Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:47:43 +0000
Will medical advances split the Trump coalition? ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- _This is a free edition of_ _**Faster, Please!**_ ,_my regular newsletter about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.) If you enjoy it and find it helpful in any way, please consider buying a subscription to the twice-weekly regular issues that include in-depth essays, Q &As with smart people, and summaries of relevant news stories. _ Upgrade to paid * * * # 🧬 MAGA vs. the transhumanists of Silicon Valley ### Will medical advances split the Trump coalition? | | James Pethokoukis --- | Mar 27 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- If prediction markets nail their predictions, by 2050 a country will achieve longevity "escape velocity," the point where medical advances increase life expectancy by at least one year per calendar year. (In other words, we'll outpace aging through continuous medical progress.) Or to take a different angle, there's a 43 percent chance there will be a "cure to aging" by 2050 and 73 percent by 2070. To give a sense of how these forecasts are derivatives of AI forecasts, there's a 65 percent chance that five years after achieving artificial general intelligence, there will be a widely available radical life extension treatment. Keeping that context in mind, recall the schism that emerged in late 2024 within Donald Trump's MAGA coalition over skilled immigration. "Tech MAGA," championed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, advocated for increased foreign talent to enhance America's technological edge, while "Old MAGA" or "Classic MAGA" and its anti-immigration stalwarts … well, not so much. The fracture became highly visible following Trump's appointment of India-born Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser. This internecine struggle encapsulated the broader tension within contemporary conservative politics: reconciling innovation-driven growth policy with an economic nationalism that loathes disruption. #### Techlash 1.0 It was a conflict that was bound to happen, given the nature of the conservative movement that existed before the techies made their big appearance during the past election. As I describe in _The Conservative Futurist_ , the GOP had for years been moving away from the expansive techno-optimism of Ronald Reagan. From my 2023 book: > Not only did Reagan have an expansive view of human potential -- he loved a Thomas Paine quote that many conservatives hate: "We have it within our power to begin the world over again" -- but he also embraced a techno-solutionist ethos. It was technology that Reagan saw as the means to end the threat of nuclear annihilation through the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was technology that made mockery of the Malthusian predictions of the limits to growth and predictions of global famine. "We're breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny," Reagan told the students at Moscow State University back in 1988 One obvious explanation for the shift was Silicon Valley's embrace of Barack Obama in 2004 when its social media expertise helped propel him to victory and cemented personal relationships with tech luminaries like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Conservative suspicions hardened after Trump's 2016 election, when the tech establishment's antipathy seemed matched by content moderation policies perceived as targeting right-wing speech. But some seeds of the divorce were sown much earlier thanks to emerging advances in biotechnology. Breakthroughs in areas like gene editing and synthetic biology promised to reshape society, unsettled many conservatives at the turn of century. The biotechnological revolution that produced test-tube babies, cloned sheep, and the Human Genome Project didn't just inspire wonder; it triggered a wave of anxiety among the religious of the right who questioned the moral cost of progress. Leon Kass, a leading bioethicist, captured these fears in 2001 when he warned of a future "peopled by creatures of human shape but stunted humanity." Critics of such technological interventions earned the unflattering sobriquet "bio-Luddites" from biotech progress advocates. That same year, the George W. Bush administration imposed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, marking a victory for this emerging conservative bioethics movement. | | ---|---|--- The Economist, March 20, 2025 #### Enhancing regulation Back to 2025: In "Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction," The Economist chronicles "a growing movement that sees the human body as just another piece of hardware to be hacked, optimized and upgraded." Valued at $125 billion and growing at 10 percent annually, the human enhancement industry aims to improve human capabilities beyond natural limits. Tech billionaires including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are leading this movement, investing billions to redefine human potential through three key technologies: supplements and medications, gene therapies, and brain-computer interfaces. With human enhancements of various sorts looming, The Economist suggest a radical shift in America's regulatory approach providing a powerful tailwind. For example: HHS head Robert Kennedy Jr., brings personal experience with testosterone supplementation and skepticism toward FDA constraints on stem-cell research. More telling is the nomination of Jim O'Neill, a longtime associate of Peter Thiel and longevity enthusiast, as Kennedy's deputy. The Economist notes that O'Neill has explicitly criticized the FDA for what he considers excessive caution in approving experimental treatments. This represents a significant departure from the traditional regulatory approach, which has focused on safety and efficacy for treating specific medical conditions rather than enhancing already healthy individuals. Then there's the Enhanced Games sporting organization, which has attracted investment from Donald Trump Jr., anticipates specific regulatory relaxations, including looser restrictions on anabolic steroids. Points taken. Yet The Economist's sanguine outlook underestimates the formidable countervailing force of religious conservatism within today's Republican coalition. There's no reason to think Classic MAGA views biotech enhancement as anything but fundamentally transgressive -- not medical progress but Promethean overreach. Many religious conservatives surely see technologies like gene editing and neural implants as violating divine boundaries rather than, says, advancing American competitiveness and economic potential. As conservative Christian thinker Rod Dreher has written (in a quote that appears in my book), "We are moving very quickly into the post-human future," a sentiment that has long resonated through conservative media that has often portrayed Silicon Valley as advancing a "transhumanist" agenda. When enhancements move beyond treating illness to "improving" healthy humans, expect resistance reminiscent of the 2001 stem cell controversy. The Trump administration and its tech allies may discover that religious principles within its base present a more potent obstacle than inherited regulatory inertia that can be DOGE-ed away. The next phase of America's culture wars may be a right-on-right conflict. And it may come sooner than you might think. Upgrade to paid Share * * * * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- * * * * * * ## Micro Reads ### ▶ Economics * **A World Turned Inside Out by Stephen S. Roach \- PS** * **Reindustrialize the Midwest? \- Douglas Holtz-Eakin** ### ▶ Business * **OpenAI Unveils New Image Generator for ChatGPT \- NYT** * **Corporate America's Euphoria Over Trump's 'Golden Age' Is Giving Way to Distress \- WSJ** * **How Elon Musk's SpaceX Secretly Allows Investment From China \- ProPublica** ### ▶ AI/Digital * **ARC-AGI-2: Leading AI models fail new test of artificial general intelligence \- NS** * **ChatGPT Can Now Edit Photos Better, Create Charts For Work \- Bberg** * **I Quit Google for ChatGPT and Other AI Search--and I'm Not Going Back \- WSJ** * **China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. \- MIT** * **The best AI email writing assistant: We tested 5, and only one beats a human \- Wapo** * **No cloud needed: Nvidia creates gaming-centric AI chatbot that runs on your GPU \- Ars** * **Earth AI's algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored \- Tech Crunch** ### ▶ Biotech/Health * **An ominous shadow falls over mRNA technology \- FT** ### ▶ Clean Energy/Climate * **How Researchers Found a Greener Way to Make Fuel for Nuclear Fusion--By Accident \- SciAm** * **Beneath Greenland's Ice Lies a Climate Solution--and a New Geopolitical Battleground \- Wired** ### ▶ Robotics/AVs * **After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers \- Understanding AI** ### ▶ Space/Transportation * **Firm wins Space Force funding to provide an"aircraft carrier" in orbit \- Ars** * **Pentagon's Longtime Rocket Launcher Races to Catch SpaceX \- WSJ** ### ▶ Up Wing/Down Wing * **I Love'Severance,' Which Is Why I Don't Want to Watch Anymore \- NYT Opinion** * **Return of the Landline: A Regressive or Welcome Scenario? \- AEI** Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. 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