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November 20, 2024 - 7:00am
Elon Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
Speaking at New College Oxford about advances in AI, Boris Johnson’s former adviser said that a subset of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs could no longer ignore Washington’s overreach and may look to rebuild parts of the state that don’t function properly.
Cummings said he could “easily imagine” a new national industrial strategy led by tech elites like Musk, who has recently been appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.
“It’s unclear how the whole experiment will go with a whole section of the Silicon Valley elite deciding that enough is enough essentially,” said Cummings. “The view always was in Silicon Valley that being thousands of miles away from DC was actually a great blessing because they could say ‘We can just do our own stuff and they’ll leave us alone’”.
Cummings went on to outline the ways that Silicon Valley elites might change government departments. “Option one is you go into the Air Force and fire the majority of people and restructure it completely, which is very hard to do in government,” he said. “But the other option is you just say ‘we’re going to do it differently’ and all the money the US Air Force was going to get for drones is no longer going to the US Air Force,” he argued.
Instead, the former Downing Street advisor argued that a separate legal entity should be created with its own powers and laws, which would be known as “Drone Force”. Cummings proposed making it exempt from “all the normal procurement rules” so it could “build like Silicon Valley does — i.e. super fast and optimised for speed and engineering — not optimised for Congress, all of the insane DEI stuff which they put in.”
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SubscribeWhat was it Nicholas Taleb called them?
IYI.
Intellectuals yet idiots. We should pay no more attention to Cummings than we should to the numpties advising Starmer. They all come out of the same silo and have a similar level of experience in the real world. Which is to say: none whatsoever.
Whilst that may be true in a one sense, it’d be more valuable to critique the arguments that Cummings puts forward.
No-one can accuse him of not “thinking outside the box”, and even if his ideas don’t come to fruition (although they had some real-world effect with Brexit, since inexpertly rolled out) they’re also points of reference against which future events can be measured.
That’s right. As Nassim Taleb says in his book Skin in the Game, these people have no skin in the game, and they never have had. That’s why they pass and implement such abominations as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. Both hugely expensive bills that opposed market forces rather than complement them and so did more harm than good.
I tried to get some grant money for electric car research under a part of the Inflation Reduction Act and was stunned to find that the website said the DEI portion of your application is the most important part. Unbelievable! That tells you one purpose of the money: a giveaway to minorities.
You should have said you were trans or that you identiffiy as an African or something, I’m not even joking
That would have been lying. But couldn’t you do it legally, change your skin colour I mean, and sex, by deed poll or whatever it is not surgery. It would be legal blatant racist sexism to deny your application then.
“was stunned to find that the website said the DEI portion of your application is the most important part.”
Do you really expect people to believe this nonsense?
I mean, the two putzes who replied are obviously dumb enough to think this might possibly be true but anyone with half a brain knows this is garbage.
Half a brain? You’re flattering yourself there, I think.
What would it actually do to your world view if it was true?
The 4 ways of spending money invariably applies. I first read it in a book by P J O’Rourke (All The Trouble In The World), but I believe it was first coined by someone else.
Interesting. I had never heard of those four ways of spending money, but they do ring true. PJ O’Rourke says that he got them from Milton and Rose Friedman. Reminds me a little bit of Louis Brandeis and “other people’s money”.
Not all intellectuals are idiots.
Dominic Cummings is (or at least has been) spectacularly right about some things. And spectactularly wrong about others. The sort of person who’s useful in a backroom role or in opposition, but quite unsuited to the actual operational grind. But that’s not at all the same as being intellectually wrong about almost everything (he’s no Polly Toynbee).
Fair points. But Polly Toynbee isn’t an intellectual. She got into Oxford (having failed A levels) on the strength of her family name, and then failed her degree but was given a pass (on the strength of her family name).
Bet she thinks she is though !
I don’t know anything about Taleb but it’s seems to me that there’s a set of locked-in, rusted-on systems throughout the world that operate the same way whether in a communist regime or a supposedly democratic republic. These system serve those who control the levers, who cannot be removed through elections. To change it means violent disruption, not guns in the street, but pulling it apart and rebuilding. That needs very strong individuals who 1) know how to do it and 2) have the support to do it. As I’ve said before, we’ve been living in a dark, suffocating room for a long time and there are generations who have no idea that these things can be done and have been done before. Unfortunately they’ll find this frightening and resist such ideas as totalitarian or dictatorial, when in fact it’s the power of the individual, something they’ve been persuaded is dangerous.
