Transcription
As far as my perspective on Trump goes, it tends to revolve around the view that he is a businessman at heart and that the focus of his political style, I guess, is dealmaking. I wrote a lot in my book about Trump's mentor, Roy Conn, who was, among other things, the general counsel to McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings. He was also, you know, a New York City lawyer that represented a lot of unsavory figures, including some tied to organized crime and also had the ear of Ronald Reagan and taught politicians in the United States and sort of bridged a variety of worlds. And he essentially taught Trump the art of the deal. And you know, a lot of his close associates like the Pope family were very politically connected, also connected to organized crime arguably, but were very much in the business of making backroom deals, and that that's how political power in the United States functions.
Fundamentally, I think Trump likes to focus on and promote about his political style is around negotiations, whether those are diplomatic negotiations or negotiations with businessmen that lead to uh big number investments he can tout to the public, which is, you know, I think part of the impetus behind his having the Project Stargate press conference, you know, at the White House on his first full day. And I think that's also kind of consistent with what we saw from Trump during his first term as well.
So when you're sort of focused on those metrics, I don't necessarily think that the focus is necessarily on how do I help everyday Joe. I'm sure that you know in his mind if you're, you know, of the opinion that I'm going to tout this big multi-million dollar investment in US AI infrastructure, for example, perhaps he views that as helpful for the American economy and thus helpful for the American people. And I think it is very likely that over the next four years there certainly will be some Americans that economically benefit from Trump's economic policy. But I don't necessarily think that's going to be everybody. And I think, you know, generally based on what we've seen so far, there's been a lot of courting of big tech executives and a lot of talk about making the US the AI and crypto capital of the world. And how much of that is necessarily going to translate or trickle down to, sort of refer to, you know, Reaganite economic terms, you know, to the everyday American public? It's really hard to know.
But again, you know, I just want to go back to someone like Eric Schmidt, for example, who, as I noted earlier, had sort of an outsized role in developing the AI policy of the military intelligence community. He wrote a book called The Age of AI with Henry Kissinger and also, I believe, a professor from MIT who I'm sorry, his name escapes me at the moment, but basically that book posited that essentially AI is going to make a two-tiered society. There's going to be the top tier of people who develop and maintain AI and set and determine what its objective functions are and then sort of a second class, which we would assume is larger than the first class. So they don't explicitly say that, but who AI acts upon and eventually that that group will lose the ability to understand and really be able to conceive of how how AI is impacting their lives and will develop some sort of dependency on AI for things like decision-making, sort of leading to this phenomena that they refer to in the book as cognitive diminishment, which I sort of see as this idea—uh, we've all heard it before—if you don't use it you lose it, sort of the idea of like mental math: you start using a calculator, or a phone calculator or something like that, and it becomes more difficult over time and eventually very difficult to be able to do mental math in your head when perhaps when you were in grade school it was much easier to do that because you were sort of—you had to use that ability regularly. And so they essentially argue that by not making those decisions and outsourcing that to AI, this particular class will lose the ability to make those decisions over time. And when you also factor in that there's a lot of effort to sort of outsource creativity, art and music to artificial intelligence, will that have an impact on people's ability to create and what sort of impact will this have on society? And you know these are things that I think sort of get left out of the public discussion and I don't think they're really on someone like Trump's radar as a businessman; he's focused on sort of the bottom line, the number, the success of the negotiation and how successful it it looks, whether it's to his base or to businessmen he wants to court or, you know, other people, foreign leaders.
If you're familiar with someone like Henry Kissinger, for example, and some of his more controversial views on the masses and public and some of his more infamous quotes, you know, I mean, is that a system that he wants to happen? He created a national security memorandum, for example, that viewed people that live in the third world, birth rates in the global south as national security threats to the United States and wanted to implement policies to reduce their population size, for example, and sort of had what I would argue was a eugenicist bent to some of his policies. And he was one of the mentors, of course, to people that have become infamous in recent years like the World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab. You know, some of his more infamous quotes that he's known for refer to, you know, soldiers being, you know, pawns of foreign policy, essentially, sort of like, you know, people's lives are just, you know, pawns on a chessboard for the sort of the elite figures to move around for their benefit. That's sort of the mentality, as I see it, of someone like him. But obviously he's been, you know, praised as a model statesman and all of this stuff and has mentored Trump in his first administration, mentored Hillary Clinton, you know, people on both sides of the aisle.
You know, I think the more you look into someone like that and his connections with sort of dubious oligarchs like David Rockefeller, going, you know, significantly back in time, he's sort of someone that promotes this idea of a global technocracy. Well, I don't necessarily want to say that I'm like a Luddite and we should all go back to the stone age or things like this, but I think there needs to be like an actual public discussion on this, particularly on the fact that our out-of-control national security state and Silicon Valley are have essentially been fusing over the past few decades and what necessarily that means because a lot of people be, you know, will say stuff, well, it's AI and the private sector, but when that private sector company has multi-million dollar conflicts of interest with the national security state, I think that should be part of the discussion. And I think also there needs to be a way to sort of know whether some of these algorithms are hyped or whether what the company says their accuracy is, for example, is actually accurate before decisions are made to outsource major decision-making, whether at the government level or the local level or really on any level, you know, to an algorithm.
