company Wants to Take Your Job - NYT

* The Mirage of Geoeconomics - PS

* Japan urged to use gloomier population forecasts after plunge in births - FT

* Europe’s nuclear fusion potential draws record investment round - FT

▶ Business

* How Disney’s AI lawsuit could shift the future of entertainment - Wapo

* Meta plans big bet on AI’s secret ingredient: human brains - FT

* Nvidia and Perplexity Team Up in European AI Push - WSJ

* CRMArena-Pro: Holistic Assessment of LLM Agents Across Diverse Business Scenarios and Interactions - Arxiv

* Fervo Snags $206 Million for Cape Station Geothermal - Heatmap

* BYD launches cut-price EVs in Europe amid global price war - Semafor

▶ Policy/Politics

* The right refuses to take AI seriously - Vox

* The Gig Economy Benefits Freelance Workers—Until Regulation Steps In - AEI

* The war is on for Congress’ AI law ban - The Verge

* Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement - Wired

* Big Tech Is Finally Losing - NYT Opinion

* American Science's Culture Has Contributed to the Grave Threat It Now Faces - Real Clear Science

▶ AI/Digital

* New Apple study challenges whether AI models truly “reason” through problems - Ars

* The problem of AI chatbots telling people what they want to hear - FT

* With the launch of o3-pro, let’s talk about what AI “reasoning” actually does - Ars

* ‘This is coming for everyone’: A new kind of AI bot takes over the web - Wapo

* Europe’s AI computing shortage ‘will be resolved’ soon, says Nvidia chief - FT

* We’re Not Ready for the AI Power Surge - Free Press

▶ Biotech/Health

* Pancreatic cancer vaccine eradicates trace of disease in early trials - New Atlas

* World first: brain implant lets man speak with expression — and sing - Nature

* The Alzheimer’s drug pipeline is healthier than you might think - The Economist

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Big Tech Cares About Clean Energy Tax Credits — But Maybe Not Enough - Heatmap

* Nvidia ‘Climate in a Bottle’ Opens a View Into Earth’s Future. What Will We Do With It? - WSJ

* Oil’s Lost Decade Is About to Be Repeated - Bberg Opinion

* How the Pentagon Secretly Sparked America's Clean Energy Boom - The Debrief

▶ Space/Transportation

* Musk-Trump feud is a wake-up call on space - FT

* Trump's 2026 budget cuts would force the world's most powerful solar telescope to close - Space

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* ‘Invasive Species’? Japan’s Growing Pains on Immigration - Bberg Opinion

* Incredible Testimonies - Aeon

* How and When Was the Wheel Invented? - Real Clear Science

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Trump's "beautiful" bill wrecks our energy future - Slow Boring

* DOGE Looked Broken Before the Trump-Musk Breakup - The Dispatch

* Steve Teles on abundance: prehistory, present, and future - The Permanent Problem

* Is Macroeconomics a Mature Science? - Conversable Economist

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

As we seemingly grow closer to achieving artificial general intelligence — machines that are smarter than humans at basically everything — we might be incurring some serious geopolitical risks.

In the paper Superintelligence Strategy, his joint project with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang, Dan Hendrycks introduces the idea of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction: a system of deterrence where any state’s attempt at total AI dominance is sabotaged by its peers. From the abstract:

Just as nations once developed nuclear strategies to secure their survival, we now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals. Given the relative ease of sabotaging a destabilizing AI project—through interventions ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters—MAIM already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in. Alongside this, states can increase their competitiveness by bolstering their economies and militaries through AI, and they can engage in nonproliferation to rogue actors to keep weaponizable AI capabilities out of their hands. Taken together, the three-part framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness outlines a robust strategy to superintelligence in the years ahead.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Hendrycks about the potential threats posed by superintelligent AI in the hands of state and rogue adversaries, and what a strong deterrence strategy might look like.

Hendrycks is the executive director of the Center for AI Safety. He is an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI and Scale AI, and is a prolific researcher and writer.

In This Episode

* Development of AI capabilities (1:34)

* Strategically relevant capabilities (6:00)

* Learning from the Cold War (16:12)

* Race for strategic advantage (18:56)

* Doomsday scenario (28:18)

* Maximal progress, minimal risk (33:25)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Development of AI capabilities (1:34)

. . . mostly the systems aren't that impressive currently. People use them to some extent, but I'd more emphasize the trajectory that we're on rather than the current capabilities.

Pethokoukis: How would you compare your view of AI . . . as a powerful technology with economic, national security, and broader societal implications . . . today versus November of 2022 when OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT?

Hendrycks: I think that the main difference now is that we have the reasoning paradigm. Back in 2022, GPT couldn't think for an extended period of time before answering and try out multiple different ways of dissolving a problem. The main new capability is its ability to handle more complicated reasoning and science, technology, engineering, mathematics sorts of tasks. It's a lot better at coding, it's a lot better at graduate school mathematics, and physics, and virology.

An implication of that for national security is that AIs have some virology capabilities that they didn't before, and virology is dual-use that can be used for civilian applications and weaponization applications. That's a new concerning capability that they have, but I think, overall, the AI systems are still fairly similar in their capabilities profile. They're better in lots of different ways, but not substantially.

I think the next large shift is when they can be agents, when they can operate more autonomously, when they can book you flights reliably, make PowerPoints, play through long-form games for extended periods of time, and that seems like it's potentially on the horizon this year. It didn't seem like that two years ago. That's something that a lot of people are keeping an eye on and think could be arriving fairly soon. Overall, I think the capabilities profile is mostly the same except now it has some dual-use capabilities that they didn't have earlier, in particular virology capabilities.

To what extent are your national security concerns based on the capabilities of the technology as it is today versus where you think it will be in five years? This is also a way of me asking about the extent that you view AGI as a useful framing device — so this is also a question about your timeline.

I think that mostly the systems aren't that impressive currently. People use them to some extent, but I'd more emphasize the trajectory that we're on rather than the current capabilities. They still can't do very interesting cyber offense, for instance. The virology capabilities is very recent. We just, I think maybe a week ago, put out a study with SecureBio from MIT where we had Harvard, MIT virology postdocs doing wet lab skills, trying to work on viruses. So, “Here's a picture of my petri dish, I heated it to 37 degrees, what went wrong? Help me troubleshoot, help me guide me through this step by step.” We were seeing that it was getting around 95th percentile compared to those Harvard-MIT virology postdocs in their area of expertise. This is not a capability that the models had two years ago.

That is a national security concern, but I think most of the national security concerns where it's strategically relevant, where it can be used for more targeted weapons, where it affects the basis of a nation's power, I think that's something that happens in the next, say, two to five years. I think that's what we mostly need to be thinking about. I’m not particularly trying to raise the alarm saying that the AI systems right now are extremely scary in all these different ways because they're not even agential. They can't book flights yet.

Strategically relevant capabilities (6:00)

. . . when thinking about the future of AI . . . it's useful to think in terms of specific capabilities, strategically-relevant capabilities, as opposed to when is it truly intelligent . . .

So that two-to-five-year timeline — and you can debate whether this is a good way of thinking about it — is that a trajectory or timeline to something that could be called “human-level AI” — you can define that any way you want — and what are the capabilities that make AI potentially dangerous and a strategic player when thinking about national security?

I think having a monolithic term for AGI or for advanced AI systems is a little difficult, largely because there's been a consistently-moving goalpost. So right now people say, “AIs are dumb because they can't do this and that.” They can't play video games at the level of a teenager, they can't code for a day-long project, and things like that. Neither can my grandmother. That doesn't mean that she's not human-level intelligence, it's just a lot of people don't have some of these capabilities.

I think when thinking about the future of AI, especially when thinking about national security, it's useful to think in terms of specific capabilities, strategically-relevant capabilities, as opposed to when is it truly intelligent or something like that. This is because the capabilities of AI systems are very jagged: they're good at some things and terrible at others. They can't fold clothes that reliably — most of the AI can't —and they're okay at driving in some cities but not others, but they can solve really difficult mathematics problems, they can write really long essays and provide pretty good legal analysis very rapidly, and they can also forecast geopolitical events better than most forecasters. It's a really weird capabilities profile.