This is discussed in Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations as “Distributional Coalitions,” that are “deeply networked relationships between industry, government, lobbyists, friend networks, academia, and pockets of family wealth intent on building in protection for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The solution is “disruption.” But not revolution.
I agree with the analysis but it has to be said that, for example, in the UK had Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election, those systems would have just spent the last 5 years protecting the economy and society from the demented nonsense that a Corbyn government would have done its best to implement.
This does not mean I actually approve of such systems, which are not only resistant to the democratic will, but also resistant to any sort of reform no matter how badly and obviously it is needed. What I’m saying is that, tempting though Gordian-knot-style solutions may seem at times, the reality is that careful disassembly is preferable.
A couple of tech bros are never going to fix the lumbering bureaucracy in the U.S. It is so enormous and so many now are utterly dependent on it–from Boeing to Brides of the State–that an intervention sufficient to alter it meaningfully would induce a short to medium term economic catastrophe. Were one to winnow the dolts from the deep state, from whence cometh the talent with which to replace them? Silicon Valley 80-hour-a-week outside the box geniuses are never going to flock to government jobs just for the pension plan and health benefits. The bureaucracy is the polar opposite of a start up and will always have as its ultimate leadership politicians.
I am not sure how serious we are supposed to take this. Big tech, and big capital in general, have been in bed with the government for a long time. Silicon Valley is no exception. Of course big private parties may not like certain regulations and its always good to see if there are truly ridiculous practices going on. But it is not as if big (tech) companies are strangers to extreme bureaucracy themselves. Big capital in many ways wants overreach and bureaucracy to protect them against market discipline.
Palmer Luckey from Anduril Industries has already disrupted drone manufacturing.
He’s knocking his barracuda out at tens of thousand dollars a pop instead of millions. The established players are wetting themselves.
He’s right.
Elon Musk’s Space X has proved beyond doubt how much better a well run private company can launch rockets and satellites than NASA and Boeing. They are an order of magnitude (10x) faster in getting stuff done. At lower cost and with better quality and reliability.
And it’s surely no coincidence that companies like Space X hire strictly on merit and don’t carry passengers on their staff.
Whereas big, old companies and anything related to government are infested with DEI and other such nonsense and overheads and are the “employers of last resort” (a role which used to be shared by Britain’s nationalised industries).
The challenge now is working out where to draw the line to get a better tradeoff between regulation and efficiency. For sure, it’s far too far towards regulation and inefficiency today. And heading rapidly in the wrong direction still.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson recently also argued, you are comparing apples with oranges. NASA is (or should be) in the business of working out the fundamental innovations that the private sector can’t or won’t do. For example, when the US wanted to go to the moon before the Soviets did, NASA actually pulled it off in just a few years. They can do this because the state can redirect all its resources for such an effort when it really wants to. They do not have to worry about profit and money. In a wartime economy you see the same. From this perspective it also makes sense why at NASA they do not care much about reusable rockets and efficiency. That is just not their core business. Conversely, private industry cannot take too much risks and will focus more on small iterative innovations, improving what already exists.
I think the main reason why the state became sluggish and much less focused on big innovations is because there is no main competitor anymore in this unipolar world.
Regardless of what you think about NASA, there is a direct comparison between Boeing and Space X. And it certainly isn’t in Boeing’s favour. No apples and oranges there.
I think you have it backwards. Private industry is more innovative than government agencies like NASA. Look at the difference between SpaceX and NASA. One takes risks, tolerates failures, and runs as a profitable business with rapid innovation, subject to market forces. The other refuses to take risks, penalizes failure, and burns through money and time to so slowly progress that if a business it would be bankrupt.
Governments just don’t do business as well as business, especially when technology is changing fast. Governments used command and control, a waterfall method of development that stifles innovation in favor of reliability and stability. There’s nothing wrong with reliability and stability, but that means you don’t do anything new.
