The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

The rise of J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of his colleagues in the late 1930s only further situated scientists and engineers at the heart of American life and the defense of the democratic experiment. Joseph Licklider, a psychologist whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipated the rise of early forms of AI, was hired in 1962 by the organization that would become the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—an institution whose innovations would include the precursors to the modern internet as well as the global positioning system. His research for his now classic paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which was published in March 1960 and sketched a vision of the interplay between computing intelligence and our own, was supported by the U.S. Air Force. There was a closeness, and significant degree of trust, in the relationships between political leaders and the scientists on whom they relied for guidance and direction. Shortly after the launch by the Soviet Union of the satellite Sputnik in October 1957, Hans Bethe, the German-born theoretical physicist and adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was called to the White House. Within an hour, there was agreement on a path forward to reinvigorate the American space program. “You see that this is done,” Eisenhower told an aide. The pace of change and action in that era was swift. NASA was founded the following year.

By the end of World War II, the blending of science and public life—of technical innovation and affairs of state—was essentially complete and unremarkable. Many of these engineers and innovators would labor in obscurity. Others, however, were celebrities in a way that might be difficult to imagine today. In 1942, as war spread across Europe and the Pacific, an article in Collier’s introduced Vannevar Bush, who would help found the Manhattan Project but was at the time a little-known engineer and government bureaucrat, to the magazine’s readership of nearly three million, describing Bush as “the man who may win the war.” An interest in those untangling the most fundamental mysteries of the physical world had been growing for decades on both sides of the Atlantic. Marie Curie sent a letter to her brother in 1903, shortly after discovering radium and winning the Nobel Prize, her first of two, noting the onslaught of requests from journalists. “One would like to dig into the ground somewhere to find a little peace,” she wrote. Similarly, Albert Einstein was not only one of the twentieth century’s greatest scientific minds but also one of its most prominent celebrities—a popular figure whose image and breakthrough discoveries that so thoroughly defied our intuitive understanding of the nature of space and time routinely made front-page news. And it was often the science itself that was the focus of coverage.

This was the American century, and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology. The pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed not only protecting U.S. interests but moving society, and indeed civilization, up the hill. And while the scientific community required funding and extensive support from the government, the modern state was equally reliant on the advances that those investments in science and engineering produced. The technical outperformance of the United States in the twentieth century—that is, the country’s ability to reliably deliver economic and scientific advances for the public, from medical breakthroughs to military capabilities—was essential to its credibility. As Jürgen Habermas has suggested, a failure by leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government. When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer. A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

For decades, the U.S. government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy—the obstacle to progress, not its logical partner. The technology giants of the current era long avoided government work. The level of internal dysfunction within many state and federal agencies created seemingly insurmountable barriers to entry for outsiders, including the insurgent startups of the new economy. In time, the tech industry grew disinterested in politics and broader communal projects. It viewed the American national project, if it could even be called that, with a mix of skepticism and indifference. As a result, many of the Valley’s best minds, and their flocks of engineering disciples, turned to the consumer for sustenance.

Later in these pages, we will examine the reasons that the modern technology giants, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook, shifted their focus away from collaboration with the state to the consumer market. The fundamental causes of the shift include the increasing divergence of the interests and political instincts of the American elite from those of the rest of the country following the end of World War II, as well as the emotional distance of a generation of software engineers from the broader economic struggles of the country and geopolitical threats of the twentieth century. The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. Why court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military when you can retreat into the perceived safety of building another app?

As Silicon Valley turned inward and toward the consumer, the U.S. government and the governments of many of its allies scaled back involvement and innovation across numerous domains, from space travel to military software to medical research. A widening innovation gap was left by the state’s retreat. Many on both sides of the divide cheered this divergence, with skeptics of the private sector arguing that it could not be trusted to operate in public domains and those in the Valley remaining wary of government control and the misuse or abuse of their inventions. It will, however, be a union of the state and the software industry—not their separation and disentanglement—that will be required for the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the last.

In this book, we make the case that the technology sector has an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible. A renewed embrace of the public interest will be essential if the software industry is to rebuild trust with the country and move toward a more transformative vision of what technology can and should make possible. The ability of government to continue to provide for the welfare and security of the public will also require a willingness on the part of the state to borrow from the idiosyncratic organizational culture that enabled so many companies in Silicon Valley to reshape entire sectors of our economy. A commitment to advancing outcomes at the expense of theater, to empowering those on the margins of an organization who may be closest to the problem, and to setting aside vain theological debates in favor of even marginal and often imperfect progress is what allowed the American technology industry to transform our lives. Those values also have the potential to transform our government.