When I'm thinking about national security from a malicious-use standpoint, I'm thinking about weapon capabilities, I'm thinking about cyber-offensive capabilities, which they don't yet have, but that's an important one to track, and, outside of malicious use, I'm thinking about what's their ability to do AI research and how much of that can they automate? Because if they can automate AI research, then you could just run 100,000 of these artificial AGI researchers to build the next generations of AGI, and that could get very explosive extremely quickly. You're moving from human-speed research to machine-speed research. They’re typing 100 times faster than people, they're running tons of experiments simultaneously. That could be quite explosive, and that's something that the founders of AI pointed at as a really relevant capability, like Alan Turing and others, where that’s you could have a potential loss-of-control type of event is with this sort of runaway process of AI's building future generations of AIs quite rapidly.

So that's another capability. What fraction of AI research can they automate? For weaponization, I think if it gets extremely smart, able to do research in lots of other sorts of fields, then that would raise concerns of its ability to be used to disrupt the balance of power. For instance, if it can do research well, perhaps it could come up with a breakthrough that makes oceans more transparent so we can find where nuclear submarines are or find the mobile launches extremely reliably, or a breakthrough in driving down the cost by some orders of magnitude of anti-ballistic missile systems, which would disrupt having a secure second-strike, and these would be very geopolitically salient. To do those things, though, that seems like a bundle of capabilities as opposed to a specific thing like cyber-offensive capabilities, but those are the things that I'm thinking about that can really disrupt the geopolitical landscape.

If we put them in a bucket called, to use your phrase, “strategically-relevant capabilities,” are we on a trajectory of a data- and computing-power-driven trajectory to those capabilities? Or do there need to be one or two key innovations before those relevant capabilities are possible?

It doesn't seem like it currently that we need some new big insights, in large part because the rate of improvement is pretty good. So if we look at their coding capabilities — there's a benchmark called SWE-bench verified (SWE is software engineering). Given a set of coding tasks — and this benchmark was weighed in some years ago — the models are poised to get something like 90 percent on this this summer. Right now they're in this 60 percent range. If we just extrapolate the trend line out some more months, then they'll be doing nine out of 10 of those software engineering tasks that were set some years ago. That doesn't mean that that's the entirety of software engineering. Still need coders. It's not 100 percent, obviously, but that suggests that the capability is still improving fairly rapidly in some of these domains. And likewise, with their ability to play that take games that take 20-plus hours, a few months ago they couldn't — Pokémon, for instance, is something that kids play and that takes 20 hours or so to beat. The models from a few months ago couldn't beat the game. Now, the current models can beat the game, but it takes them a few hundred hours. It would not surprise me if in a few months they'll get it down to around human-level on the order of tens of hours, and then from there they'll be able to play harder and harder sorts of games that take longer periods of time, and I think that this would be indicative of higher general capabilities.

I think that there's a lot of steam in the current way that things are being done and I think that they've been trapped at the floor in their agent capabilities for a while, but I think we're starting to see the shift. I think that most people at the major AI companies would also think that agents are on the horizon and I don't think they were thinking that, myself included, a year ago. We were not seeing the signs that we're seeing now.

So what we're talking about is AIs is having, to use your phrase, which I like, “strategically-relevant capabilities” on a timeline that is soon enough that we should be having the kinds of conversations and the kind of thinking that you put forward in Superintelligence [Strategy]. We should be thinking about that right now very seriously.

Yeah, it's very difficult to wrap one's head around because, unlike other domains, AI is much more general and broad in its impacts. So if one's thinking about nuclear strategy, you obviously need to think about bombs going off, and survivability, and second strike. The failure modes are: one state strikes the other, and then there's also, in the civilian applications, fissile material leaking or there being a nuclear power plant meltdown. That's the scenario space, there’s what states can do and then there's also some of these civilian application issues.

Meanwhile, with AI, we've got much more than power plants melting down or bombs going off. We've got to think about how it transforms the economy, how it transforms people's private life, the sort of issues with them being sentient. We've got to think about it potentially disrupting mutual assured destruction. We've got to think about the AIs themselves being threats. We've got to think about regulations for autonomous AI agents and who's accountable. We've got to think about this open-weight, closed-weight issue. We've got, I think, a larger host of issues that touch on all the important spheres society. So it's not a very delimited problem and I think it's a very large pill to swallow, this possibility that it will be not just strategically relevant but strategically decisive this decade.

Consequently, and thinking a little bit beforehand about it is, useful. Otherwise, if we just ignore it, I think we reality will slap us across the face and AI will hit us like a truck, and then we're going, “Wow, I wish we did something, had some more break-glass measures at a time right now, but the cupboard is bare in terms of strategic options because we didn't do some prudent things a while ago, or we didn't even bother thinking about what those are.”

I keep thinking of the Situation Room in two years and they get news that China's doing some new big AI project, and it's fairly secretive, and then in the Situation Room they're thinking, “Okay, what do we know?” And the answer is nothing. We don't have really anybody on this. We're not collecting any information about this. We didn't have many concerted programs in the IC really tracking this, so we’re flying blind. I really don't want to be in that situation

Learning from the Cold War (16:12)

. . . mutual assured destruction is an ugly reality that took decision-makers a long time to internalize, but that's just what the game theory showed would make the most sense.

As I'm sure you know, throughout the course of the Cold War, there was a considerable amount of time and money spent on thinking about these kinds of problems. I went to college just before the end of the Cold War and I took an undergraduate class on nuclear war theory. There was a lot of thinking. To what extent does that volume of research and analysis over the course of a half-century, to what extent is that helpful for what you're trying to accomplish here?

I think it's very fortunate that, because of the Cold War, a lot of people started getting more of a sense of game theory and when it's rational to conflict versus negotiate, and offense can provide a good defense, some of these counterintuitive things. I think mutual assured destruction is an ugly reality that took decision-makers a long time to internalize, but that's just what the game theory showed would make the most sense. Hopefully we'll do a lot better with AI because strategic thinking can be a lot more precise and some of these things that are initially counterintuitive, if you reason through them, you go, actually no, this makes a lot of sense. We're trying to shape each other's intentions in this kind of complicated way. I think that makes us much better poised to address these geopolitical issues than last time.

I think of the Soviets, for instance, when talking about anti-ballistic missile systems. At one point, I forget who said that offense is immoral, defense is moral. So pointing these nuclear weapons at each other, this is the immoral thing. We need missile-defense systems. That's the moral option. It's just like, no, this is just going to eat up all of our budget. We're going to keep building these defense systems and it's not going to make us safer, we're just going to be spending more and more.

That was not intuitive. Offense does feel viscerally more mean, hostile, but that's what you want. That's what you want, to preserve for strategic stability. I think that a lot of the thinking is helpful with that, and I think the education for appreciating the strategic dynamics is more in the water, it's more diffused across the decision-makers now, and I think that that's great.

Race for strategic advantage (18:56)

There is also a risk that China builds [AGI] first, so I think what we want to do in the US is build up the capabilities to surgically prevent them . . .

I was recently reviewing a scenario slash world-building exercise among technologists, economists, forecasting people, and they were looking at various scenarios assuming that we're able to, on a rather short timeline, develop what they termed AGI. And one of the scenarios was that the US gets there first . . . probably not by very long, but the US got there first. I don't know how far China was behind, but that gave us the capability to sort of dictate terms to China about what their foreign policy would be: You're going to leave Taiwan alone . . . So it gave us an amazing strategic advantage.

I'm sure there are a lot of American policymakers who would read that scenario and say, “That's the dream,” that we are able to accelerate progress, that we are able to get there first, we can dictate foreign policy terms to China, game over, we win. If I've read Superintelligence correctly, that scenario would play out in a far more complicated way than what I've just described.

I think so. I think any bid for being a, not just unipolar force, but having a near-strategic-monopoly on power and able to cause all other superpowers to capitulate in arbitrary ways, concerns the other superpower. There is also a risk that China builds it first, so I think what we want to do in the US is build up the capabilities to surgically prevent them, if they are near or eminently going to gain a decisive advantage that would become durable and sustained over us, we want the ability to prevent that.

