President Donald Trump announced the Genesis Mission this week, and some are calling it the 21st century moonshot – the most ambitious undertaking in decades, if not of all time. The plan is to build an integrated AI platform that will “harness Federal scientific datasets to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”
The executive order that establishes the mission explains that that will states that it will benefit scientific discovery, national security, energy dominance, and workforce productivity, while also multiplying the return on taxpayer investment into the research and development. According to Forbes, this is not another government program but, instead, a bold strategic move that will combine science, data, and computing as components to enhance national strength.
Col. Robert Maginnis is an expert on national security and foreign affairs as well as the author of AI for Mankind's Future. He says that it has grave implications for national security as well as for U.S. technological leadership across the world.
“The intent is to really respond to what the Chinese are doing with their civil-military fusion projects on all technologies, especially artificial intelligence,” states Maginnis.
The project will organize the efforts of American tech companies and government research facilities, and it has implications for almost every area of life.
“It's going to help us to write, it's going to help our medical community, and it's going to help retail. We're going to have the Alexis, but the Alexis is going to keep getting smarter,” explains Maginnis.
Maginnis says that it aims to harness the rapidly advancing technology that is predicted to change our very way of life.
“I do believe that we will eventually get to something like artificial general intelligence, which is smarter than we are, and we can harness it,” states Maginnis.
However, Maginnis says that the initial plan does not have any explicit provisions for moral considerations or ethical fences, although there are voices in the administration that are advocating for that.
“We're going to make a lot of mistakes, and I'm afraid this administration may be a little too enthusiastic. I like the idea of doing some of what is in there, but it's going to take a while,” concludes Maginnis.
