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Science and technology under Trump: what can we expect?
Nov. 11, 2024. 6 mins. read.
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Donald Trump will be the next President of the USA. What can we expect from his administration for science and technology?
Perhaps you love Donald Trump. Perhaps you hate Donald Trump. Whichever the case, I won’t try to change your mind. Continue to love him if you love him, or continue to hate him if you hate him. Not that I could ever change your mind anyway.
Myself, I don’t hate Trump and I don’t love him either. I like certain things about him, and I like certain other things much less, and that’s all. And don’t ask me if I voted for or against him: I don’t vote in the USA.
I won’t try to do a full analysis of why Trump won the elections. This is a job for political pundits, or future historians. However, I’ve been reading very many commentaries in the last few days, and many insightful ones. For example, I find this commentary (not written by a professional political pundit) very insightful.
Many professional political pundits and casual observers alike say that the Democrats lost the elections because they have lost touch with the people. In particular, many smart people on both sides blame the Democrats for abandoning the working class to embrace “boutique” ideologies promoted by privileged elites. This sounds about right to me.
However, I won’t continue to elaborate on that. I’ll only put down some thoughts on the likely impact of the next Trump administration on science and technology.
Let that sink in
The fact is that on January 20 Donald Trump will be the 47th President of the United States. As Elon Musk (much more about him to follow) would say, let that sink in.
Contrary to 2016, this time Trump has managed to surround himself with an all-stars team. Vice President elect J.D. Vance of course, then people like Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and others. Joe Rogan played an important role in ensuring Trump’s victory. But the first name in the list is Elon Musk.
Trump owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Musk for betting on him at a very high personal risk. It can be argued that Musk’s support has been a decisive factor for Trump’s victory. More practically, losing Musk’s support would put Trump at risk of losing other high profile supporters and losing the midterm elections in 2016.
Therefore, I think we can expect Trump to support Musk for the foreseeable future.
Spaceflight and space expansion: the Moon
If the Trump administration will support Musk, SpaceX and its Starship rocket will likely play a bigger and growing role in NASA’s Artemis program to return to the Moon permanently and sustainably.
There are more and more calls for NASA to abandon its costly and arguably obsolete Space Launch System (SLS) and rely on the leaner and meaner Starship option for all parts of the Artemis program. I hope NASA will gradually do that.
We don’t need conflict between NASA supporters and SpaceX fans. We do need, instead, collaboration and mutual support between the two toward the common goal of making humanity multi-planetary.
In my last opinion piece on spaceflight, written before the elections, I said: My simple prediction is that, if Harris wins the elections, China will win the new space race. If Trump wins the elections, the USA will have a fighting chance.
Now the USA have a fighting chance. But success is not guaranteed, and the USA (and the West) can only win if there is sufficient political and popular support. And support must be bipartisan to be sustainable. I hope Trump will confirm the current NASA Administrator, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, who has done a good job.
Spaceflight and space expansion: Mars
Test missions to Mars could be on the table, The Washington Post reports. The article (unpaywalled copy) quotes space policy analyst Greg Autry saying that NASA could become “a customer of a SpaceX mission to Mars.” Autry, a former Trump advisor who wrote a book titled “Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier” (2024), posted to X that NASA should “support SpaceX on Mars while focusing NASA on fixing all the problems with Artemis.”
Robert Zubrin, the founding president of the Mars Society and a longtime advocate of the colonization of Mars, has been a fierce critic of Donald Trump (from a classical libertarian perspective) and has supported Harris. However, he has written a Mars Society statement where he says: “For whatever reasons they may have, massive forces have now stepped forward to lend their help to make our vision a reality. We will not reject their efforts. On the contrary, we will do our level best to make sure that any humans to Mars program launched by the Trump or any other US administration is a brilliant success.”
According to credible sources, Musk’s dream of transporting humans to Mars will become a bigger national priority under the Trump administration, Reuters reports.
Techno-optimism
Browsing my X feed, I see that many people in the techno-libertarian, techno-optimist crowd are enthusiastic.
Beff Jezos, the co-founder and principal spokesman of the Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) movement, has been on a rave since the announcement of Trump’s victory. Marc Andreessen, the author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and James Pethokoukis, the author of “The Conservative Futurist,” have commented favorably. Pethokoukis has written an interesting and thoughtful post titled “An Up Wing Trump agenda: what’s realistic?“
That optimistic techno-libertarians feel energized and driven is, I think, a positive outcome.
Energy and fundamental science
Trump’s support for Musk should extend to electric vehicles and the associated energy infrastructure. But there are fears that Trump could “unleash domestic fossil fuel production… and scale back federal support for renewable energy and electric vehicles,” The Washington Post reports. This seems to indicate that Trump will have to try and keep both Musk and the fossil fuel lobby happy, which is certainly a challenge.