There's a variety of ways one can do things. There's the classic grayer ways like arson, and cutting wires in data centers, and things like that, or for power plants . . . There's cyber offense, and there's other sorts of kinetic sabotage, but we want it nice and surgical and having a good, credible threat so that we can deter that from happening and shaping their intentions.

I think it will be difficult to limit their capabilities, their ability to build these powerful systems, but I think being able to shape their intentions is something that is more tractable. They will be building powerful AI systems, but if they are making an attempt at leapfrogging us in a way that we never catch up and lose our standing and they get AIs that could also potentially disrupt MAD, for instance, we want to be able to prevent that. That is an important strategic priority, is developing a credible deterrent and saying there are some AI scenarios that are totally unacceptable to us and we want to block them off through credible threats.

They'll do the same to us, as well, and they can do it more easily to us. They know what's going on at all of our AI companies, and this will not change because we have a double digit percentage of the employees who are Chinese nationals, easily extortable, they have family back home, and the companies do not have good information security — that will probably not change because that will slow them down if they really try and lock them up and move everybody to North Dakota or wherever to work in the middle of nowhere and have everything air-gapped. We are an open book to them and I think they can make very credible threats for sabotage and preventing that type of outcome.

If we are making a bid for dictating their foreign policy and all of this, if we're making a bid for a strategic monopoly on power, they will not sit idly by, they will not take kindly to that when they recognize the stakes. If the US were to do a $500 billion program to achieve this faster than them, that would not go unnoticed. There's not a way of hiding that.

But we are trying to achieve it faster than them.

I would distinguish between trying to develop just generally more capable AI technologies than some of these strategically relevant capabilities or some of these strategically relevant programs. Like if we get AI systems that are generally useful for healthcare and for . . . whatever your pet cause area, we can have that. That is different from applying the AI systems to rapidly build the next generation of AIs, and the next generation of that. Just imagine if you have, right now, OpenAI’s got a few hundred AI researchers, imagine if you've got ones that are at that level that are artificial, AGI-type of researchers or are artificial researchers. You run 10,000, 100,000 thousand of them, they're operating around the clock at a hundred X speed, I think expecting a decade's worth of development compressed or telescoped into a year, that seems very plausible — not certain, but certainly double-digit percent chance.

China or Russia for instance, would perceive that as, “This is really risky. They could get a huge leap from this because these rate of development will be so high that we could never catch up,” and they could use their new gains to clobber us. Or, if they don't control it, then we're also dead, or lose our power. So if the US controls it, China would reason that, “Our survival is threatened and how we do things is threatened,” and if they lose control of it, “Our survival is also threatened.” Either way, provided that this automated AI research and development loop produces some extremely powerful AI systems, China would be fearing for their survival.

It's not just China: India, the global south, all the other countries, if they're more attuned to this situation, would be very concerned. Russia as well. Russia doesn't have the hope about competing, they don't have a $100 billion data centers, they're busy with Ukraine, and when they're finished with that, they may reassess it, but they're too many years behind. I think the best they can do is actually try and shape other states' intents rather than try to make a bid for outcompeting them.

If we're thinking about deterrence and what you call Mutually Assured AI Malfunction [MAIM], there's a capability aspect that we want to make sure that we would have the capability to check that kind of dash for dominance. But there's also a communication aspect where both sides have to understand and trust what the other side is trying to do, which was a key part of classic Cold War deterrence. Is that happening?

Information problems, yeah, if there's worse information then that can lead to conflict. I think China doesn't really need to worry about their access to information of what's going on. I think the US will need to develop more of its capabilities to have more reliable signals abroad. But I think there's different ways of getting information and producing misunderstandings, like the confidence-building measures, all these sorts of things. I think that the unilateral one is just espionage, and then the multilateral one is verification mechanisms and building some of that institutional or international infrastructure.

I think the first step in all of this is the states need to at least take matters into their own hands by building up these unilateral options, the unilateral option to prevent adversaries from doing a dash for domination and also know what's going on with each other's projects. I think that's what the US should focus on right now. Later on, as the salience of AI increases, I think then just international discussions to increase more strategic stability around this would be more plausible to emerge. But if they're not trying to take basic things to defend themselves and protect their own security, then I don't think international stuff that makes that much sense. That's kind of out of order.

Doomsday scenario (28:18)

If our institutions wake up to this more and do some of the basic stuff . . . to prevent another state dominating the other, I think that will make this go quite a bit better. . .

I have in my notes here that you think there's an 80 percent chance that an AI arms race would result in a catastrophe that would kill most of humanity. Do I have that right?

I think it's not necessarily just the race. Let's think of people's probabilities for this. There's a wide spectrum of probability. Elon, who I work with at xAI, a company I advise, xAI is his company, Elon thinks it's generally on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Dario Amodei, the CEO of philanthropic, I think thinks it's around 20 percent, as well. Sam Altman around 10 percent. I think it's more likely than not that this doesn't go that well for people, but there's a lot of tractability and a lot of volatility here.

If our institutions wake up to this more and do some of the basic stuff of knowing what's going on and sharpen your ability to have credible threats, credible, targeted threats to prevent another state dominating the other, I think that will make this go quite a bit better. . . I think if we went back in time in the 1940s and were saying, “Do we think that this whole nuclear thing is going to turn out well in 50 years?” I think we actually got a little lucky. I mean the Cuban Missile Crisis itself was . . .

There were a lot of bad moments in the ’60s. There were quite a few . . .

I think it's more likely than not, but there's substantial tractability and it's important not to be fatalistic about it or just deny it’s an issue, itself. I think it's like, do we think AI will go well? I don’t know, it depends on what our policy is. Right now, we're in the very early days and I'm still not noticing many of our institutions that are rising to the occasion that I think is warranted, but this could easily change in a few months with some larger event.

Not to be science fictional or anything, but you talk about a catastrophe, are you talking about: AI creates some sort of biological weapon? Back and forth cyber attacks destroy all the electrical infrastructure for China and the United States, so all of a sudden we're back into the 1800s? Are you talking about some sort of more “Terminator”-like scenario, rogue AI? When you think about the kind of catastrophe that could be that dangerous humanity, what do you think about?

We have three risk sources: one are states, the other are rogue actors like terrorists and pariah states, and then there's the AI themselves. The AI themselves are not relevant right now, but I think could be quite capable of causing damage on their own in even a year or two. That's the space of threat actors; so yes, AI could in the future . . . I don't see anything that makes them logically not controllable. They're mostly controllable right now. Maybe it's one out of 100, one out of 1000 of the times you run these AI systems and deploy them in some sort of environments [that] they do try breaking free. That's a bit of a problem later on when they actually gain the capability to break free and when they are able to operate autonomously.

There's been lots of studies on this and you can see this in OpenAI’s reports whenever they release new models. It's like, “Oh, it's only a 0.1 percent chance of it trying to break free,” but if you run a million of these AI agents, that's a lot of them that are going to be trying to break free. They're just not very capable currently. So I think that the AIs themselves are risky, and if you're having humanity going up against AIs that aren't controlled by anybody, or AIs that broke free, that could get quite dangerous if you also have, as we're seeing now, China and others building more of these humanoid robots in the next few years. This could make them be concerning in that they could just by themselves create some sort of bioweapon. You don't need even human hands to do it, you can just instruct a robot to do it and disperse it. I think that's a pretty easy way to take out biological opposition, so to speak, in kind of an eccentric way.

That's a concern. Rogue actors themselves doing this, them reasoning that, “Oh, this bioweapon gives us a secure second strike,” things like that would be a concern from rogue actors. Then, of course, states using this to make an attempt to crush the other state or develop a technology that disables an adversary’s secure second strike. I think these are real problems.

Maximal progress, minimal risk (33:25)

I think what we want to shoot for is [a world] where people have enough resources and the ability to just live their lives in ways as they self-determine . . .

