Today we seem to be in a time of elevated anxiety on a macro-social level. The current political climate (most of it bad, I would argue) coupled with the truly accelerated rate of change (most of it actually good on average, I would argue) fosters and drives this.
We are never in “normal” times where normal means no worry about the future and the path we are on. But from time to time it is worse (heightened).
Here are two items that I read recently that offered some hope amongst the fear.
I.
Derek Thompson continues in a recent post:
The results were remarkable: On an independent test set of 493 scans, REDMOD detected the invisible signature of future pancreatic cancer with significant accuracy at a median lead time of 475 days before diagnosis. In other words, this AI program could detect cancer 40 months before the best doctors. Most importantly, REDMOD didn’t cheat. The team prevented the AI from cheating in several ways by making it impossible for the AI to use electronic records to identify scans where a mass was determined to be “present but overlooked.”
Before AI kills us all, it appears that it will give us meaningfully reduced mortality.
II.
Yes, China builds. Some of that building is impressive. Some of it is surveillance infrastructure and junky apartments sitting on top of a brittle political model with an aging, shrinking population. This is not a superior civilization. It is a ruthless machine that can be highly efficient at specific things while being deeply warped at its core.
Meanwhile, what does America still have?
The lead in AI.
The world’s best universities.
The deepest capital markets.
The most creative entrepreneurial culture.
The most important alliance network.
The reserve currency.
The most capable military.
The greatest ability to absorb talent from everywhere.
The broadest ecosystem for turning ideas into dominant global companies.
This is what the America declinists never understand. America’s strength has never come from looking neat on a high-speed rail brochure. It comes from combining freedom, talent, capital, scale, ambition, and military reach in a way no other country has matched. China can manufacture very effectively. America still invents the future.
That is from Lee Bressler. I love the last line of that quote from his post, “America still invents the future.”
While we need to work to make that continue to be true, it is worth pondering how enduring that truth is despite the headwinds—some of our own making.
Substacks referenced above: