America’s AI Action Plan: Strength Through FAFO

First published on 7/26/25 on The Illusion of More

With an introduction that combines the quasi-erudition of Big Tech utopianism and just enough dipshit to sound like Donald Trump, the White House unveiled an action plan on artificial intelligence that is part magical thinking and part policy statement. It all adds up to one bottom line: “Let Big Tech do what it wants, and things will be great.”

In fairness, letting Big Tech do what it wants has a solid bipartisan tradition in U.S. policy, but the naivete of the late 1990s is ancient history. The public and Members of Congress are now well versed in the many negative consequences of laissez faire policy that allowed Web 2.0 to run amok liability free, and yet, despite hearing after hearing with Senators proclaiming outrage at the tech giants, we are poised to approach the development of artificial intelligence with the same doe eyed, babes-in-the-woods innocence of people who cannot learn from experience.

Regarding most of the action plan’s content, the language itself describing each initiative—from science and medicine to national defense—is innocuous and irrelevant. Because no matter what is proclaimed as a goal, the question of AI development that can benefit the American people comes down to guardrails and oversight—and usually some combination of the two. Unfortunately, we have neither.

The tech companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they possess no ethics that would prioritize public interest over profit; the Trump administration has no credibility about anything; and Congress has largely been reduced to performance art, promising for the last eight years that it will finally “rein in tech.” Thus, the AI action plan, like so many plans of the current administration, boils down to fuck around and find out (FAFO).

Unlike major transformative undertakings of the past—the action plan cites the space race—no technology has had the potential to crawl into every aspect of social, economic, and political life as AI. Data runs the world, which means those who control the data run the world. Hence, the promise of what AI could do for society rests entirely on the guardrails and oversight which the industry rejects out of hand and the Trump administration believes are unnecessary.

As one obvious example, a whole section of the plan discusses “empowering American workers,” which is boilerplate for any administration except that most predictions about AI include job loss at unprecedented scale. To navigate this fresh terrain—either to mitigate job loss or address the consequences of job loss at scale—requires leadership that is intelligent and gives a damn about people. But this administration is neither intelligent nor cares about anyone, including the people who voted for them.

Consider one example from a friend who is sanguine about AI’s potential, and who recently mentioned the likelihood that an AI will soon be much better at reading a medical scan or X-ray than a human radiologist. That prediction, and the penumbra of medical advancements it implies, is entirely reasonable but also invites a cascade of ethical considerations that the party of Trump would sweep into the dustbin called “over regulation.”

So, sure, in theory we could be the beneficiaries of faster, more accurate, and cheaper diagnostics with the potential to alleviate scenes like the bottleneck seen every day in my local ER. But ordinary Americans will not truly benefit from these and other promised advancements without public oversight, and I imagine the party that wants to kick millions of Americans off health insurance rolls and scale back essential services doesn’t give a flying fuck.

As the mantra about Web 2.0 preaches, “If the service is free, then you’re the product.” That was and remains a dangerous consequence of social media platforms. But what happens when the same principle applies to access to medical or other critical services wholly controlled by one or two AI companies—say Meta or Amazon?—run by leaders with zero morals? Maybe the out-of-pocket price comes down initially and revitalizes the utopian “age of abundance” rhetoric from tech’s cheerleaders, but the real implication of having a handful of companies providing essential services is technological feudalism. And that prospect undermines the animating imperative of the AI action plan—i.e. to “beat China” in this new cold war.

But at present, we’re just too stupid to beat China at this game because we’ve reached a crisis state when we have no fucking idea who we are as a nation anymore. One section of dipshittery in the action plan states that AI will “protect speech and American values” and that these ends will be achieved, in part, by “eliminat[ing] references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and climate change.” Right. Fuck the best and brightest for the sake of the vested whitest. Because that’s how we won the space race, right? Without mathematicians Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson.

Meanwhile, the White House built on misinformation, sedition, hate, crime, grift, ignorance, and authoritarian tactics has a plan to “protect American values” by behaving exactly like China and other anti-democratic societies. I’d call that burning down the village to save it, but especially with AI, it’s actually erecting a Potemkin Village and calling it America. Web 2.0 has been a multipronged disaster because congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle naively decided to let the experiment run for years until finally expressing regret circa 2017. Now, we are poised to double down on the errors of the 1990s and FAFO with a tech fraught with uncertainties for the American people. Beat China? We’re not smart enough to meet the moment.

Photo by Yacobchuck