Let me finish with this: I want continuing AI progress such that we can cure all the major chronic diseases, that we can get commercial nuclear fusion, that we can get faster rockets, all the kinds of optimistic stuff, accelerate economic growth to a pace that we've never seen. I want all of that.

Can I get all of that and also avoid the kinds of scenarios you're worried about without turning the optimistic AI project into something that arrives at the end of the century, rather than arrives midcentury? I’m just worried about slowing down all that progress.

I think we can. In the Superintelligence Strategy, we have three parts to that: We have the deterrence part, which I’m speaking about here, and we have making sure that the capabilities aren't falling into the hands of rogue actors — and I think this isn't that difficult, good export controls and add some just basic safeguards of we need to know who you are if we're going to be helping you manipulate viruses, things like that. That's easy to handle.

Then on the competition aspect, there are many ways the US can make itself more competitive, like having more guaranteed supply chains for AI chips, so more manufacturing here or in allied states instead of all of it being in Taiwan. Currently, all the cutting-edge AI chips are made in Taiwan, so if there's a Taiwan invasion, the US loses in this AI race. They lose. This is double-digit probability. This is very foreseeable. So trying to robustify our manufacturing capabilities, quite essential; likewise for making robotics and drones.

I think there's still many axes to compete in. I don't think it makes sense to try and compete in building a sort of superintelligence versus one of these potentially mutual assured destruction-disrupting AIs. I don't think you want to be building those, but I think you can have your AIs for healthcare, you can have your AIs doing all the complicated math you want, and whatever, all this coding, and driving your vehicles, and folding your laundry. You can have all of that. I think it's definitely feasible.

What we did in the Cold War with the prospect of nuclear weapons, we obviously got through it, and we had deterrence through mutual assured destruction. We had non-proliferation of fissile materials to lesser states and rogue actors, and we had containment of the Soviet Union. I think the Superintelligence Strategy is somewhat similar: If you deter some of the most stabilizing AI projects, you make sure that some of these capabilities are not proliferating to random rogue actors, and you increase your competitiveness relative to China through things like incorporating AI into your military by, for instance, improving your ability to manufacture drones and improving your ability to reliably get your hands on AI chips even if there's a Taiwan conflict.

I think that's the strategy and this doesn't make us uncompetitive. We are still focusing on competitiveness, but this does put barriers around some of the threats that different states could pose to us and that rogue actors using AI could pose to us while still shoring up economic security and positioning ourselves if AI becomes really relevant.

I lied, I had one more short question: If we avoid the dire scenarios, what does the world look like in 2045?

I would guess that it would be utterly transformed. I wouldn't expect people would be working then as much, hopefully. If you've controlled it well, there could be many ways of living, as there is now, and people would have resources to do so. It’s not like there's one way of living — that seems bad because there's many different values to pursue. So letting people pursue their own values, so long as it doesn't destroy the system, and things like that, as we have today. It seems like an abstract version of the picture.

People keep thinking, “Are we in zoos? Are AIs keeping us in zoos?” or something like that. It's like, no. Or like, “Are we just all in the Zuckerberg sort of virtual reality, AI friend thing?” It's like no, you can choose to do otherwise, as well. I think we want to preserve that ability.

Good news: we won't have to fold laundry. Bad news: in zoos. There's many scenarios.

I think what we want to shoot for is one where people have enough resources and the ability to just live their lives in ways as they self-determine, subject to not harming others in severe ways. But people tend to think there's same sort of forced dichotomy of it's going to be aWALL-EWALL-E world where everybody has to live the same way, or everybody's in zoos, or everybody's just pleasured-out and drugged-up or something. It’s forced choices. Some people do that, some people choose to have drugs, and we don't hear much from them, and others choose to flourish, and pursue projects, and raise children and so on.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Is College Still Worth It? - Liberty Street Economics

* Scalable versus Productive Technologies - Fed in Print

▶ Business

* AI’s Threat to Google Just Got Real - WSJ

* AI Has Upended the Search Game. Marketers Are Scrambling to Catch Up. - WSJ

▶ Policy/Politics

* U.S. pushes nations facing tariffs to approve Musk’s Starlink, cables show - Wapo

* US scraps Biden-era rule that aimed to limit exports of AI chips - FT

* Singapore’s Vision for AI Safety Bridges the US-China Divide - Wired

* A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms - Wired

▶ AI/Digital

* AI agents: from co-pilot to autopilot - FT

* China’s AI Strategy: Adoption Over AGI - AEI

* How to build a better AI benchmark - MIT

* Introducing OpenAI for Countries - OpenAI

* Why humans are still much better than AI at forecasting the future - Vox

* Outperformed by AI: Time to Replace Your Analyst? Find Out Which GenAI Model Does It Best - SSRN

▶ Biotech/Health

* Scientists Hail This Medical Breakthrough. A Political Storm Could Cripple It. - NYT

* DARPA-Funded Research Develops Novel Technology to Combat Treatment-Resistant PTSD - The Debrief

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - Sustainability by Numbers

* OpenAI and the FDA Are Holding Talks About Using AI In Drug Evaluation - Wired

▶ Robotics/AVs

* Jesse Levinson of Amazon Zoox: ‘The public has less patience for robotaxi mistakes’ - FT

▶ Space/Transportation

* NASA scrambles to cut ISS activity due to budget issues - Ars

* Statistically Speaking, We Should Have Heard from Aliens by Now - Universe Today

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class - Noahpinion

* The Banality of Blind Men - Risk & Progress

* Toys, Pencils, and Poverty at the Margins - The Dispatch

* Don’t Bet the Future on Winning an AI Arms Race - AI Prospects

* Why Is the US Economy Surging Ahead of the UK? - Conversable Economist

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

With the rise of American populist nationalism has come the rise of nativism: a belief in the concept of “heritage Americans” and a deep distrust of immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the ideology beneath this severe skepticism, as well as what Americans lose economically if we shut our doors to both low- and high-skilled immigrants.

Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of his own Substack with David Bier, as well as the co-author of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.

Read more of Nowrasteh’s work on immigration, nationalism, and other research.

In This Episode

* Illegal immigration (1:16)

* Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

* Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20)

* The future American workforce (14:04)

* Population decline and assimilation (17:35)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Illegal immigration (1:16)

The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans . . . because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Pethokoukis: Will you, in a very short period of time, give me a sense of the situation at the southern border of the United States of America in terms of immigration, how that has evolved from Trump 1, to Biden, to now? Is it possible to give me a concise summary of that?

Nowrasteh: From Obama through Trump 1, the border apprehension numbers were pretty reasonable, you were talking about somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 per year. Then came Covid, crashed those numbers down to basically nothing by April of 2020.

After that, the numbers progressively rose. They were at the highest point in December of 2020 than they had been for any other December going back over 25 years. Then Biden takes office, the numbers shoot through the roof. We're talking about 170,000 to 250,000, sometimes 300,000 a month until January or so of 2024; those numbers start coming down precipitously. December of 2024, they're at 40,000 or so, 45,000. January 2025, Trump comes in, they go down again. First full month of Trump's administration in February, they're about 8,000, the lowest numbers without a pandemic in a very long time.

What's the right number?

That's a hard question to answer? In an ideal world where costs and benefits didn't matter, I think the ideal number is zero. But the question is how do you get to that ideal number, right? Is it by having an insane amount of enforcement, of existing laws where you basically end up brutalizing people to an incredible extent? Or is it practically zero because we let people come in lawfully to work in this country. The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans, and that would bring that number down to about what it is now or even lower than what it is now every month, because the reason people come illegally is because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

. . . I just don't think the economic argument is what moves people on this topic.

As I’ve understood it, and maybe understand it wrong, is this issue has developed that — at first it seemed like the concern, and it still is the concern, was with illegal undocumented immigrants. And then it seems to me the argument became, “Well, we don't want those, and then we also really don't want low-skill immigrants either.” And now it seems, and maybe you have a different perspective, that it's, “Well, we don't really want those high-skill immigrants either.”

You gave me the current state of illegal immigration at the southern border. What is the current state of the argument among people who want less, perhaps even no immigration in this country?

