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

by Alexander C. Karp

“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.

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.

Our geopolitical adversaries are ruled by individuals who are often closer to founders, in the sense Silicon Valley uses the term, than traditional politicians. Their fates and personal fortunes are so deeply intertwined with those of the nations whose authoritarian regimes they oversee that they behave as owners, in that they have a direct stake in the future of their countries. And as a result, they can be far more alert and sensitive to the needs and demands of their public, even if they ruthlessly and viciously ignore them. In business and in politics, we are all, always, negotiating against the threat of revolt.

The ability to develop the tools required to deploy force against an opponent, combined with a credible threat to use such force, is often the foundation of any effective negotiation with an adversary.

“To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,”

“The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.”

“War is always a bargaining process.”

While other countries press forward, many Silicon Valley engineers remain opposed to working on software projects that may have offensive military applications, including machine learning systems that make possible the more systematic targeting and elimination of enemies on the battlefield. These engineers will, without hesitation, dedicate their working lives to building algorithms that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms. But they will not build software for the U.S. Marines.

“Building this technology to assist the U.S. government in military surveillance—and potentially lethal outcomes—is not acceptable,” Google employees wrote in a letter, which received more than three thousand signatures,

We have seen firsthand the reluctance of young engineers to build the digital equivalent of weapons systems. For some of them, the order of society and the relative safety and comfort in which they live are the inevitable consequence of the justice of the American project, not the result of a concerted and intricate effort to defend a nation and its interests. Such safety and comfort were not fought for or won. For many, the security that we enjoy is a background fact or feature of existence so foundational that it merits no explanation. These engineers inhabit a world without trade-offs, ideological or economic.

The wunderkinder of Silicon Valley—their fortunes, business empires, and, more fundamentally, entire sense of self—exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible. They charge themselves with constructing vast technical empires but decline to offer support to the state whose protections—not to mention educational institutions and capital markets—have provided the necessary conditions for their ascent. They would do well to understand that debt, even if it remains unpaid.

“The only thing that will ever prevent nations from beginning war is terror,”

Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations—billions of people and their children and now grandchildren—have never known a world war.

“decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”

the United States “cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our own legions.”

The retreat of a muscular and assertive Germany undoubtedly contributed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Vladimir Putin calculated correctly that he would not pay a significant price for it. After decades of self-flagellation, Germany’s military had retreated into something of a caricature of an actual armed force.

Article 9 of the nation’s constitution states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” and, as a result, “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” The provision, which is still technically the law of the land today, in effect requires that other nations, including the United States, defend the country if it were ever attacked. The mistake was not to dismantle Japan’s imperial army and enact legal safeguards to prevent its resurrection in the immediate aftermath of the war. It was to maintain the same policy for three-quarters of a century, through the remaking of world order, including the rise of an assertive and capable China as well as a newly ambitious Russia.

Software is now at the helm, with hardware—the drones on the battlefields of Europe and elsewhere—increasingly serving as the means by which the recommendations of AI are implemented in the world.

The U.S. Department of Defense requested a total of $1.8 billion to fund artificial intelligence capabilities in 2024, representing only 0.2 percent—a fifth of 1 percent—of the country’s total proposed national defense budget of $886 billion.

weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.

The challenge is that the ascendant engineering elite in Silicon Valley that is most capable of building the artificial intelligence systems that will be the deterrent of this century is also most ambivalent about working for the U.S. military. An entire generation of software engineers, capable of building the next generation of AI weaponry, has turned its back on the nation-state, disinterested in the messiness and moral complexity of geopolitics. While pockets of support for defense work have emerged in recent years, the vast majority of money and talent continues to stream toward the consumer.

have resulted in an unquestioned yet massive redirection of resources, both intellectual and financial, to sating the often capricious needs of capitalism’s consumer culture.

The threat of such protest and outrage from the crowd is that it shapes and influences the instincts of leaders and investors across the technology industry, many of whom have been trained to systematically avoid any hint of controversy or disapproval.

In 2022, YouTube made $959 million from advertising that was targeted at 31.4 million children under the age of twelve. Instagram made $801 million in a year from that same age-group. We must rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital. Let us not go gentle into that good night.

As a nation, we should move to build, for example, a technological peace corps—an institution through which curious and talented engineering minds whose efforts might otherwise be co-opted to further refine online advertising algorithms could instead be directed to addressing glaring innovation gaps across education, medicine, national defense, and basic science in the United States and abroad.

“To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom,” he later wrote. His beliefs had a cost, and their defense required putting the credibility of his organization, and himself, at risk.

The testimony exposed a fundamental challenge that we, in the United States and the West, face. A broad swath of leaders, from academic administrators and politicians to executives in Silicon Valley, have for years often been punished mercilessly for publicly mustering anything approaching an authentic belief. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

“tend to equate public greatness with private goodness.”

