The core argument, up front: Silicon Valley is now spending at a pace that assumes artificial intelligence will justify hundreds of billions of dollars a year in infrastructure — before anyone has proven it will. That is not a criticism of AI’s potential. It is a description of a gap: the gap between capital deployed and value delivered, and a second, more dangerous gap between how fast these systems are being built and how slowly society is learning to govern them. Everything below is really an elaboration of that one tension. Washington Is Watching: The Regulatory Tightrope
As Silicon Valley accelerates, Washington faces a difficult balancing act. Move too slowly, and regulation falls years behind technological capability, leaving society exposed to deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and automated discrimination. Move too aggressively, and policymakers risk slowing American innovation while international competitors keep building.