Trump Is Winning AI But Losing Europe
The sharp and rarely-talked-about contrast between the American and European approach to AI + comments on the AI Action Plan & GPAI CoP

Introduction
The only reason why I continue to share my thoughts online and breathe new life into this publication once a week is because I am obsessed with a single question: Where is information technology taking humanity?
This question has deep philosophical, geopolitical, and human rights implications. No one can accurately describe or predict what they are, but the implications are there. Mike Solana speculates that technology is taking us to a goonpocalypse, and I think his explicit diagnosis of contemporary society is, unfortunately, dead on the money. IT continues to grow and scale at a rapid pace (AI is also IT, even though many people want it to be much more than that), but to what end? What is BigTech’s grand vision besides continuing to make money and farm more engagement? There is none. Where are the aspirations and plans to support human flourishing or contribute to the common good? There are none, even though marketing wizards and corporate carnival barkers can spin up a lot of words and frame bad decisions in a positive light.
The few American tech companies that have put humanity on its current trajectory are continuing to pursue growth for the sake of growing, aspire to automate workers for the sake of automating them, and burn billions, or more likely trillions of dollars into AI, because, why not? AI? Importantly, the US government is now fully strapped to the passenger seat on BigTech’s ambitious journey to nowhere, believing that AI will lead to a new kind of superintelligence that can cure all the ills of society.
Stuff like that is not comfortable to think about, but necessary. What kind of world are the powerful American tech platforms building and why are we all agreeing to it? How do the ancient ideas of democracy fit into a digital-first, AI-first society? Are we, as people in the West, in the process of building a template for living an enshittified life that is fundamentally not worth living? I am here to ask those questions with a brutal and uncompromising honesty rooted in data and facts.
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