The Silicon Valley establishment has grown so suspicious and fearful of an entire category of thought, including contemplations on culture or national identity, that anything approaching a worldview is seen as a liability.

The problem is that those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world. “If you do not feel it, you will not get it by hunting for it,” Goethe reminds us in Faust. “You will never touch the hearts of others, if it does not emerge from your own.”

“If I give my name, I lose my future,” he said. But is a belief that has no cost really a belief?

“Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”

Our educational institutions and broader culture have enabled a new class of leaders who are not merely neutral, or agnostic, but whose capacity for forming their own authentic beliefs about the world has been severely diminished.

And that absence leaves them vulnerable to becoming instruments for the plans and designs of others. An entire generation is at risk of being deprived of the opportunity to think critically about the world or its place in it. It is this productization of the American mind, in addition to its closing, that we must guard against. A significant subset of Silicon Valley today undoubtedly scorns the masses for their attachment to guns and religion, but that subset clings to something else—a thin and meager secular ideology that masquerades as thought.

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents finally die.” The miracle of the West is its unrelenting faith in science. That faith, however, has perhaps crowded out something equally important, the encouragement of intellectual courage, which sometimes requires the fostering of belief or conviction in the absence of evidence.

The problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.

“If all beliefs are equally true or historically contingent, if the belief in reason is simply an ethnocentric Western prejudice, then there is no superior moral position from which to judge even the most abhorrent practices—as well as, of course, no epistemological basis for postmodernism itself.”

Was America nothing more than a vehicle through which a newly globalized and educated elite could enrich itself?

The problem that we are describing is not a principled commitment to pacifism or nonviolence. It is a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything. The company, at its core, builds elaborate and extraordinarily lucrative mechanisms to monetize the placement of advertising for consumer goods and services that accompany search results. The service is vital and has remade the world. But the business, and a significant subset of its employees, stop short of engaging with more essential questions of national purpose and identity—with an affirmative vision of what we want to and should be building as part of a national project, not simply an articulation of the lines that one will not cross. They remain content to monetize our search histories even as they decline to defend our collective security.

In her book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato, an economics professor at University College London, calls out this collective amnesia in the Valley, noting that the U.S. military’s role has “been forgotten” by this era’s software titans, who have rewritten history in order to place themselves at its center and exclude and diminish the role of government in fostering and sustaining innovation. And in the absence of any larger project for which to fight, many simply turned elsewhere, not out of some moral failing, but because of the transformation of our most hallowed educational institutions into administrative caretakers, not vessels of culture.

The market has spoken, we tell ourselves, essentially abdicating responsibility for this massive shift in the ambitions and direction of a generation of capable and well-meaning minds. Some graduates, of course, are convinced that they are involved in a broader project. But the mere association of oneself with an ideology or political movement—and resulting feeling of adjacency to engagement and proximity to action—too often masquerade as actual belief or thought. Results need to matter. As Henry Kissinger reminded us, nations “should be judged on what they did, not on their domestic ideology.”[*2] The systematic expression and investigation of one’s own beliefs—the essential purpose of genuine education—remain our best defense against the mind becoming a product or vehicle for the ambitions of another.

The broader risk for any country is that elite power structures harden and calcify.

We must again look inward, not to our political leaders, many of whom have been complicit in our present descent, but to us, the public itself, for failing to rise up, for failing to resist the hollowing out of our American mind.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

that the construction of a unified canon of texts and narratives, if not mythologies, gave students “a sense of common citizenship and participation in a community of reason, a belief in careers open to talent, and a faith in a truth susceptible to enlargement and improvement generation after generation.”

“at a time when Wall Street money was cascading down on barely postpubescent entrepreneurs,”

It was squarely focused on the consumer, and the business proposition was anything but ornate—sell more of the same thing through a different channel. Our critique here is not that the pursuit of consumer markets is misplaced but rather that such a single-minded focus on the consumer has come at the expense of other broader and more significant endeavors.

“I just feel like I’m designed to be slightly dissatisfied with everything,” he says, wistfully. “I satisfy one desire, and it just agitates another.” Celine, played by Delpy, responds, winning the exchange: “But I feel really alive when I want something…. Wanting, whether it’s intimacy with another person or a new pair of shoes, is kind of beautiful. I like that we have those ever-renewing desires.”

Everyone could be a founder, because everyone encountered things that needed fixing and better ways to navigate their daily lives. This democratization of the potential for producing novel ideas in business, to challenge incumbents, has been one of the most enduring effects of the rise of the consumer internet, its websites, and the avalanche of apps.

“Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?” His interest was in disentangling the structural causes of the West’s failure to fulfill the promise of its own mythology of unrelenting scientific and technological progress.