The news comes fast and furious, such that even chatbots have difficulty keeping up. I asked Gemini to comment on the Ukrainian drone strike against Russia’s bomber force, and the answer came in Chinese for some reason. Asking it to switch to English, I got an overview with the banal conclusion, “The full impact of this event will become clearer as more information becomes available.” If I were still trying to get cartoons published, I’d draw one with the Red Sea parting, using that line as the caption.
I checked in on X, driven by the same curiosity for the repulsive that once led me to take a tour of the Paris sewer system. MAGA types, human or bot, were grousing about Ukraine’s effrontery, and suggesting Russia’s response might be nuclear. Vladimir Putin wouldn’t be deterred by his White House latherer, but fears crossing Xi Jinping, whose government has repeatedly signaled disapproval for nukes exploding on the land mass that also contains China. In any case, Ukraine just showed the primacy of 21st-century tech over legacy Cold War weapons, such as Russia’s turboprop strategic bombers.
Also on X, Ann Coulter posted about how a judge named Manik Talwani had been overruled by the Supreme Court on deportations, and it was “so weird” this “Punjabi” didn’t grasp the U.S. Constitution. But Manik, who died in 2023, was a physicist from India, while the judge in this case is his daughter Indira, born in New Jersey, making me wonder if Coulter’s outsourced her posts to a chatbot. Feeding such suspicions was an incisive book I read, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, which aptly castigates such “text extrusion.”
Manik Talwani, incidentally, was a naturalized U.S. citizen whose achievements included precise measurements of the gravitational field on the moon for the Apollo program. He exemplified how the U.S. benefitted from its capacity to attract foreign-born talent to American efforts in science, technology and other fields. That capacity is getting a rapid dismantling from the Trump administration, through science budget cuts, immigration restrictions and crackdowns on foreign students. J.D. Vance recently downplayed immigrant contributions to the space program, fatuously rewriting history.
The withdrawal of Jared Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator made me wonder if I’d underestimated his merits. I was unimpressed by his performance at confirmation hearings (in which Ted Cruz cogently voiced concerns about China beating the U.S. to the moon); Isaacman was cagey about his closeness to Elon Musk, and prone to overpromising what NASA could do. Whether Isaacman got the kibosh because Musk’s influence is fading, or because Donald Trump belatedly found out Isaacman had given money to Democrats, or because Isaacman couldn’t summon enthusiasm for massive budget cuts that will destroy America’s primacy in space science, or some combo of all these, is unclear. But the potential for a worse nominee is considerable, and it’s reasonable to conclude that “NASA is f***ed.”
At the libertarian magazine Reason, for which I used to write, a recent video and article titled “Eisenhower Warned Us About the ‘Scientific Elite,’” by Zach Weissmueller, argued that federal cuts will be good for science, getting it out of the hands of government-beholden elites and restoring the halcyon days of Thomas Edison and Bell Labs. The problem with this argument is that a lot of science is too long-term, large-scale or unconnected to product development for any private-sector funder to undertake. If you want treatments for rare diseases, or warning of asteroids hitting the Earth, or to understand gravitational waves even though there’s no foreseeable profit in that, spending under one percent of GDP on federal R&D has been a good deal, and we’d be wise to put it higher, as Eisenhower did.
Under present trends and policies, the U.S. will become, like Russia, a former superpower, presenting a feared façade for some time through legacy weaponry but behind the curve in scientific, technological and economic prowess, and losing its military edge as well.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky