by Jeff Childers - C & C News

Yesterday, President Trump captured the science news cycle by signing the latest in his escalating series of AI-related executive orders. This one is a beast. Without exaggeration, it is potentially world-changing (or potentially world-ending, depending on your glass-half-empty point of view). The new order was simply titled, “Launching the Genesis Mission.”

The problem this order aims to solve is that, while we’ve been spending trillions on science research, taxpayers are not really getting a decent return on investment. “Despite research budgets soaring since the 1990s,” the Genesis Fact Sheet explained, “scientific progress has stalled— new drug approvals have declined, and more researchers are needed to achieve the same outputs.”

The “stall” seems to refer to a bizarre and inexplicable phenomenon we’ve discussed before, the Great Freeze in arts, science, music, fashion, and culture that began icing over in the late 1990’s. Everything just stopped. Till then, every decade saw regular progress. After 1990, advancements slowed to glacial speeds.

But set that incomprehensible Great Freeze conundrum aside. One way to look at this new Executive Order is that Trump is trying to shatter the ice dome.

President Trump’s new order was both revolutionary and breathtaking. He’s given the U.S. government two monumental directives under the umbrella of “the Genesis Mission”:

Create an AI supersystem trained on all federal scientific data, studies, and information. Include the entire database libraries of seventeen national labs including NASA, NIH, CDC, FDA, DOE (i.e. nuclear), and so on.
Maintain a running list of the Top 20 “pressing national challenges” that the AI will be aimed at solving. The DOE simultaneously launched a glossy website offering examples of these“challenges,” including fusion energy, new types of materials, quantum computing, and life-saving medicines.

While many specific details aren’t yet available, the project will also extend to private American companies under licensing deals. For example, the website lists current partners such as Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

🔥 If it works, the Genesis Mission could conceivably challenge every entrenched industry in the country. That’s why nobody could have done this but Trump. He’s like a one-man presidential demolition team, crashing through all the siloed, risk-averse, bureaucratic fiefdoms of the biggest and most powerful administrative agencies, regulators, and blue-chip companies in the country. “Consensus managers” don’t create space for revolutionary change; it takes a “wrecking ball” leader to tear down the walls first.

“Genesis Missions will transform how science is done in America,” the DOE’s video promised. The Secretary of Energy, who was tasked with leading the mission, compared it to the Manhattan project and the Apollo missions. “The project is about applying AI to science, engineering, and national security. What we’ve seen so far is AI applied to language,” Secretary Chris Wright explained.

The mission’s stated goal is “to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade” by augmenting —not replacing— human scientists.

Secretary Wright offered an example: solving the problem of our creaky, antiquated, susceptible energy grid. “It will be transformative in the coming years,” Wright said. “We’re going to have a better, more affordable energy grid in five years.”

It is much more than AI hype this time. Get a load of this:

🔥 Trump’s Executive Order quietly called for a closed-loop, “AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing” platform. In other words, they are planning for ‘AI agents’ to manage fully automated facilities to autonomously design experiments, test hypotheses, and automate entire research workflows— like operating instruments, collecting samples, analyzing data, and refining scientific methods. By itself.

Here is the exact language from Section 3(e) of the order:

“Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.”

I know. Hello, Skynet! Welcome, my friends, to the machine.

Pursuant to the order, the DOE must review and inventory all federal research facilities capable of hosting robotic laboratories and AI-directed workflows, and develop technical and operational standards for fully automated research environments controlled by AI.

What can we say about all this? The words “historic,” “revolutionary,” and even “Moon shot” seem quaint, clichéd, and inadequate to describe this kind of technological inflection point. Genesis doesn’t merely describe a single, focused scientific goal like Apollo or Manhattan, but rather the creation of a self-perpetuating, self-improving engine for sleepless progress across all scientific domains at once.

Assuming it works, the AI will be able to conduct its own experiments, like mixing different metals together to see if it makes a superconductor. The results are returned immediately, and the AI can tweak the formula and move on to the next combination. The AI’s automated experiments can run all day and night, never take smoke breaks, and won’t need months of woke-worded grant writing and murky approvals.

🔥 If successful, the Genesis inflection point could soar far beyond “just” technology. It could reshape economies, geopolitics, education, culture, arts, and even the essential meanings of human creativity, responsibility, and discovery. It is potentially the ultimate pivot from “human-driven advancement” to “machine-accelerated civilization.”

That may sound like typical tech hyperbole. And the results might fall short of these wild expectations. But they also might not. For the first time in human history, those wild expectations lie within sighting range.