Indeed, the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software. The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.

This book proceeds in four parts. In Part I, “The Software Century,” we argue that the current generation of spectacularly talented engineering minds has become unmoored from any sense of national purpose or grander and more meaningful project. These programmers retreated into the construction of their technical wonders. And wonders indeed have been built. The newest forms of artificial intelligence, known as large language models, have for the first time in history pointed to the possibility of artificial general intelligence—that is, a computing intellect that could rival that of the human mind when it comes to abstract reasoning and solving problems. It is not clear, however, that the technology companies building these new forms of AI will allow them to be used for military purposes. Many are hesitant if not outright opposed to working with the U.S. government at all.

We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry—the unmanned drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield. The twenty-first century is the software century. And the fate of the United States, and its allies, depends on the ability of their defense and intelligence agencies to evolve, and briskly. The generation that is best positioned to develop such weaponry, however, is also the most hesitant, the most skeptical of dedicating its considerable talents to military purposes. Many of these engineers have never encountered someone who has served in the military. They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella but are responsible for none of its costs.

Part II, “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind,” offers an account of how we got here—of the origins of our broader cultural retreat both in the United States and across the West. We begin with the most structural issue—the current generation’s abandonment of belief or conviction in broader political projects. The most talented minds in the country and the world have for the most part retreated from the often messy and controversial work that is most vital and significant to our collective welfare and defense. These engineers decline to work for the U.S. military but do not hesitate to dedicate their lives to raising capital to build the next app or social media platform of the moment. The causes of this turn away from defending the American national project, we argue, include the systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s. The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun. But we failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place. The void was left open, and the market rushed in with fervor to fill the gap.

The result was a hollowing out of the American project, with a rudderless yet highly educated elite at the helm. This generation knew what it opposed—what it stood against and could not condone—but not what it was for. The earliest technologists who built the personal computer, the graphical user interface, and the mouse, for example, had grown skeptical of advancing the aims of a nation whose allegiance many of them believed it did not deserve. The rise of the internet in the 1990s was as a result co-opted by the market, and the consumer was hailed as its king. But many have rightly questioned whether that initial digital revolution made possible by the advent of the internet, in the 1990s and 2000s, truly improved our lives, instead of merely changing them.

It was against this backdrop that Palantir was founded and set out working for American defense and intelligence agencies in the years after the September 11 attacks. In Part III, “The Engineering Mindset,” we describe the organizational culture that makes Palantir and many of the other technology giants that have been founded in Silicon Valley distinct. So much of what makes Palantir work constitutes a direct rejection of the standard model in American corporate practice. In particular, we discuss the lessons we can learn from the social organization of honeybee swarms and flocks of starlings and the implications of improvisational theater for building startups, as well as the conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and others in the 1950s and 1960s that exposed the feebleness of the vast majority of human minds when confronted with the threat of authority.

We also discuss the early years of Palantir, when the company began working with the U.S. Army and special forces personnel in Afghanistan to develop software that would help predict the placement of roadside bombs, the ubiquitous improvised explosive devices that became the leading cause of casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of nearly a decade. The engineering mindset that has allowed us and others to build such software relies on the preservation of space for creative friction and rejection of intellectual fragility, a willingness to shrug off the unrelenting pressure to conform and mimic what has come before, and a skepticism of ideology in favor of the ruthless pursuit of results.

Finally, in Part IV, “Rebuilding the Technological Republic,” we address what will be needed to reconstitute a culture of collective endeavor and shared purpose. The Valley remains deeply reluctant to risk entering into any number of public domains, including local law enforcement, medicine, education, and until only recently national security—areas that are often too politically fraught and unforgiving to outsiders. The result has been the rise of innovation deserts across the country, sectors that have spurned technology and resisted, often fiercely, the entry of new ideas and participants. The public sector must also incorporate the most effective features of Silicon Valley’s culture in order to remake its own, including ensuring that those leading our most significant institutions have a stake in their success or failure.

More broadly, the reconstitution of a technological republic will require a reassertion of national culture and values—and indeed of collective identity and purpose—without which the gains and benefits of the scientific and engineering breakthroughs of the current age may be relegated to serving the narrow interests of a secluded elite.

