This intelligent and thought-provoking book is really about three issues.
On the one hand, it’s about technology, especially the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a decisive tool not just for economic growth but national defense (as summed up in the subtitle as “Hard Power”)
It’s also about leadership, especially the leadership style of the Silicon Valley founders which, in the authors’ view, has faltered on the biggest issues of our time just when its leadership was needed most (hence “Soft Belief”).
Finally, it’s also a book about our Western heritage. This is somewhat surprising coming from the heads of a leading American tech company; but ultimately, it’s the issue that gives Technological Republic its intellectual heft and importance as a guide to America’s future.
Because in the end The Technological Republic is about how the first two phenomena can save the third from its enemies, both foreign and (in the age of WOKEness) at home.
At a time when everyone is talking about ours being in an age of transition, the authors start with the transition that underlies everything else. This is the shift from what they call the “atomic age,” when the balance of global power depended on who had the most nuclear weapons, to the software age, culminating in the emergence of AI as the decisive weapon of the future.
“Software is now at the helm” of our national defense, they write. Military hardware from drones to tanks and submarines increasingly serve as vessels for carrying the powerful packages of software that determine victory for defeat, including AI.
From just winning games of chess and Go, AI has managed to smash the human monopoly on creativity and manipulation of language, a mimicry that is startling and disconcerting — while also unlocking the secret of national power.
As Karp and Zamiska point out, America’s leading antagonist China, understands the importance and value of AI, and have constructed an entire national strategy around becoming the world’s AI superpower.1 Yet for America and the West, “early encounters with this novel technology has been marked by an uneasy blend of wonder and fear.”
The authors have no illusions about the potential threat of runaway AI, including “to our entire sense of self as a species.” Still, they argue, we can’t let that fear determine our response to its technological challenges, and opportunities. We’re going to need the right kind of leadership to win the AI race: the most existential race of our time.
The place where that leadership should be emerging is the corporate clusters that made the software age possible in the first place, i.e. in Silicon Valley and beyond. The rise of America’s high-tech economy created a powerful aristocracy of talent, a true meritocracy which was ready to defy the challenges of the marketplace in order to advance a series of personal visions: in other words, an aristocracy of founders.
But when confronted with issues of national security, even national survival such as runaway illegal immigration and the rise of China, that same aristocracy proved AWOL.
“The technology companies that this country has built have for the most part deftly navigated around any issues that would draw undue scrutiny or unwanted attention; the hallmark of their mode of being is avoidance and often silence.”
Silence, or worse. Google’s refusal in 2018 to participate in DoD’s anti-terrorist program Project Maven, and Microsoft’s initial opposition to accepting a contract with the U.S. Army, as powerful warning signals of this systemic failure.
Instead, Silicon Valley tried to portray its lack of moral leadership as “a desire to accommodate all views and values. “But,” the authors point out, “the tolerance of everything has the tendency to devolve into support of nothing.”
In fact, this globalist elite was so desperate to “banish notions of the good life from public discourse,” they write (quoting author Michael Sandel), that they locked away their moral and spiritual convictions in their gym locker before the race had even begun.
So what do we need to win? Here we meet the unexpected turn in a book that is supposed to be about technology. Names like Alexander the Great, Winston Churchill, Goethe, Claude Monet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and books like 1984, The Odyssey, and Plato’s Republic, populate nearly every page and every chapter of Technological Republic — as do the Talmud and the Bible.
By invoking the best ideas from the past, Karp and Zamiska see a positive intellectual framework emerging that uses the past to inform the present and build the future.
“The reconstruction of a technological republic in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.”
The result can be a technological leadership class that believes in not just confounding the competition and offering profits to shareholders, but in defending what is true and good and beautiful, as well as embodying a sense of national pride and pride in the great achievements of the West.
From where I sit, it’s already happening. I see these authors and Palantir as leading a wave of patriotic high-tech founders, a new Greatest Generation rising to the challenge of remaking our national defense, just as the original Greatest Generation of business leaders built the World War Two arsenal that saved America and its allies in their time of crisis.
There is no magic formula or miraculous technology that will save us, and never has been. But the hard work for a stronger, more secure American future is underway. The Technological Republic lights the way forward.
- Details can be found in my article, “China and Artificial Intelligence: The Cold War We’re Not Fighting,” ↩︎