I don’t expect Trump to be too keen of promoting the transition to nuclear energy. He has recently commented on the “cost and risks of building more nuclear plants,” and he may be influenced by Robert Kennedy Jr., who is not a supporter of nuclear energy. I hope others will persuade Trump that nuclear energy is the way to go.
I’m afraid Trump will not give a high priority to fundamental science unless it can result in immediate high-profile, high-prestige publicity stunts. This would be bad, because advances in fundamental science prepare the way for new and better technologies that benefit all.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In July The Washington Post reported that “Trump’s allies are drafting a sweeping AI executive order that would launch a series of ‘Manhattan Projects’ to develop military technology and immediately review ‘unnecessary and burdensome regulations'” (unpaywalled copy).
But now that Musk is one of the main Trump advisors, we should remember that Musk’s attitude toward AI is ambiguous. On the one hand, Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI and wants his current AI company xAI, which develops the large language model (LLM) Grok, to be at the forefront of AI research.
But on the other hand, Musk has expressed concern that rapid unregulated development of AI technology could be dangerous to humanity, and was one of the signatories of an open letter that, essentially, suggested to freeze the development of AI technology until further notice.
Which side of Musk will advise Trump on AI remains to be seen.
I hope the adventurous side of Musk will prevail. Otherwise, China will win another important race, the race to AI supremacy.
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4 Comments
4 thoughts on “Science and technology under Trump: what can we expect?”
This was a great analysis, thank you! Here are a few quick comments on some of those topics.
I was not here witnessing the moment when a human first time stepped on the moon but my father talks about it at time to time as one of the most amazing events he had lived through. In blockchain communities the Apollo mission is often used as an example of a large group of people coming together, collaborating and achieving something once thought impossible. However the detailed politics for space exploration will unfold, I wish a shared goal affecting the future of the entire civilization could unite people even a little bit. I can't possibly understand who would like to be remembered as one who tried to sabotage such collaboration because of some political disagreements.
In my view, for the long run, the questions and future policy guidelines of AI are maybe the biggest ones. I don't believe Musk has any too big difficulties in navigating between security and acceleration aspects of it. I've a kind of been there myself. It was almost a decade ago in my early twenties when I stumbled upon Tegmark's book 'Our Mathematical Universe' which helped me to realize that it is ok to ask questions I had dared to ask only as a kid. Soon after, I excitedly learnt about his takes on the AI, discovered the recently founded Future of Life Institute and how Musk became the financial backbone of it. Although I still highly appreciate what they'r doing on the technical side, it is very difficult to see how centralized regulation and closed systems would lead to any truly beneficial outcomes. I don't believe that this new US administration will push it in that direction.
The AI race has a close energy dimension in it. And why wouldn't it? Other things equal, the more energy, the more computations. I think that this aspect will increasingly find its way into general discussions about energy production more broadly. I recall an X space from last summer where Musk and Kennedy had a brief chat about nuclear power. RFKs' greatest worry was non-internalized costs where some costs regarding security are not carried by the company but are left to taxpayers which breaks the free market mechanism. Musk explained how the recent advancements in the technology have eliminated many of the costs or security concerns that came with the older reactor generations. Regardless of what the politics end up being, I expect intellectually honest conversation and reasonable uncensored argumentation that people can follow and learn.
What comes to the fundamental science I'm also a bit afraid that it will indeed not be among highest priorities. On the other hand, I'm expecting a lot from the progress of new economic and social systems (web3) where the value of scientific work is captured and resources allocated in more market based manner so that ultimately the government's job is to just stay out of the way. But it is true that we are not there yet and the public funding/support will keep playing an important role in the near future.
Finally, yet importantly, I'm not from the US either but haven't felt this optimistic for a while. And yes, "Let that sink in" was the tweet of the day.
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Hi, thank you for commenting. Yes, I hope the feeling of being a small part of a big thing, the march of humanity toward inner and outer spaces and the creation of our mind children, will unite people a little bit. But one has to fully experience this feeling first, so we have some urgent cultural engineering to do.
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I don’t have strong feelings of love or hate towards Trump either, but I appreciate the balanced perspective in your article. Your view on the potential for NASA and SpaceX collaboration is insightful, as it offers a promising future for space exploration. However, the challenge of balancing fossil fuel interests with the push for renewable energy is a valid concern. The uncertainty around Trump's approach to AI, especially with Musk’s mixed views, adds complexity to the situation. Overall, while there’s reason for optimism, navigating these challenges will require careful, bipartisan support.
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Exactly! We'll need bipartisan support, balanced views, and thoughtful people on board who are not afraid of expressing their opinion.
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