WARNING: Elon Musk is crippling the future of the United States
And I am not sure he even understands the consequences of his own actions
Suppose the air conditioning in your car stopped working, and you brought the car into the shop, and the mechanic said, "I am afraid your car is broken, so I have started dismantling it".
US citizens, that, in a nutshell, is what Trump and Musk are doing to your country.
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I retired from the American University system at age 49 (after 26 years) so have no direct stake in this.
But am here to say that drastically cutting NIH & NSF funding and reducing grant “overhead” to universities to 15% are among the dumbest ideas I have ever seen.
America will never be the same. Science will take a huge hit; academic stars will leave; university reputations will crumble, and homegrown talent will be even harder to find.
Asia and Europe will profit.
Epic unforced errors.1
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One measure of how clueless the administration is comes from this exchange by Molly Jong-Fast and Elon Musk:
Musk honestly seems to have no clue.
Another measure of their cluelessness is that I don’t realize that red states will take a huge hit from this, if it goes through:
For those with the patience to dive deep, the eminent scientist Dick Aslin has a written a long thoughtful essay on Trump-Musk’s thoughtless decision, explaining in detail what indirect costs are and why this decision would be devastating to many universities. Harvard and Yale can take it, but most will be hurt badly.
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As I put it in a tweet, “Elon Musk’s single-minded obsession with cutting costs is going to cripple science and American universities, with horrific lasting consequences.”
Gary Marcus, PhD spent 7 years in American colleges and universities as a student, and 26 as a professor. He knows that the universities could be much much better than they are, and known that they are filled with problems and inefficiencies. But he also knows that the US will be lost without them.
Journalist Keith Olbermann noted correctly in a reply to the tweet version of this section that these cuts aren’t strictly speaking errors, in the sense that these decisions are what Trump intended. True enough – the cuts are by design — but they are unforced errors with respect to the nation.
Seriously Gary. Agree and have agreed with your take on deep learning and Gen AI and agents which have been spot on. But you need to get out of your derangement echo chamber with President Trump and look at the sheer amount of corruption that has been and is being exposed in the US government. The sheer, ethical implications of what the US government has been up to with our tax money is horrific. Need to stop slinging political mud and come around with constructive suggestion. Your voice carries weight, and it would be good if you drop your biases and look at this holistically.
Very few of us actually understand the full consequences of our own actions in the limited areas in which we operate. That someone, such as Musk, with so little introspection has apparently been given the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, is more than frightening, and the outcome is likely to be destructive, and beyond deadly, devastation in some areas.
This brings up the age old question: What then must we do?