State of the argument is actually what you described. When I started working on this topic about 15 years ago, I never thought I would've heard people come out against the H-1B visa, or against high-skilled immigrants, or against foreign entrepreneurs. But you saw this over Christmas actually, December of 2024. You saw this basically online “H-1 B-gate” where Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk were saying H-1Bs are great. I think Musk had tweeted, “over my dead body we're going to cut the H-1B,” right? And you see this groundswell of conservatives and Republicans — not all of them, by any means — come out and say, “We don't even want these guys. We don't want these skilled immigrants,” using a whole range of arguments. None of them economic, by the way. Almost none of them economics; all culture, all voting habits, all stereotypes, a lot of them pretty nasty in my opinion.

So there is this sense where some people just don't want immigrants. The first time I think I encountered this in writing from a person who was prominent was Anne Coulter, Jeff Sessions when he was senator, and these types of people around 2015, in a big way, and it seems to have become much more prominent than I ever thought it would be.

Is it that they don't understand the economic argument or they just don't care about that argument?

They don't care about it. I have come to the realization — this makes me sad because I'm an economist by training — but I just don't think the economic argument is what moves people on this topic. I don't think it's what they care about. I don't think it animates . . . It animates me as a pro-immigration person, I think it animate you, right?

It does, yeah, it sure does.

It does not animate the people who are opposed to it. I think it is a cultural argument, it is a crime element, it is a threat element, it is a, “This makes us less American somehow” weird, fuzzy-feeling argument.

Would it matter if the immigrants were all coming from Germany, France, and Norway?

Maybe for a handful of them, but generally no, I don't think so. I think the idea that America is special, is different, is some kind of unique nation that ethnically, or in other ways cannot be pierced or contaminated by foreigners — I think it's just like an “Ew, foreigners,” type of sentiment that people have. A base xenophobia that a lot of people have combined with a very reasonable fear and dislike of chaos. When people see chaos on the border, they hate it.

I hate chaos on the border. My answer is to get rid of the chaos by letting people come in legally, because you legalize a market, you can actually regulate it. You can't regulate an illegal market. But I think other people see chaos, they have this sort of purity conception of America that's just fanciful, in my opinion, and they just don't want foreigners, and the chaos prompts them, makes it even more powerful.

To what extent is it fear that all these immigrants will eventually vote for things you don't want? Or in this case, they're all going to become Democrats, so Republicans don't want them.

That’s definitely part of it. I think that's more of an elite Republican fear, or an elite sort of nativist or conservative fear than it is amongst the people online who are yelling at me all the time or yelling at Elon Musk. I think that resonates a lot more in this city and in online conservative publications, I think that resonates much more. I don't think it's borne out by the facts, and people who say this will also loudly trumpet how Hispanics now basically split their vote in the 2024 election. David Shore, who is the progressive analyst of electoral politics, said he thinks that Trump actually won the naturalized immigrant vote, which is probably the first time a Republican has won the naturalized immigrant vote since the 19th century.

The immediate question is, does that kind of thing, will that resonate into a changing opinion among folks on the right if they feel like they feel like they can win these voters?

I don't think so because I think it's about deeper issues than that. I think it's a real feelings-, values-based issue.

Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20)

When people feel like they don't have control of something in their country or their government doesn't have control of something, they become anti- whatever is the source of that chaos, even the legal versions of it.

Has this been there for a long time? Was it exacerbated for some reason? Was it exacerbated by the financial crisis and the slow economy afterward? The only time I remember hearing about people using the idea of “heritage Americans” were elite people whose great great grandparents came over on the Mayflower and they thought they were better than everybody else, they were elites, they were these kind of Boston Brahmans. So I was aware of the concept from that, but I've never heard people — and I hear it now — about people who were not part of the original Mayflower wave, or Pilgrims, think of themselves as “heritage Americans” because their parents came over in the 1850s or the 1880s, but now their “heritage.” That idea to me seems new.

I hadn't heard of it until just a few years ago, frankly, at all. I racked my brain about this because I used to have a lot of affinity for the Republican Party, just to be frank. And I'm from California, and I'm in my ’40s, so I remember Prop 187 in 1994 when the state had a big campaign about illegal immigrants’ enforcement and welfare, and it really changed the state's voting patterns to be much more democratic, eventually.

Then I saw the Republican Party under George W. Bush, and John McCain, and all these other guys who were pro-Republican, but always in California the Republicans were very skeptical of immigration across the board, but I didn't really see that spread. Then I saw it go to Arizona in 2010, 2009, 2008, around there. I saw it go to South Carolina, Mississippi, some of these places, and then all of a sudden with Trump, it went everywhere.

So I racked my brain thinking, did I miss something? Was there always something there and I was just too myopic to view it, or I wasn't in those circles, or I wanted to convince myself that it wasn't there? And I really think that it was always there to some small extent, but Trump is the most brilliant political entrepreneur of our lifetime and probably of our country's history, and that he took over this party from the outside and he convinced people to be nativists. Because what he was saying, the words — not that different from Scott Walker saying about immigration. It was not that different from what Mike Huckabee was saying about immigration. It wasn't that different from Santorum. But he said it or sold it in a way that just worked, I guess. That maybe absolves me of some responsibility or maybe allows me to say that I didn't miss anything, but I do think that that largely explains it.

And how does it explain that, and you may not have an answer. I can sort of understand the visceral concern about chaos at the border or people coming here illegally. But then to take it to the point that we don't even want AI engineers to come to this country from India, or, “I'm really angry that someone from a foreign country is taking my kid's spot at Harvard.” That, to me, seems almost inexplicable.

It's not the fact of the chaos, but it's the perception of the chaos, because when Trump came in in 2015, the border crossing numbers were really low. They were in the 300,000s, low 400,000s, but he talked about it like it was millions, and he created this perception of just insane, outrageous chaos.

There's a research and political psychology field about the locus of control. When people feel like they don't have control of something in their country or their government doesn't have control of something, they become anti- whatever is the source of that chaos, even the legal versions of it. In some way, it's an understandable human reaction, but in some ways it is so destructive. But, like you said, it spreads to AI engineers from China because it's like all immigration, and it's so bad, and it's so destructive, and that is the best explanation that I've seen out there about that.

The future American workforce (14:04)

What we notice in the economics of immigration, when we do these types of studies and we take a look at the wage impacts, we've got basically no wage effect on those of native-born Americans.

I write a lot about, hopefully, this technological wave that we're going to be experiencing, and then I also write a little about immigration. The question I get is, if we're going to be worried about the jobs of the future being taken over by software or by robots, if we really think that's going to happen, shouldn’t we really be thinking very hard about the kinds of people we let enter into this country, even legally, and their ability to function in that kind of economy?

I think we need to think about what is the best mechanism to select people to come here that the economy needs. What you described . . . assumes an amount of knowledge, and foresight, and, frankly, the incentive to make a wise decision in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians that they just do not have and that they will never have. and what matters most and who can pick the best in the market,

You can say STEM degrees only. I only want people who have STEM degrees from colleges that, on some global ranking, are in the top 500 universities. You could say that. That would be one way of selecting.

They could try to centrally plan it like that. . .

You're saying “centrally planned” because you know that's going to get a reaction out of me, but go ahead.

I do. The thing is, there's all different types of ways to have an immigration system and there's going to be a little bit of planning any immigration system. But I think the one that will work best is the one that allows the market to have the widest possible choice. We don't know how automation is going to turn out.

There's this thing called Moravec’s paradox in a lot of AI writing, which is the idea that you'll probably be able to automate a lot of high-skill jobs more easily than you will be able to automate, say, somebody who's a maid, or a nanny, or a nurse, or a plumber, just because the real world is harder than . . . You and I type, and talk, and do math. That's probably easier to do. So maybe the optimal thing to do would be to increase immigration for low-skilled people because all the jobs in the future are going to be low-skilled anyway, because we're going to be able to automate all the high-skilled jobs.

Though you could say then that that would take away the jobs from the natives.

