How Technology Will Be Impacted by a Trump Presidency

July 15, 2016 – In an open letter signed by 145 of the leading individuals in technology companies and related institutions in the United States, the authors have pilloried Donald Trump for his “anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline.” For them Mr. Trump represents a disaster in waiting. They see him as a threat to the open exchange of ideas and the free movement of people. They chide him for his policy statements about building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. They see him as a threat to an open Internet, a threat to dealing with climate change and a person of poor judgment.

In their letter they state “America’s diversity is our strength. Great ideas come from all parts of society, and we should champion that broad-based creative potential.” They note that 40% of Fortune 500 companies owe their foundation to an immigrant or his or her immediate descendants.  They see a Donald Trump presidency as one that would be openly hostile to immigration, one that would threaten or do mass deportations of American residents, as a place where profiling would become a standard procedure.

They describe the role they believe government should play in fostering a technical economy, one where investments are made in infrastructure, education and scientific research. In their condemnation they write “Donald Trump articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements. His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation.”

They call for a president who believes in “freedom of expression, openness to newcomers, equality of opportunity, public investment in research and infrastructure, and respect for the rule of law.”

So is all this true?

Here are some quotes from Donald Trump that make you pause and wonder about the candidate’s understanding of technology.

When asked about closing the Internet because of ISIS’ use of it as a recruitment tool, Trump stated:

“ISIS is recruiting through the Internet. ISIS is using the Internet better than we are using the Internet, and it was our idea. I want to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they’re doing. You talk freedom of speech. I don’t want them using our Internet to take our young, impressionable youth. We should be using our most brilliant minds to figure a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet. And then we should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS. And we can do that if we use our good people.”

When further questioned about closing parts of the Internet he stated:

“I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody. I don’t want to let people that want to kill us use our Internet.”

From his Trump: Make America Great Again, his position on immigration states “We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own.” From this opening falsehood he proceeds to justify “a wall across the southern border” and changing the rules around work visa programs ostensibly to ensure the domestic pool of unemployed get hired first even if they are unqualified to do high tech jobs.

What seems glaringly missing from the Trump policy site is nary a word about technology or innovation. It’s as if these significant drivers of America’s leadership in the world have been completely overlooked while he focuses on trade wars with China and Mexican “rapists and criminals.” What’s even more frightening is that the party that Trump represents is largely adopting his positions on these subjects. In the last week the Republicans announced that coal is “clean” energy, a delusional position that counters basic science. Trump has vowed to dismantle the COP21 climate change agreement, to undo the existing EPA efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and to institute America first go for broke energy development in coal, oil and natural gas. Trump’s 100-day action plan is to “rescind…the climate action plan” and to achieve “American energy dominance” with King Coal leading the way. In his response to the alarm raised by climatologists and the scientific community, Trump stated “political activists with extreme agendas will no longer write the rules.”

So I get where these technology sector leaders are coming from in their open letter. One of them is Peter Diamandis whose musings on the future provides this blog site with interesting content from time to time. Among the other noteworthy are Irwin and Paul Jacobs, of Qualcomm, the telecommunications giant, Shishir Mehrotra from YouTube, Dustin Moskovitz  and Margaret Stewart from Facebook, Alexis Ohanian from Reddit, Pierre Omidayr from eBay, Barney Pell from the Singularity University, Kim Malone and Hunter Walk, both former directors at Google, Katie Stanton, former VP at Twitter, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Padmasree Warrior, former CTSO at Cisco, Barry Diller, of Expedia, Daniel Weitzner from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and numerous others including a who’s who of high-tech venture capitalists, university researchers and teachers. In Trump’s defense from within the technology sector comes Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir. He will be a speaker at the Republican National Convention.