Democracies have also faced new challenges – disinformation, surveillance, cyber intrusions – from technologies that we thought would once almost inevitably favor democratic values. We did not fully grasp that those advantages must be prized, preserved, and renewed. We seemed to take for granted that our technological advantages were somehow permanent and invincible. But China’s trajectory also was supported by an under-appreciation in the West and in the United States of the importance–-and the fragility–of our technological preeminence as well as by a reflexive and bipartisan allergy for many years, indeed for decades, of industrial policy of almost any stripe. In the course of events, Beijing leveraged theft of IP and rule-shattering subsidies to advance its work. Meanwhile, the dramatic growth of China’s biotechnology sector shows Beijing’s interest in the convergence of advanced biotech and AI, of the revolutionary potential of programmable biology, and the foresight that this revolution will be driven by amassing genomic data. The once dominant North American telecom companies withered, and Huawei’s growth and global reach surged. America’s share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity shrank by two-thirds, and we lost the ability to manufacture chips at the leading edge. And our advantages in the digital base layer – the hard infrastructure of chips and telecoms equipment – has also eroded. None of this operates seamlessly, but the AI applications that support these systems are advancing rapidly. Beijing’s mass video surveillance network – pointedly called “Skynet” – and other programs are combining hundreds of millions of cameras with high performance computing, facial and gait recognition technologies, and pilot social credit systems all in an attempt to implement algorithmic social control at a national scale.

Internet shutdowns have become a routine tool to crush dissent as we just saw this past Sunday in Cuba. In each year of the last decade, global internet freedom has declined. Government control of the internet proliferated.

So in the second wave, the authoritarians struck back. And in 2000 SMIC, China’s leading semiconductor firm, was founded. In 1999, the Beijing Genomics Institute, now known as BGI, was formed. In the mid-90s Huawei laid the groundwork for becoming a global player. Its Golden Shield Project gave rise to a sophisticated domestic censorship apparatus and an internet blocked from the rest of world by the Great Firewall.Īnd that project was not just about the internet and software. Recognizing-indeed, fearing-that the digital revolution would be a democratizing force or could be a democratizing force, China began an ambitious project to make the internet work for autocracy. At the end of the 90s, the two largest and most innovative telecom equipment manufacturers were America’s Lucent and Canada’s Nortel.īut we failed to see that the seeds of an authoritarian resurgence had already been planted. In 1990, we enjoyed more than 35 percent of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity. We also took for granted the hard infrastructure advantages that underpinned America’s technological dominance. How could it not also be a global democratizing force? The internet emerged and rapidly became the ultimate connector. And to be fair, it was a moment when the tide of history was rolling in that direction: the Berlin Wall fell-aided by the radio and other forms of communication. When new technologies were hailed as liberalizing by their very nature. I don’t need to tell this audience about the optimism in the early internet era. And the question now is whether we can engineer a third wave of the digital revolution-a turn in which we forge a democratic technological ecosystem characterized by resilience, integrity, and openness with trust and security, that reinforces our democratic values and our democratic institutions. The second wave saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would favor democracy and human rights. And I’d like to start by putting that choice in historical context. And President Biden believes deeply, fundamentally, that making technology deliver is critical to making sure that democracy delivers – making sure that technology delivers – for democratic value and for inclusive prosperity.Īnd so as I see it, the choice today is whether we can muster the will, the energy, and the resources to alter the course of the digital revolution. In his address to the Joint Session of Congress in April, President Biden argued that the question of our time is whether democracy rather than autocracy is best poised to deliver for its citizens and to meet the major challenges of our time.

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