You could say that, of course. What we notice in the economics of immigration, when we do these types of studies and we take a look at the wage impacts, we've got basically no wage effect on those of native-born Americans. If we were to have a situation where let's say massive amounts of jobs disappear in entire sectors of the economy, vanished, automated . . . well, that just means that we're going to have more opportunities and specialization, division of labor, where there's going to be a lot more lower-skilled and mid-skill jobs, just because there's such a much larger and more productive side of the economy.

There's going to be so much more profits in these other ones that we're going to have a bigger economy in the same way that when agriculture basically shrank as a massive section of the workforce, those people got other jobs that were more productive, and it was great. I think we could maybe see that again, and I hope we do. I don't want to have to work anymore.

Population decline and assimilation (17:35)

. . . if the whole world is going to have population decline in 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to have to deal with that at some point, but I'd rather deal with that problem with a population of 600 million Americans than a population of 350 million Americans.

The scenario — and this was highlighted to me by one of our scholars who looks a lot about demographics and population growth — his theory is that all the population-decline estimates, shrinkage, and slowing down estimates from the United Nations are way too optimistic, that population would begin to level off much faster. Whatever the UN's low or worst-case scenario is, if you want to put a qualifier on it like that, it's probably like that. And a lot of policymakers are underestimating the decline in fertility rates, and eventually everyone's going to figure that out. And there'll be a mad global scandal for population — for people.

There's going to be tons of labor shortages and you're going to want people, and there's going to be this scramble, and not every country is going to be as good at it. If people want to immigrate, they're probably more likely, everything else equal, they're going to want to go to the United States as opposed to — not to smear another country — I don't know, Argentina or something. We have this great ability to accept people to come here and for them to succeed and build companies. Maybe that company is a bodega, maybe that company is a technology company. So we're at this moment where we have this great natural advantage, but it seems like we're utterly rejecting it.

We are not just rejecting it, we are turning it from a positive into a big negative. You have these students who are being apprehended and having their visas canceled because of a fishing license violation six years ago. People who are skilled science students studying the United States who could go on to be founders of big companies or just high-skilled workers, and we're saying, “Nope, can't do it, sorry.” We're kicking people out for reasons of speech — speech that I often don't like, by the way, but it doesn't matter, because I believe it on principle. It's important.

We already see it showing up in tourism numbers plummeting to the United States, and I think we're going to see it in student visa numbers shortly. And student visas are the first step on that long chain of being able to be a high-skilled immigrant one day. So we are really doing long-term damage.

On the population stuff, I completely agree, and if the whole world is going to have population decline in 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to have to deal with that at some point, but I'd rather deal with that problem with a population of 600 million Americans than a population of 350 million Americans.

What is your general take on the notion of assimilation? Is that a problem? Should we doing more to make sure people are successful here? How do you think about that?

I do think assimilation is important. I don't think it's a problem. When I talk about assimilation, I use it in the way that Jacob Vigdor — Jake is a professor, University of Washington economist, and he says, assimilation is when an immigrant or their kids are indistinguishable from long-settled Americans on the measurements of family size, civic participation, income, education, language. Basically it takes three generations. That is, the first generation are the immigrants, second are their kids, third are their grandkids, on average.

Some, much faster. Like my Indian neighbors are more than assimilated in the first generation. They do better than native born Americans on most of those measures. Some lower-skilled Hispanic or some East African immigrants, takes three, three and a half, four sometimes, to do that well, but it's going very well.

We do not have the cultural issues that some countries in Europe have. To some extent, it's overblown in Europe, those problems, but they do exist and they exist to a greater extent than they do here. Part of that is because we have birthright citizenship. People who are born in this country are citizens, they don't feel like they're an illegal underclass because they’re not. They feel totally accepted because they are legally, and we have an ethos in this country, because we don't have an ethnic identification of being American like they do in places like Germany or in Norway. I have family members in Norway who are half Iranian and they're not really considered to be Norwegian, culturally. Here it's the opposite. If I were to go say I'm not an American, people would be offended. There, if you say, “Oh, I'm Norwegian,” they'll correct you and be like, “No, you're not Norwegian, you're something else.”

We have this great secret sauce born of our culture, born of our lack of an ethnic Americanness. It doesn't matter what ethnicity or race you are, or religion, anybody can be American. And we have done it so well and we just don't have these issues, and I don't think, as a result, we should do more because I'm worried about the government breaking it.

Based on what you just said, at a gut level, how do you feel when someone uses the phrase “heritage Americans,” and they hate the idea of America as an idea, and to be an American you need to have been here for a long time. That whole way of looking at it — do you get it, or do you at some level [think], I am not a psychologist, I do not understand it?

A way to make sense of it [is] by swapping out the word “American” in their sentence and we place it with the word “Frenchman,” or “German,” or “Russian,” or “Japanese,” or some other country that's a nation state where the identity is bound up with ethnicity. That's the way that I make sense of it, and I think this is a concept that just does not work in the United States; it cannot work. Maybe it's the most nationalistic I am, but I think that that's just a fundamentally foreign idea that could never work in the United States. It sounds more at home in Europe and other places. That's what strikes me

As I finish up, I know you have all kinds of ideas to improve the American immigration system, which we will try to link to, but instead of me asking you to give me your five-point plan for perfection, I'm going to ask you: How does this turn around? What is the scenario in which we become more accepting again of immigrants, perhaps the way we were 30 years ago?

That really is a $64,000 question. The idea that I have floated — which probably won't work, but at least gets people to pause — is the entitlement programs are going insolvent, and I have pitched to my grandmother-in-law, who is a very nice woman, who is a Republican who is skeptical of immigration, but who is worried about Social Security going bankrupt, I say, “Well, there is one way to increase the solvency of this program for 30 or 40 years.” And she said, “What's that?” and I say, “Let in 100 million immigrants between the age of the 20 and 30.” And it gives her pause. I think if that idea can give her pause, then maybe it has a shot. When this country seriously starts to grapple with the insolvency of entitlement programs, that's looming.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

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In the 1960s, a deep anxiety set in as one thing became seemingly clear: We were headed toward population catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and “The Limits to Growth,” written by the Club of Rome, were just two publications warning of impending starvation due to simply too many humans on the earth.

As the population ballooned year by year, it would simply be impossible to feed everyone. Demographers and environmentalists alike held their breath and braced for impact.

Except that we didn’t starve. On the contrary, we were better fed than ever.

In his article in The New Atlantis, Charles C. Mann explains that agricultural innovation — from improved fertilization and irrigation to genetic modification — has brought global hunger to a record low.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Mann about the agricultural history they didn’t teach you in school.

Mann is a science journalist who has worked as a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired magazines, and whose work has been featured in many other major publications. He is also the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, as well as The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.

In This Episode

* Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)

* Water infrastructure (13:11)

* Feeding the masses (18:20)

* Indigenous America (25:20)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)

I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know.

Pethokoukis: What got my attention was a couple of pieces that you've worked on for The New Atlantis magazine looking at the issue of how modern Americans take for granted the remarkable systems and infrastructure that provide us comfort, safety, and a sense of luxury that would've been utterly unimaginable even to the wealthiest people of a hundred years ago or 200 years ago.

Let me start off by asking you: Does it matter that we do take that for granted and that we also kind of don't understand how our world works?

Mann: I would say yes, very much. It matters because these systems undergird the prosperity that we have, the good fortune that we have to be alive now, but they're always one generation away from collapse. If they aren't maintained, upgraded and modernized, they'll fall apart. They just won't stand there. So we have to be aware of this. We have to keep our eye on the ball, otherwise we won't have these things.

The second thing is that, if we don't know how our society works, as citizens, we're simply not going to make very good choices about what to do with that society. I feel like both sides in our current political divide are kind of taking their eye off the ball. It's important to have good roads, it's important to have clean water, it's important to have a functioning public health system, it's important to have an agricultural system that works. It doesn't really matter who you are. And if we don't keep these things going, life will be unnecessarily bad for a lot of people, and that's just crazy to do.

Is this a more recent phenomenon? If I would've asked people 50 years ago, “Explain to me how our infrastructure functions, how we get water, how we get electricity,” would they have a better idea? Is it just because things are more complicated today that we have no idea how our food gets here or why when we turn the faucet, clean water comes out?