This is a bit of a misconception. I don’t think the question is who is “more” innovative. The public and private sectors typically just aim for different types of innovations.The public sector often aims for long term, more fundamental big inventions with high risks and a high rate of failure. Things that are sometimes not applicable for decades. Or projects that are simply too expensive for private parties in terms of money and resources. The private sector is more interested in iterative innovations and improvements. In many cases they also combine, improve and commercialize inventions from the public sector. Also the private industry is/was very good in improving the production process itself, like we saw with Fordism. With the public sector I mean government agencies, universities etc. but I think you could also say that government contractors, semi-private labs and subsidized departments of private companies are essentially an extension of the state. When a company is largely shielded from market discipline I’d say it’s only private on paper.
In any case, Mariana Mazzucato makes a reasonable case for this perspective. But also if you just open your phone and trace where all the fundamental inventions behind every part start, it’s pretty much all public sector. Very often military, e.g. DARPA funded. But as I argued before, innovation really is very fast when there is an incentive, as we saw during the cold war. And without it, it appears that things can get sluggish.
Good comment, but I disagree with you and especially, with Mariana Mazzucato. I do agree that there are two kinds of innovation, what I call optimizing and what I call innovation (others have different names for the two types, but most most agree there are two). But I think big companies are good at optimizing, young companies are good at innovating, and the government is bad at both.
Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Value of Everything is not bad, but The Entrepreneurial State and then The Mission Economy take things too far. In short, I think the state is a lousy entrepreneur, and should not try to be one, and that missions (or moonshots) just don’t work. Bill Janeway in his book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy gives a mention of Mariana Mazzucato and agrees with her basic stance, but I think his views are much more nuanced than hers and contradictory in some respects.
Another interesting take on innovation is UnHerd contributor Edward Luttwak’s book The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. He calls the two types of innovation macroinnovation and microinnovation. He points out that macroinnovation comes from the bottom up, not from top-down control by the state.
There are lots of views on this topic, but no one can prove their view is the correct one as the evidence can be interpreted many ways. But I think the Silicon Valley way of doing business, agile rather than waterfall, is the better way to go. That system has its faults, among them making people filthy rich who don’t deserve it, but in 60 years it took us from multi-ton computers to computers that fit in a shirt pocket but are millions of times more powerful. A remarkable achievement.
So I agree Mazzucato is probably too rigid in her somewhat negative view of private industry. Obviously private entities can and do innovate a lot, in ways the state cannot. Nevertheless, I think the idea that the state is always bad at innovation – or more generally that it is bad at everything – is also objectively nonsense. Evidently the public sector can generate an enormous amount of progress if it really wants to. If only because it has the ability to redirect all resources towards a specific goal. We saw this with the Manhattan project, we saw this with the Apollo missions and many other Cold War inventions. Not to mention all the achievements in fundamental science on which modern technology is based. Also note that when the stakes are really high, such as during wars, states do not deregulate to emphasize market forces but the opposite, they centralize. Not that I am arguing for this or anything.
As for Silicon Valley, yes they have given us extraordinary innovations and an interesting culture. But we also have to recognize that it is very much a sector that profited in the slipstream of cold war and DARPA projects. That computers are much more powerful is precisely an example of iterative innovations: more of the same. In fact, in many ways progress actually was much slower than futurologists anticipated – many of the millennium dreams of the 60s are still not achieved. Peter Thiel and some others make this case as well, we haven’t really seen that much innovation outside of the digital realm. The downside of startup culture and Silicon Valley is that it is prone to speculative hypes, I think. Sometimes projects have very little substance besides the PR. Or the actual innovation is that the company expects it can dominate the market because, with enough venture capital, it can be unprofitable for years. These practices became much worse after 2008 and the pandemic because, with loose monetary policies, investors are swimming in so much liquidity – essentially a lot of public money mind you – they hardly know what to do with it.
So the guy who brought us the wonders of Brexit and “advised” Boris Johnson is the guy we should be listening to?!?!? The guy who expected the public to believe that he drove 200 miles to check his eyesight?
He’s a chancer whose 15 minutes were up some time ago.
Silicone Valley Big Tech companies are the most enthusiastic, committed Woke DEI players of all!