The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation. But our present advantage cannot be taken for granted. It was a culture, one that cohered around a shared objective, that won the last world war. And it will be a culture that wins, or prevents, the next one. The decline and fall of empires can be swift, and has come in the past without forewarning. An unwinding of our skepticism of the American project will be necessary for us to move forward. We must bend the latest and most advanced forms of AI to our will, or risk allowing our adversaries to do so while we examine and debate, sometimes it seems endlessly, the extent and character of our divisions. Our central argument is that—in this new era of advanced AI, which provides our geopolitical opponents with the most compelling opportunity since the last world war to challenge our global standing—we should return to that tradition of close collaboration between the technology industry and the government. It is that combination of a pursuit of innovation with the objectives of the nation that will not only advance our welfare but safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.

Skip Notes

* We have, in the modern era, crowded out technical minds from electoral office. There are notable exceptions. Margaret Thatcher, for example, worked as a chemist at a plastics firm before becoming the British prime minister, and Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in East Germany prior to serving as chancellor. Yet contemporary democratic regimes have not placed scientists at their center. A survey conducted in 2023 found that only 1.3 percent of state legislators in the United States were either scientists or engineers.

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Chapter Two

Sparks of Intelligence

In 1942, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the son of a painter and a textile importer, was appointed to lead Project Y, the military effort established by the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer and his colleagues worked in secret at a remote laboratory in New Mexico to discover methods for purifying uranium and ultimately to design and build working atomic bombs. He would become a celebrity, a symbol not only of the raw power of the American century and modernity itself but of the potential as well as risks, and indeed dangers, of blending scientific and national purpose.

For Oppenheimer, the atomic weapon was “merely a gadget,” according to a profile of him in Life magazine in October 1949—the object and manifestation of a more fundamental endeavor and interest in basic science. It was a commitment to undirected academic inquiry alongside a wartime focus of effort and resources that resulted in the most consequential weapon of the age, and one that would structure relations between nation-states for at least the next half century.

In high school, Oppenheimer, who was born in 1904 in New York, developed a particular affection for chemistry, which he later recalled “starts right in the heart of things” and whose effects in the world, unlike theoretical physics, were visible to a young boy. The engineering inclination to build—the insatiable desire simply to make things work—was present throughout Oppenheimer’s life. The task of constructing and building came first; debates about what to do with one’s creation could follow. He was pragmatic, with a bias toward action and inquiry. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it,” he once told a government panel. Oppenheimer’s feelings about his role in constructing the most destructive weapon of the age would shift after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947, he observed that the physicists involved in the development of the bomb had “known sin” and that “this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

The pursuit of the inner workings of the most basic components of the universe, of matter and energy themselves, had for many seemed innocuous. But the ethical complexity and implications of that era’s scientific advances would continue to reveal themselves in the years and decades after the end of the war. Some of the scientists involved saw themselves as operating apart from the political and moral calculus that was the domain of ordinary men, who were left, indeed abandoned, to navigate the ethical vagaries of geopolitics and war. Percy Williams Bridgman, a physicist who taught Oppenheimer as an undergraduate at Harvard, articulated the view of many of his peers when he wrote, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals.” The scientist, in this frame, is not immoral but rather amoral, existing outside or perhaps before the point of moral inquiry. It is a view still held by many young engineers across Silicon Valley today. A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose.

We have now, nearly eighty years after the invention of the atomic bomb, arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, a crossroads that connects engineering and ethics, where we will again have to choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend. The choice we face is whether to rein in or even halt the development of the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence, which may threaten or someday supersede humanity, or to allow more unfettered experimentation with a technology that has the potential to shape the international politics of this century in the way nuclear arms shaped the last one.

The rapidly advancing capabilities of the latest large language models—their ability to stitch together what seems to pass for a primitive form of knowledge of the workings of our world—are not well understood. The incorporation of these language models into advanced robotics with the capacity to sense their surroundings will only lead us further into the unknown. The marrying of the power of the language models with a corporeal, or at least robotic, existence, with which machines can begin exploring our world—establishing contact, through the senses of touch and sight, with an external version of truth that would seem to be the bedrock of thought—will prompt, and perhaps soon, another significant leap forward. In the absence of understanding, the collective reaction to early encounters with this novel technology has been marked by an uneasy blend of wonder and fear. Some of the latest models have a trillion or more parameters, tunable variables within a computer algorithm, representing a scale of processing that is impossible for the human mind to begin to comprehend. We have learned that the more parameters a model has, the more expressive its representation of the world and the richer its ability to mirror it. And the latest language models with a trillion parameters will soon be outpaced by even more powerful systems, with tens of trillions of parameters and more. Some have predicted that language models with as many synapses as exist in the human brain—some 100 trillion connections—will be constructed within the decade.