How Trump is killing his own plan to 'make America great again'

16 August

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on, as he and Apple CEO Tim Cook (not pictured) present Apple's announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House (REUTERS)

President Donald Trump announced an ambitious “AI Action Plan” to expand U.S. dominance in AI over China. However, his “anti-science” cost-cutting measures are squashing that effort, says Futurism writer Sharon Adarlo.

Mark Histed, National Institute of Health's head of neural computation and behavior, told reportersthat while the Trump administration’s cuts may not be apparent within the next two years, "the whole ecosystem that we have built around AI, that has been created by federal support," could soon be seriously undermined.

Histed and others argue that AI would not have gotten as far as it has without federally funded research in other technologies. Self-driving cars, for example, rely on computer vision technology, which the government had supported since the 1980s. Computer vision also factors into other important AI components like face and image recognition technology.

Additionally, protein modeling app AlphaFold, which uses AI to help discover new medications, relied on federal funding, as did Anthropic, which improves AI safety in the U.S. Department of Defense, according to the Guardian.

Trump’s cuts to other disciplines, including neuroscience, are adversely impacting the cross-fertilization of AI-related ideas between fields, reports Adarlo.

Another problem with Trump cutting science research is that valuable AI talent is abandoning academia for Silicon Valley because there are less funds for education and research at universities, according to Histed.

"We train lots and lots and lots of people in neuroscience and related fields that are going directly to these tech companies," Histed said. "There’s tons of overlap. All the people who are leading the technical side of the AI revolution have had contact with the academic world that trained them and is supported by U.S. federal funding."

Without education funding, AI companies could soon run out of the talent they need to keep up with China.

Read the full Futurism report at this link.

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