Field Note: Techno-Conservatism

I’ve been thinking about a term: Techno-Republican. Or maybe Techno-Conservative. Did I just coin that? Who knows. Either way, both labels kind of reflect where my beliefs have been heading lately.

I’m pro-America, pro-defense, pro-chip manufacturing. No question. But I also have these slight isolationist instincts. Not the old-fashioned, paranoid kind, but rooted in a belief that with advanced technology like AGI, we should be capable of complete self-sufficiency. This sort of belief will tend to influence everything else.

I believe AGI should be nationalized. I think it would be extremely dangerous if every country developed their own AGI. That scenario doesn’t bring peace, but it brings either a new form of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.), or it reactivates the original M.A.D. logic but on an even more terrifying scale. There’s no in-between.

That said, I do believe AGI could lead to utopia. I’m not doom-pilled about it. It’s just that when it comes to AGI, no one, and I do mean no one, can truly predict what comes next. That’s what makes it both thrilling and terrifying. So in my mind, a Techno-Conservative would focus less on foreign policy and more on domestic sovereignty. Once AGI is on the table only in the U.S., the goal becomes securing the homeland, not reshaping the world.

Under this philosophy, geopolitics becomes less about intervention and more about resilience. It’s about keeping other countries from pressuring us to share our technology. And yeah, that would probably make Techno-Conservatives deeply unpopular on the global stage. In a way, we're already testing those waters. But that isolationism could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we focus inward, the more we’re pushed away by everyone else. Still, that might be the cost of technological survival.

Here’s where it gets trickier: I don’t think the U.S. government is going to be the one that builds AGI. A private company will. And the second one company achieves AGI, others are likely just a few steps behind. That’s the real challenge. How do you nationalize something like that in a country like ours, where innovation can’t just be shut down with a decree? You can’t just tell everyone to stop. That fantasy of containment or perfect nationalization starts to fall apart fast.

And China? Yeah. They’re already on their own AGI path. They may be behind now, but it’s only a matter of time. If the U.S. develops AGI, it’s almost guaranteed that China will too. That’s not a possibility, that’s inevitability. Which means every future president regardless of party will have to prepare for a world where China possesses AGI. That’s the beginning of a new global era.

That realization kind of negates a lot of the initial Techno-Conservative assumptions I started with. But I guess that’s the fun of yapping, ideas shift.

Actually… here’s one more thought.

What if the very idea that “China will get AGI” becomes a kind of paradox? What if our fear of them getting it pushes us to move faster? We panic, we fast-track development, we get AGI first, and then AGI helps us so thoroughly that we establish an unbreachable lead. We improve cybersecurity, clamp down on leaks, control digital borders, and create so much AGI-enabled internal strength that we essentially shut the door behind us.

We get there first, and we make it so no one else ever catches up. The prophecy breaks itself.

But, the realist in me says that no technology has ever been successfully gatekeeped. Not the SR-71, not GPS, not even the atom bomb.

Anyways, that’s where I’ll leave this one.