Eight years ago, the November US election results were a shock to the small staff at the boutique tech publication I headed, Backchannel. The morning after, one of our editors posted on our Slack channel that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf and futile. However, on a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to address this feeling, directed towards my colleagues and readers. I argued that despite the enormity of the election, one thing remained unchanged – the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through. While politicians may come and go, the chip, the network, the mobile device, and all they entailed were changing humanity and redefining what it means to be human. Our job was to chronicle this epic transformation, regardless of who was in political power. The headline of my column was “The iPhone Is Bigger Than Donald Trump.”
This week, Trump was once again elected president despite numerous disqualifiers. It’s an unbelievable story, and the next few years will undoubtedly be the stuff of history. Maybe not in a good way. Maybe in a very bad way for a country where many expected to celebrate its continuing values on America’s 250th birthday. Yet, I stand by my 2016 statement. As Stewart Brand once said, “Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.” What is happening in technology and science remains the activity that will ultimately make the biggest impact on our species. Future generations will look back at this time and identify it as the period when microchips and neural net software changed everything. And who was that strongman with the funny hair who crashed the country that used to occupy real estate in the Western Hemisphere? I may no longer run a publication, but as a single voice in a much larger staff, I emphatically reprise my 2016 statement of purpose, with a slight tweak: Artificial intelligence is bigger than Donald Trump.
Of course, journalists must cover Trump’s second presidency vigorously and demand accountability. In the short term, what happens in our community and country will have a bigger influence on our daily lives than the latest version of Claude, ChatGPT, or even Apple Intelligence. However, in the long run, the advancements in technology and science will have a more significant impact on our species. As a tech journalist, it is my duty to continue to chronicle this epic transformation, even as we navigate through the challenges of the current political climate.