In that sense, the Genesis announcement is less about dry technical breakthroughs and more of a singularity. If you hate change— well, I don’t quite know what to tell you. There’s no previous scale of change to even compare against what looks likely to soon arrive.

No other country has ever undertaken an initiative of this scale, scope, and imagination. No other country on Earth could likely pull it off. Let us count the ways.

🔥 First of all, the U.S. operates the world’s most advanced network of national laboratories (like the DOE labs), supercomputing centers, and scientific data repositories— resources built over generations requiring vast public investment.

America’s tech ecosystem —spanning leading tech companies (all currently onshoring), its top universities, and our startup culture— is unrivaled in its interconnections and innovation capacity. Who else can marshal public and private ingenuity on this level?

We might be the only country capable of integrating AI at this kind of massive, society-shaping scale.

It won’t be China. In some ways, China has already surpassed the US in automation and AI. But China’s culture operates under heavy state censorship that violently constrains unconventional and unapproved thought. Genesis’s unlimited scope poses an unparalleled threat; it could potentially upset every existing entrenched interest.

China’s authoritarian central planners would need to slowly approve every single disruptive development, one by one, thereby strangling any Genesis-like project in the crib.

They wouldn’t even try. The sheer possibility of unapproved, uncontrollable change would make such a project an existential risk for China’s central planners. It would be scrapped long before it could proceed on the scale envisioned by the President. This structural inflexibility is communism’s greatest weakness. Trump is leaning into it, intentionally or not.

Finally, the U.S. leads in both classical and quantum high-performance computing, and it is one of the few countries capable of integrating AI at a massive, society-shaping scale. The Genesis Mission is therefore a uniquely American endeavor, thanks to our existing infrastructure, scale, boldness of mandate, cultural advantages, and deep catalog of agency resources. Other nations —Who? Russia? UK? France? Canada?— might attempt similar programs, but in terms of “pulling it off” at this scale, the U.S. is, for now, peerless.

Genesis teases the potential for untapped technological, economic, and strategic leadership, potentially leapfrogging China and reinforcing the U.S.’s primacy at the outer frontiers of advancement. Trump is racing past everyone else— using stuff that is already laying around in the nation’s agencies’ sheds.

Once again, he recognized a latent, profitable asset where everyone else saw bureaucratic chaos.

Oh— one more thing. You must read between the order’s lines a little, but it seems clear from the Genesis EO that the U.S. government will retain a stake in any new products or technologies developed using its supercomputing cluster. More nontax income. Income that could pay off the debt and obsolete the income tax, say.

👽 I cannot conclude this topic without at least a nod to conspiracy theories and dystopian anxieties. First of all, if you’re an alien enthusiast: The Genesis Mission would be a nifty way to slipstream highly advanced tech —like tech developed from crashed alien spacecraft, say— into the mainstream without anyone noticing. Look what the AI’s inscrutable black box cooked up today: Antigravity!

With a platform this broad, deep, and opaque, almost anything could be folded into the narrative of legitimate, AI-generated discoveries— even the fantastic. After all, AI is a black box. They still don’t even understand how AI works in the first place, not really. It’s crazy, but it’s true.

Finally, it’s worth wondering whether the Genesis Mission could set us on the path to a Skynet-style apocalypse? Absolutely— and it requires no imagination whatsoever. In a reality-blurring twist worthy of Simpsons prophecy, let’s recall that in the Terminator saga, “Genisys” was the all-seeing, all-connecting global OS that morphed into the murderous Skynet. Am I connecting dots again? Not directly. But come on— the parallels are uncanny.

I’m just saying. It’s more than a little weird.

Still, I’m choosing optimism. Ever since AI unexpectedly burst out of Google’s language lab —assuming you buy the official origin story— it was always inevitable that our superlative-chasing President would set his sights on building the biggest, boldest, most magnificent AI platform the world has ever seen. No conspiracy theory required.

Plus, for three centuries, every leap in science has been greeted with existential dread— and yet, each time, humanity has somehow survived in one piece. And, of course, Genesis could ultimately amount to much less than it seems to promise, for any number of reasons. For one thing, the bureaucracy and its corporate allies will probably try to murder it, or regulate it into oblivion, and might succeed.

For now, I’ll keep my eye on the half-full part of the glass. The stakes are astronomical: maybe, just maybe, the Genesis Mission will finally shatter the Great Freeze and usher in a truly Great Thaw— leading to an even truer Golden Era.

Link to original article - https://substack.com/home/post/p-180034174

THE GENESIS SINGULARITY - Executive Order - An Explanation Of Incredible Scientific Potential

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