Last year, Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE fired or forced out a critical mass of government scientists, even as they gutted funding to research programs at the country’s universities. You’d think that this would be a barrier to making scientific breakthroughs in America, but not according to Trump. He’s promised that America will produce annual “moonshot”-scale breakthroughs, without scientists, by asking a chatbot to shit out paradigm-shattering scientific leaps on demand…
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/trump-spent-2025-attacking-…
The problem is that while AIs can shit out sentences that seem to qualify as scientific breakthroughs, they can’t actually do science. Take Google’s claim that its Deepmind product had advanced material science by 800 years, “discovering 2.2 million structures.” It turns out that these “discoveries” are useless – in that they constitute trivial variations on known materials, and/or have no uses, and/or can only exist at absolute zero:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643
For Trump, the fantasy of science without scientists is more important than whether any science happens.
America needs science, but for Trump – a billionaire solipsist – America is a country populated by people who mostly don’t really exist.
That’s true of tech bosses, too. After all, they were the original suckers for Effective Altruism and the fantasy of a world without people. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg announced that the average person has three friends, but wants 15 friends, and that he would solve this with chatbots?
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