Hello, and welcome back to the Future in Five Questions. This week, we caught up with Katherine Boyle, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a.ka. a16z. While large swathes of Silicon Valley share former Andreessen partner Balaji Srinivasan’s dream of a post-nation-state future, Boyle’s investment thesis represents a different strain of thinking. It’s premised on the pitch that tech startups can serve, rather than supersede, the national interest. She’s not the only one pursuing this vision. Washington and Silicon Valley are growing closer in the post-pandemic era, a trend that’s forcing both worlds to navigate issues like the Defense Department’s continued tech acquisition struggles and concerns about cozy ties between government and investors. Here, Boyle makes her case for investing in “American Dynamism,” tweaking DoD contracting rules to help startups, and reading ancient authors to understand the future. What’s one underrated big idea? Building technology companies for the country. Not even a decade ago, Silicon Valley felt so isolated from the rest of the country’s needs, that the idea of building companies that support the national interest – in defense, national security, aerospace, energy – was very much out of style. But we’re seeing a radical shift in how founders and engineers view public service: that some of our greatest problems can be solved through building technology companies for America, whether it’s manufacturing drones to shore up the defense industrial base or building AI tutors to help elementary students learn math. We see American Dynamism as an underrated big idea because so many young engineers are choosing to build startups that support the country, particularly after living through Covid-19 and now seeing war in Ukraine. We believe the next ten years of technological innovation will be very much focused on supporting the needs of America. What’s the technology that you think is overhyped? Most technology is underhyped on a long enough time horizon — look no further than the early critiques of the Internet, or even critiques of the automobile in the 1910s, where people didn’t fully grasp how the internal combustion engine and mass manufacturing of cars would change transport, commerce, food security and all elements of society reliant on fast transport. If I’m certain of anything, it’s that we undervalue technological progress because the human mind can’t fathom how quickly positive technological change can compound. (We’re far better at seeing the negative — hence the popularity of doomerism in AI, climate, biosecurity, etc.) What book most shaped your conception of the future? I love futurism as a genre, but I’m not a futurist. I’m an optimist. And the books that have most shaped my view of what the country can look like 100 years from now are actually those that espouse immutable truths, or what it means to be human. This might surprise your audience, but the best books on predicting the future, in my view, are political philosophy books. I think we can learn more about what the future will look like from Aristotle or Plato than from the greatest science fiction authors. On technology, I’m a fan of the work of Kevin Kelly, who starts much of his writing from a place of understanding what human flourishing is. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Here’s something very specific the DOD should consider: waive past performance requirements and award production contracts to the best technology companies, specifically when it relates to AI and emerging technology. Right now DOD biases towards awarding contracts for complex technology systems to companies that have inferior systems but more past performance. Silicon Valley believes the opposite: companies atrophy over time. The best technology shifts are created by new companies, not old ones. New companies often have the best engineers, especially in AI. Past performance requirements in government assume the opposite view of how innovation really works, which ultimately hinders how quickly we can get new technology products in the hands of the warfighter. What surprised you most this year? I had my second son a few weeks before the new generative AI products were released, and there was something about being up in the middle of the night with him — often not sleeping — where I had a lot of time to play with the technology. There’s only been two other times in my adult life – the first week of Covid and when Lehman Brothers collapsed — when I said, “It feels like the world is shifting under me.” It’s striking that I’ve never felt that feeling with a pure technological shift before, and I’m surprised by the immediate positive reception from the public. In just a few months it already feels engrained in many workflows, and particularly how young people learn new things. Like with the automobile or the internet, we’ll have endless debates over what it means and its effect on society, but the fact that it’s here, in use, and already delighting people in their school, home and work lives tells me that AI will look much more like those advancements than anything else I’ve experienced.
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The Western world might be facing a “too many cooks” situation when it comes to AI regulation, according to a report yesterday from POLITICO’s Mark Scott. Mark writes that the multiple upcoming summits to talk about government approaches to AI “risk entrenching divisions between countries in ways that threaten to undermine efforts to draw up a unified international rulebook on AI” — and, what’s more, they’re getting uncomfortably personal. “...Right now, there are a lot of egos in the room,” one anonymous European Commission official told Mark. The multiple big events coming up include a summit of G7 officials in September; a more formal G7 event later in the fall; and a U.K.-led summit sometime in November. The big elephant in the room? China. “International rivalries, diplomatic realpolitik and — above all — fears about how China will promote its own AI rules have complicated preparations for the meetings,” Mark writes, but “Not all Western capitals, particularly within the EU, view Beijing's stance on AI as contradictory to their own.” — Derek Robertson
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