Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The Future in Five Questions. This week I interviewed James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former business journalist. His forthcoming book, “The Conservative Futurist,” makes the case that dynamic American capitalism can unlock a new age of technological progress and abundance. We spoke about why he thinks the government must vastly boost its research funding, his favorite sci-fi book series, and why we were wrong to ridicule Newt Gingrich for talking about lunar colonies during a presidential debate that one time. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? I don't think people naturally think of creating a permanent presence on the moon as a pro-growth, pro-economy idea. When Newt Gingrich suggested it during a presidential debate back in 2012 he was wrongly mocked, including by Mitt Romney, but I think that actually should be a national goal — not just for prestige reasons or making people feel good about what America’s accomplished, but for actual economic reasons. It would be a great proof of concept. If we can go to the moon, stay there, do things like mine for water, or rocket fuel, or helium-3, which could be used for fusion energy, it would be a great proof of concept for asteroid mining, which would really open the entire bounty of the solar system to us. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? AI has been overly hyped in its dystopian potential and under-hyped as far as what it can do, both in making us more productive in what we do every day as well as creating huge advances in drug discovery, or helping enable nuclear fusion research. What book most shaped your conception of the future? "The Expanse" series, which is a science fiction series that takes place several hundred years in the future. It is a future of both progress and problems. We have mastered the solar system, we asteroid mine, we’ve built technologies which get us from here to Jupiter fairly quickly, we have super-smart computers, but there are still problems. We survived the 21st century and threats of pandemic, climate change, and nuclear war, but there might be more war between us and Mars in the distant colonies. This showed me that's what progress is about. It's about solving some problems, but then there will always be new problems, and then we'll solve those problems too and keep moving forward. A lot of people view it as dystopian because of the problems it depicts, but it’s optimistic because in 300 years we're still around. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? It’s something they've already been talking about, which is increasing science funding. But I would increase it way more, I would take science research funding broadly back to Apollo levels as a share of GDP. I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made is that we didn't follow Project Apollo with something else on that scale. Maybe it would have been “Project Clean Energy,” or who knows. But I think having a big definable problem that we're trying to solve is helpful. Maybe that project would have been taking the space program further, colonizing the moon and then Mars, but we decided not to do that. To me, that is something that both conservatives and liberals should agree on. What has surprised you the most this year? It is an almost supernatural coincidence that this year marks the 50th anniversary of what I call “The Great Downshift” in U.S. productivity growth, which happened in 1973. Here we are, it's the 50th anniversary, and it really seems as if there is something amazing happening every day, whether it’s another breakthrough in nuclear fusion, or the mRNA vaccine, or most obviously what seems like warp-speed progress happening in AI. It's coincidental, but it's a wonderful coincidence that here we are at this inflection point away from slow growth and stagnation to rapid growth, rapid progress, and the kind of future that we dreamed about in the immediate postwar decades and again in the late 1990s.
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