Investing in America's AI Future

America has never waited for the future to arrive. We make it. We take ideas from a garage workshop, like the Palo Alto garage where Bill Hewlett and David Packard began building their first product in 1938,¹ and turn them into companies that change the world. Our edge isn't the size of our population. China and India each have more than four times our people.^{2, 3} Our edge is that one American with the right tools can outproduce, outthink, and outbuild anyone on Earth. The average American worker already produces more than three times as much as the average worker in China, and more than six times as much as one in India.⁴

Automation multiplies that edge. At UCHealth's Virtual Health Center in Colorado, wearable monitors report a patient's vital signs continuously instead of every four hours, and one nurse can review them for 50 to 75 patients a shift. She catches trouble sooner, and UCHealth reports fewer deaths from sepsis.⁵ When a machinist in Ohio, the state with more CNC machine operators than any other,⁶ programs a bank of computer-controlled machines instead of tending just one,⁷ he keeps American-made parts competitive. When a small business owner in Texas uses software that keeps her books as she goes, she cuts into the biggest piece of the roughly 24 hours a year, three full workdays, that the IRS estimates business filers spend on their federal return: the recordkeeping.⁸ She gets back to serving customers and creating jobs.

This isn't new for us. From the start, America used invention to outrun size. In 1825, the Erie Canal opened a water highway for goods and grain: passengers could travel from Albany to Buffalo in five days, less than half the time by stagecoach, and shipping costs fell by 90 percent.⁹ In 1844, the first long-distance telegraph carried a message 38 miles, from the Capitol to Baltimore, faster than any horse could run.¹⁰ In 1869, the golden spike joined our coasts by rail, and by 1870 the trip from New York to San Francisco took about a week instead of months.¹¹ We didn't just add more people to move faster. We built better tools.

We kept going. Thomas Edison turned electric light from a lab trick into a business: in 1882 his Pearl Street Station began supplying some 85 customers in Manhattan,¹² and by 1930 nearly nine in ten American homes off the farm had electricity.¹³ Henry Ford's moving assembly line cut the time to build a Model T from twelve and a half hours to 93 minutes, and Ford paid five dollars for an eight-hour day, more than double the old daily wage,¹⁴ so ordinary workers could afford the very cars they built. By 1914, four months' pay bought one.¹⁵ The Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903, for 12 seconds and 120 feet,¹⁶ and proved flight was possible. Then pilots and engineers made it safe and useful. During World War II, our factories became, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, the "arsenal of democracy."¹⁷ Shipyards cut the time to build a Liberty ship from about 230 days to under 40,¹⁸ and American factories turned out nearly 300,000 military aircraft.¹⁹ That speed helped free the world.

In the years that followed, we built the Interstate Highway System, planned at 41,000 miles and built to national design standards,²⁰ and connected the country with smooth roads and clear signs. We reached the moon in 1969, guided by computers with four kilobytes of working memory,²¹ tiny by today's standards but powerful enough to land on another world. We linked computers into ARPANET in 1969, and by 1983 it had grown into the internet,²² so ideas could move at the speed of thought. We put chips in phones and satellites in the sky, and made GPS free for anyone on Earth to use,²³ so a farmer in Kansas can steer a tractor by it²⁴ and firefighters in California can have a map of a wildfire's edge within minutes.²⁵ Again and again, we grew by being faster and smarter, not larger.

Today's automation is the same American story. Take the Port of Long Beach. Its rebuilt, automated Long Beach Container Terminal can handle the equivalent of 3.3 million twenty-foot containers a year, enough on its own to rank as America's sixth-busiest port, and its operator spent almost $9 million on training before the terminal ever opened.²⁶ Some traditional longshore jobs went away, and newer, higher-skilled jobs were created to run the new equipment.^{26, 27} That's the American way: when the work changes, we train people for what comes next.

Or look at America's family farms. They make up 96 percent of the farms in this country and grow 83 percent of what we produce. Seven in ten large family crop farms, and half of midsize ones, now steer with GPS guidance. Half of the farmers who use it say it saves them time, and nearly two-thirds say it leaves them less worn out.²⁸ They're not corporate farms. They're family operations, competing because they have the right tools. That's American individualism in action.

The same thing is happening in hospitals. In a randomized trial of more than 100,000 women in Sweden, AI-supported mammography screening found 29 percent more cancers, without a significant rise in false alarms, and cut radiologists' reading workload by 44 percent.²⁹ In the United States, a study of nearly 580,000 screenings across four states found 21.6 percent more cancers with an AI-assisted workflow.³⁰ The computer doesn't replace the doctor. It gives the doctor superhuman eyes, and more time for the patients who need it.

This works in government too. In fiscal 2024, the U.S. Treasury used better fraud detection, including machine learning, to prevent and recover more than $4 billion in fraudulent and improper payments, up from $652.7 million the year before.³¹ An electronic tax refund usually arrives in under three weeks, while a paper check can take six weeks or more.³² That's how a free country serves its citizens: fast, fair, and fraud-free.

Some worry automation means fewer jobs. History gives us reason for confidence: most Americans today work in kinds of jobs that didn't exist in 1940.³³ When ATMs appeared, everyone thought bank tellers were finished. Instead, the number of tellers grew from 288,000 in 1972 to 531,000 in 1980, as ATMs stretched banking hours without eliminating jobs.³⁴ Later, ATMs made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened more of them, and teller jobs held up as the work shifted from counting cash to solving problems, giving advice, and building relationships.³⁵ The machines handle the counting. People handle the caring.

The lesson isn't that every machine creates jobs. It's that the gains come from tools that make people more capable, not just tools that replace them.³³ That's the automation America should build.

The real risk isn't in moving too fast. It's in moving too slow. While we debate, China builds. In 2024 it installed 295,000 factory robots, more than half of all those installed worldwide that year and over eight times as many as the United States.³⁶ By its government's count, it has more automated port terminals than any other country,³⁷ and its banks processed more than 210 billion mobile payments in a single year.³⁸ But here's what they can't copy: our individual initiative. In America, any person with a laptop can start automating their work tomorrow. You don't need permission from the government. You don't need approval from the party. You just need an idea and the will to try it.

Here's how we win. Every American business should ask three questions about every process: Can software do this? Can it do it better? Can it free up our people for more important work? Start small. Automate one report. Speed up one production line. Digitize one form. Measure the results: time saved, errors prevented, customers served faster. Then do it again.

Every school should teach automation like we teach writing. Not everyone needs to be a programmer, but everyone should know how to make computers work for them. A student who can automate a spreadsheet or build a simple app has power. They can start a business from their bedroom. They can make themselves valuable to any employer. They can turn ideas into income.

Every government office should run like a business. Set clear goals: process this permit in two hours, not two weeks. Answer this request in one day, not one month. Use the same tools Amazon uses to track packages, but track permits, licenses, and benefits. Citizens deserve to know where their application is, just like they know where their order is. That's not big government. That's smart government.

This is how a free people stay free. We don't wait for elites to solve our problems. We solve them ourselves, one person at a time, one business at a time, one breakthrough at a time. Give an American the right tool, and they'll find a way to use it better than anyone imagined. That's been true since the first pioneer cleared a field. It's true now as entrepreneurs build the next billion-dollar business from their garage.

A country that builds faster grows faster. But more than that, a country where every individual can multiply their impact is a country where freedom means something. We're not cogs in a machine. We're Americans with machines that work for us. From the assembly line to the app store, from the family farm to the hospital, we win not by adding more people, but by making each person more capable.

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