The answer is “yes” in a sort of trivial sense, in that many more people were involved in producing food, a much greater percentage of the population was involved in producing food 50 years ago. The same thing was true for the people who were building infrastructure 50 years ago.

But I also think it's generally true that people's parents saw the change and knew it. So that is very much the case and, in a sense, I think we're victims of our own success. These kinds of things have brought us so much prosperity that we can afford to do crazy things like become YouTube influencers, or podcasters, or freelance writers. You don't really have any connection with how the society goes because we're sort of surfing on this wave of luxury that our ancestors bequeathed to us.

I don't know how much time you spend on social media, Charles — I'm sure I spend too much — but I certainly sense that many people today, younger people especially, don't have a sense of how someone lived 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and there was just a lot more physical suffering. And certainly, if you go back far enough, you could not take for granted that you would have tomatoes in your supermarket year round, that you would have water in the house and that water would be clean. What I found really interesting — you did a piece on food and a piece on water — in the food piece you note that, in the 1980s, that was a real turning point that the average person on earth had enough to eat all the time, and rather than becoming an issue of food production, it became an issue of distribution, of governance. I think most people would be surprised of that statistic even though it's 40 years old.

I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know. That's this enormous turning point, and there are many of these turning points. Obviously, the introduction of antibiotics for . . . public health, which is another one of these articles they're going to be working on . . .

Just about 100 years ago today, when President Coolidge was [president], his son went to play tennis at the White House tennis courts, and because he was lazy, or it was fashionable, or something, he didn't put on socks. He got a blister on his toe, the toe got infected, and he died. 100 years ago, the president of the United States, who presumably had the best healthcare available to anybody in the world, was unable to save his beloved son when the son got a trivial blister that got infected. The change from that to now is mind boggling.

You've written about the Agricultural Revolution and why the great fears 40 or 50 years ago of mass starvation didn't happen. I find that an endlessly interesting topic, both for its importance and for the fact it just seems to be so underappreciated to this day, even when it was sort of obvious to people who pay attention that something was happening, it still seemed not to penetrate the public consciousness. I wonder if you could just briefly talk to me about that revolution and how it happened.

The question is, how did it go from “The Population Bomb” written in 1968, a huge bestseller, hugely influential, predicting that there is going to be hundreds of millions of people dying of mass starvation, followed by other equally impassioned, equally important warnings. There's one called “Famine, 1975!,” written a few years before, that predicted mass famines in 1975. There's “The Limits to Growth.” I went to college in the ’70s and these were books that were on the curriculum, and they were regarded as contemporary classics, and they all proved to be wrong.

The reason is that, although they were quite correct about the fact that the human race was reproducing at that time faster than ever before, they didn't realize two things: The first is that as societies get more affluent, and particularly as societies get more affluent and give women more opportunities, birth rates decline. So that this was obviously, if you looked at history, going to be a temporary phenomenon of whatever length it was be, but it was not going to be infinite.

The second was there was this enormous effort spurred by this guy named Norman Borlaug, but with tons of other people involved, to take modern science and apply it to agriculture, and that included these sort of three waves of innovation. Now, most innovation is actually just doing older technologies better, which is a huge source of progress, and the first one was irrigation. Irrigation has been around since forever. It's almost always been done badly. It's almost always not been done systematically. People started doing it better. They still have a lot of problems with it, but it's way better, and now 40 percent, roughly, of the crops in the world that are produced are produced by irrigation.

The second is the introduction of fertilizer. There's two German scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who essentially developed the ways of taking fertilizer and making lots and lots of it in factories. I could go into more detail if you want, but that's the essential thing. This had never been done before, and suddenly cheap industrial fertilizer became available all over the world, and Vaclav Smil . . . he's sort of an environmental scientist of every sort, in Manitoba has calculated that roughly 40 percent of the people on earth today would not be alive if it wasn't for that.

And then the third was the development of much better, much higher-yielding seeds, and that was the part that Norman Borlaug had done. These packaged together of irrigation fertilizer and seeds yielded what's been called the Green Revolution, doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled grain yields across the world, particularly with wheat and rice. The result is the world we live in today. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, your parents may have said to you, as they did me, Oh, eat your vegetables, there are kids that are starving in Asia.” Right? That was what was told and that was the story that was told in books like “The Population Bomb,” and now Asia's our commercial rival. When you go to Bangkok, that was a place that was hungry and now it's gleaming skyscrapers and so forth. It's all based on this fact that people are able to feed themselves through the combination of these three factors,

That story, the story of mass-starvation that the Green Revolution irrigation prevented from coming true. I think a surprising number of people still think that story is relevant today, just as some people still think the population will be exploding when it seems clear it probably will not be exploding. It will rise, but then it's going to start coming down at some point this century. I think those messages just don't get through. Just like most people don't know Norm Borlaug, the Haber-Bosch process, which school kids should know. They don't know any of this. . . Borlaug won the Nobel Prize, right?

Right. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll tell you a funny story —

I think he won it in the same year that “The Population Bomb” came out.

It was just a couple years off. But you're right, the central point is right, and the funny thing is . . . I wrote another book a while back that talked about this and about the way environmentalists think about the world, and it’s called the “Wizard and the Prophet” and Borlaug was the wizard of it. I thought, when I proposed it, that it would be easy. He was such an important guy, there'd be tons of biographies about him. And to this day, there isn't a real serious scholarly biography of the guy. This is a person who has done arguably more to change human life than any other person in the 20th century, certainly up in the top dozen or so. There's not a single serious biography of him.

How can that be?

It's because we're tremendously disconnected. It's a symptom of what I'm talking about. We're tremendously disconnected from these systems, and it's too bad because they're interesting! They're actually quite interesting to figure out: How do you get water to eight billion people? How do you get . . . It is a huge challenge, and some of the smartest people you’ve ever met are working on it every day, but they're working on it over here, and the public attention is over here.

Water infrastructure (13:11)

. . . the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem.

I think people probably have some vague idea about agriculture, the Agricultural Revolution, how farming has changed, but I think, as you just referred to, the second half, water — utter mystery to people. Comes out of a pipe. The challenges of doing that in a rich country are hard. The challenges doing a country not so rich, also hard. Tell me what you find interesting about that topic.

Well, whereas the story about agriculture is basically a good story: We've gotten better at it. We have a whole bunch of technical innovations that came in the 20th century and humankind is better off than ever before. With water, too, we are better off than ever before, but the maddening thing is we could be really well off because the technology is basically extremely old.

There's a city, a very ancient city called Mohenjo-daro that I write about a bit in this article that was in essentially on the Pakistan-India border, 2600 BC. And they had a fully functioning water system that, in its basics, was no different than the water system that we have, or that London has, or that Paris has. So this is an ancient, ancient technology, yet we still have two billion people on the planet that don't have access to adequate water. In fact, even though we know how to do it, the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem. And a small thing that makes me nuts is that climate change — which is real and important — gets a lot of attention, but there are people dying of not getting good water now.

On top of it, even in rich countries like us, our water system is antiquated. The great bulk of it was built in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and, like any kind of physical system, it ages, and every couple years, various engineering bodies, water bodies, the EPA, and so forth puts out a report saying, “Hey, we really have to fix the US water system and the numbers keep mounting up.” And Democrats, Republicans, they all ignore this.

Who is working on the water issue in poorer countries?

There you have a very ad hoc group of people. The answer is part of it's the Food and Agricultural Organization because most water in most countries is used for irrigation to grow food. You also have the World Health Organization, these kinds of bodies. You have NGOs working on it. What you don't have in those countries like our country is the government taking responsibility for coordinating something that's obviously in the national interest.

So you have these things where, very periodically — a government like China has done this, Jordan has done this, Bolivia has done this, countries all over the world have done this — and they say, “Okay, we haven't been able to provide freshwater. Let's bring in a private company.” And the private company then invests all this money in infrastructure, which is expensive. Then, because it's a private company, it has to make that money back, and so it charges people for a lot of money for this, and the people are very unhappy because suddenly they're paying a quarter of their income for water, which is what I saw in Southwest China: water riots because people are paying so much for water.

