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America's tech blind spot
US policymakers need to strike a regulatory balance that implements safeguards for consumers while fostering innovation and facilitating research, objectives that are hindered by their current nationalist bent toward regulating both foreign and homegrown tech.
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A mannequin displays smart audio glasses from French software company Pulse Audition as part of the Eureka Park exhibition at the Venetian Expo on Jan. 9, during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024 in Las Vegas, the United States. (AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
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ationalism has emerged as a potent force shaping global tech policy, nowhere more so than in the United States. With Donald Trump returning to the White House for a second term, his vision for America’s technological future is coming into sharper focus.
At home, Trump promises a sweeping deregulatory agenda, coupled with industrial policy aimed at boosting domestic tech businesses. Abroad, his administration appears poised to double down on aggressive restrictions aimed at keeping American technology out of China’s hands.
Yet Trump’s grand vision to “make America great again” overlooks a crucial detail: The cycle of innovation matters hugely for technological progress. The path the US is charting risks fostering a tech ecosystem dominated by mediocre products, like attention-grabbing social media apps, while failing to nurture the kind of transformative inventions that drive productivity and long-term economic growth.
Joseph Schumpeter, the renowned Austrian economist who popularized the term “creative destruction”, identified three key stages of the process.
First, there’s innovation, a breakthrough idea or method. In the realm of artificial intelligence, this stage includes the development of neural networks, which laid the foundation for deep learning and more recently, the transformer architecture that has powered the rise of generative AI.
Then comes the stage of commercialization, when disruptive ideas evolve into market-ready products. This is where tools like ChatGPT, applications built on large language models (LLM), emerge and become accessible to everyday consumers. Finally, there’s diffusion, the phase when the novel technology becomes pervasive, reshaping industries and daily life.
So far, discussions of tech regulation have tended to focus on the later stages of this process, which bring immediate economic benefits, often overlooking the early stage of invention.