So you know, as an example, during COVID-19, the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, sort of gave a green light to this Israeli company called Diagnostic Robotics to use, you know, the health data in the state to predict COVID-19 outbreaks before they could happen. And so obviously if you know the algorithm of this company predicts an outbreak, there would be sort of these localized lockdowns and people would lose their ability to engage in in-person commerce and freedom of movement, etc. So you know, consequences that are pretty significant to the people living there. And when I reported on it at the time, as I recall, but it's been a few years, but I do know that the algorithm, per the company, was under 80% accurate. I think it was somewhere in the 70s. And so that's the company, right? So if it's not independently vetted and it this is sort of, you know, company PR at the end of the day, is that overinflated? It's quite possible. And so what if the accuracy of that isn't really in the 70s, it's in the 60s or near the 50s? It's no better than a coin toss. Is it really worth putting that kind of power in the hand of an algorithm that isn't necessarily going to be more efficient and accurate? But all this hype that's been generated around AI as an industry suggests that has sort of created this public perception that AI is inherently smarter than human decision-makers and more efficient and more cost-effective. For example, I think these are kind of problematic scenarios that need to be considered. And I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or poo-poo on innovation, but I think civil liberties do matter. And I think people need to be very mindful of that, especially considering again the Silicon Valley fusion with the national security state and the national security state's tendency to opportunistically whittle down American civil liberties for their benefit.
First of all, as I referred to earlier with the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and some of these FOIA documents that came out of there, there is the promotion of the idea that essentially the US needs to do what China has done and replicate this civil-military fusion model in order to win the AI arms race. The argument inherent in that is that in order to beat China, we must become China even more than China is. And you know, a lot of the justifications around China as an adversary are related to how China is not as protective of civil liberties as the United States at least postures itself as being, for example, and a major difference in the value system between China and the United States. And so if you're willing to adopt exactly that model, civil-military fusion in my opinion is really not that different than fascism at the end of the day. It's the corporatist model, and I don't think it's what Americans want. Yeah, there is a trade-off, and I think people should consider it, but what happens if we go so far out of a desperation to win an AI arms race with China, for example, that we completely surrender our the value system that supposedly makes us a freer, better society in the process? I think that is complicated.
And I would also point to the fact that, you know, transnational capital, a lot of that has enabled China's AI arms race. There's a lot of cross-pollination in these Chinese government-adjacent tech corporations and the United States. You can look at people like Larry Fink, for example, who definitely have a lot of ties to Chinese industry and people like Steve Schwarzman quite similarly very much tied there who's, you know, head of Blackstone. They're both very close personal friends of Donald Trump and also of course Fink has ties to the Democrats as well and a lot of, you know, Henry Kissinger who I mentioned earlier—a lot of top CCP officials have pictures of them with Henry Kissinger in their offices. They love the guy. And there was that effort, of course, to open up China to commerce and partnerships with Western companies, for example, you know, back several decades ago. And a lot of that involved US capital and some firms like Bechtel, for example, that were very much tied to the national security state of Ronald Reagan, for example. A lot of top people that served in his top national security were involved in Bechtel, which was building a lot of the infrastructure that helped enable China to become, you know, the power that it is. And why is that not being talked about? And I mean, this is really isn't exclusive to Democrats either, though they often get rightly pointed out for having some conflicts of interest of this nature.
But someone like Howard Lutnik, for example, who was head of the transition team for Trump and is his incoming Secretary of Commerce—a company he runs, has the same tie to a Chinese government majority-owned financial entity that was a big scandal for conservatives when Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca was also tied to it. But there's been no conservative uproar over this tie. And you have to kind of ask why that may be and why you have a lot of these big tech people, Elon Musk included, who has a major role in the national security state of the United States as one of the top contractors to Space Force and the Pentagon, for example, and Starlink, you know, through Tesla has a lot of ties to Chinese commerce and tech giants that also have rather cozy relationships with the Chinese government as well. Why is that not being discussed as, you know, a potential national security risk? If we do really need to become China to beat China, if it was really the key driver of our issue, shouldn't we be scrutinizing the ties of these oligarchs to both China and and our own national security state?
And you know, again, I think if people are familiar with my books and my work, there is a scandal that really exposed a lot of this that happened during the Clinton administration and was not properly investigated at all. It's remembered as as China Gate and it was really, you know, sort of today is, I would argue, misremembered as a campaign finance scandal for the Clinton re-election campaign. But what was the alleged bribery of the Clinton re-election campaign meant to accomplish? And if you look at what these figures gained by sort of, you know, for all intents and purposes, bribing the Clinton re-election campaign, it was facilitating exports of sensitive national security technology to China. And a lot of that was done through a company called Loral, which has since become, I think, part of Lockheed Martin. The guy that ran Loral at the time, Bernard Schwartz, nothing ever happened to him at all, despite the fact that he helped pass very sensitive satellites and other military technology from the US directly to the Chinese military, and nothing was done about it. And he was actually a major backer of Biden in 2020. Why was that not covered? Don't you think conservatives should be all over that story? And again, this sort of makes me concerned because I think there's not enough talk about transnational capital in these types of situations. And there's a very urgent need to go back and re-examine a lot of the past scandals of our national security state, China specifically because, as I note in my book, the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a lot of people at the ITA department at Commerce, those were the most people targeted as this bribery scandal at China because the Commerce Department oversees the export of sensitive technology to foreign powers. And the fact that most of the employees that knew about that scandal were all essentially blown up in the same aircraft accident and that Ron Brown had a bullet hole in his head when his body was discovered in the plane. Why has that not been—Well, it's true. You can look at the evidence and it's absolutely there. You know, why can't we examine this? And shouldn't it be disturbing that the incoming head of the Commerce Department has a direct tie to the Chinese government in the context of that type of scandal of China and targeting the Commerce Department specifically?