In other words, one of the things that government can do is sort of spread these costs over everybody, but instead they concentrate it on the users, Almost universally, these privatization efforts have led to tremendous political unhappiness because the government has essentially shifted responsibility for coordinating and doing these things and imposed a cost on a narrow minority of the users.

Are we finally getting on top of the old water infrastructure in this country? It seems like during the Biden administration they had a big infrastructure bill. Do you happen to know if we are finally getting that system upgraded?

Listen, I will be the only person who probably ever interviews you who's actually had to fix a water main as a summer job. I spent [it at] my local Public Works Department where we'd have to fix water mains, and this was a number of years ago, and even a number of years ago, those pipes were really, really old. It didn’t take much for them to get a main break.

I'm one of those weird people who is bothered by this. All I can tell you is we have a lot of aging infrastructure. The last estimate that I’ve seen came before this sort of sudden jerky rise of construction costs, which, if you're at all involved in building, is basically all the people in the construction industry talk about. At that point, the estimate was that it was $1.2 trillion to fix the infrastructure that we have in the United States. I am sure it is higher now. I am delighted that the Biden people passed this infrastructure — would've been great if they passed permitting reform and a couple of other things to make it easier to spend the money, but okay. I would like to believe that the Trump people would take up the baton and go on this.

Feeding the masses (18:20)

I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.

We’re still going to have another two billion people, maybe, on this earth. Are we going to be able to feed them all?

Yeah, I think that there's no question. The question is what we're going to be able to feed them? Are we going to be able to feed them all, filet mignon and truffled . . . whatever they put truffle oil on, and all that? Not so sure about that.

All organic vegetables.

At the moment, that seems really implausible, and there's a sort of fundamental argument going on here. There's a lot of people, again, both right and left, who are sort of freaked out by the scale that modern agriculture operates on. You fly over the middle-west and you see all those circles of center-pivot irrigation, they plowed under, in the beginning of the 20th century, 100 million acres of prairie to produce all that. And it's done with enormous amounts of capital, and it was done also partly by moving people out so that you could have this enormous stuff. The result is it creates a system that . . . doesn't match many people's vision of the friendly family farmer that they grew up with. It's a giant industrial process and people are freaked out by the scale. They don't trust these entities, the Cargills and the ADMs, and all these huge companies that they see as not having their interests at heart.

It's very understandable. I live in a small town, we have a farm down there, and Jeremy runs it, and I'm very happy to see Jeremy. There's no Jeremy at Archer Daniels Midland. So the result is that there's a big revulsion against that, and people want to downsize the scale, and they point to very real environmental problems that big agriculture has, and they say that that is reason for this. The great problem is that in every single study that I am aware of, the sort of small, local farms don't produce as much food per acre or per hectare as the big, soulless industrial processes. So if you're concerned about feeding everybody, that's something you have to really weigh in your head, or heavy in your heart.

That sort of notion of what a farm should look like and what good food is, that kind of almost romantic notion really, to me, plays into the sort of anti-growth or the degrowth people who seemed to be saying that farms could only be this one thing — probably they don't even remember those farms anymore — that I saw in a storybook. It's like a family farm, everything's grown local, not a very industrial process, but you're talking about a very different world. Maybe that's a world they want, but I don’t know if that's a world you want if you're a poor person in this world.

No, and like I said, I love going to the small farm next to us and talking to Jeremy and he says, “Oh look, we've just got these tomatoes,” it's great, but I have to pay for that privilege. And it is a privilege because Jeremy is barely making it and charging twice as much as the supermarket. There's no economies of scale for him. He still has to buy all the equipment, but he's putting it over 20 acres instead of 2000 acres. In addition, it's because it's this hyper-diverse farm — which is wonderful; they get to see the strawberries, and the tomatoes, and all the different things — it means he has to hire much more labor than it would be if he was just specializing in one thing. So his costs are inevitably much, much higher, and, therefore, I have to pay a lot more to keep him going. That's fine for me; I'm a middle-class person, I like food, this can be my hobby going there.

I'd hate to have somebody tell me it's bad, but it's not a system that is geared for people who are struggling. There are just a ton of people all over the world who are struggling. They're better off than they were 100 years ago, but they're still struggling. I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.

To make sure everybody can get fed in the future, do we need a lot more innovation?

Innovation is always good. I would say that we do, and the kinds of innovation we need are not often what people imagine. For example, it's pretty clear that parts of the world are getting drier, and therefore irrigation is getting more difficult. The American Southwest is a primary candidate, and you go to the Safford Valley, which I did a few years ago — the Safford Valley is in southeast Arizona and it's hotter than hell there. I went there and it's 106 degrees and there's water from the Colorado River, 800 miles away, being channeled there, and they're growing Pima cotton. Pima cotton is this very good fine cotton that they use to make fancy clothes, and it's a great cash crop for farmers, but growing it involves channeling water from the Colorado 800 miles, and then they grow it by what's called flood irrigation, which is where you just fill the field with an inch of water. I was there actually to see an archeologist who's a water engineer, and I said to him, “Gee, it's hot! How much that water is evaporated?” And he said, “Oh, all of it.”

So we need to think about that kind of thing if the Colorado is going to run out of water, which it is now. There's ways you can do it, you can possibly genetically modify cotton to use less water. You could drip irrigation, which is a much more efficient form of irrigation, it’s readily available, but it's expensive. So you could try to help farmers do that. I think if you cut the soft costs, which is called the regulatory costs of farming, you might be able to pay for it in that way. That would be one type of innovation. Another type of thing you could do is to do a different kind of farming which is called civil pastoral systems, where you grow tree crops and then you grow cattle underneath, and that uses dramatically less water. It's being done in Sonora, just across the border and the tree crops — trees are basically wild. People don't breed them because it takes so long, but we now have the tools to breed them, and so you could make highly productive trees with cattle underneath and have a system that produces a lot of calories or a lot of good stuff. That's all the different kinds of innovation that we could do. Just some of the different kinds of innovation we could do and all would help.

Indigenous America (25:20)

Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.

Great articles in The New Atlantis, big fan of “Wizard and the Prophet,” but I'm going to take one minute and ask you about your great books talking about the story of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If I just want to travel in the United States and I'm interested in finding out more about Native Americans in the United States, where would you tell me to go?

One of my favorite places just it's so amazing, is Chaco Canyon, and that's in the Four Corners area — that whole Four Corners area is quite incredible — and Chaco Canyon is a sign that native people could build amazing stuff, and native people could be crazy, in my opinion. It's in the middle of nowhere, it has no water, and for reasons that are probably spiritual and religious, they built an enormous number of essentially castles in this canyon, and they're incredible.

The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito as it's called now, it's like 800 rooms. They're just enormous. And you can go there, and you can see these places, and you can just walk around, and it is incredible. You drive up a little bit to Mesa Verde and there's hundreds of these incredible cliff dwellings. What seems to have happened — I'm going to put this really informally and kind of jokingly to you, not the way that an archeologist would talk about it or I would write about it, but what looks like it happened is that the Chaco Canyon is this big canyon, and on the good side that gets the southern exposure is all these big houses. And then the minions and the hoi polloi lived on the other side, and it looks like, around 800, 900, they just got really tired of serving the kings and they had something like a democratic revolution, and they just left, most of them, and founded the Pueblos, which is these intensely democratic self-governing bodies that are kind of like what Thomas Jefferson thought the United States should be.

Then it's like all the doctors, and the lawyers, and the MBAs, and the rich guys went up to Mesa Verde and they started off their own little kingdoms and they all fought with each other. So you have these crazy cliff dwellings where it's impossible to get in and there's hundreds of people living in these niches in these cliffs, and then that blew up too. So you could see history, democracy, and really great architecture all in one place.

If someone asked me for my advice about changing the curriculum in school, one, people would leave school knowing who the heroes of progress and heroes of the Agricultural Revolution were. And I think they'd also know a lot more about pre-Columbian history of the Americas. I think they should know about it but I also think it's just super interesting, though of course you’ve brought it to life in a beautiful way.

Thank you very much, and I couldn't agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.

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