Finally, Donald Trump has found a technology he likes. On Friday, the former president — who regularly bashes big tech and only recently began texting— unveiled his “Quantum Leap” plan to improve American living standards. It calls for massive investment in vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, also known as flying cars. That could be the start of a larger shift in the political environment as presidential campaign season draws near. Washington’s love affair with Silicon Valley has soured in recent years, undone by concerns over online censorship, monopoly, privacy — and, more recently, the rise of crypto and AI. But presidential campaigns come with a built-in, pro-technology dynamic. You might call it “The Vision Thing.” Every four years, candidates offer American voters a chance to choose between competing visions for the country. Time and time again, politicians have found that when it comes to painting a positive vision of the future, it helps to include some sort of cutting-edge technology — whether it was Stephen Douglas and a transcontinental railroad, Franklin Roosevelt and rural electrification, or John F. Kennedy and a mission to the moon. (Though the Vision Thing dynamic is not always kind to existing technology companies: FDR, for example, clashed with private electricity providers over his vow to set up public utilities.) What’s more, America’s physical frontier has been closed for more than a century, but candidates like Kennedy continue to rediscover the rhetorical value of finding “new frontiers” to open. That activity usually goes hand-in-hand with embracing new technologies, like spaceflight. Coincidentally, Trump’s plan, as first reported by POLITICO’s Meridith McGraw, also includes a proposal to “reopen the frontier” by building 10 new “Freedom Cities” on federal land. Not that Trump’s rhetorical style has suddenly become Kennedy-esque. In his speech yesterday at CPAC, the former president’s plug for the “Quantum Leap” intermingled with standard Trump fare like digs at electric cars and a vow to “demolish woke tyranny.” Before running for president, Trump was a regular on the motivational speaking circuit, where the importance of visualizing success is often emphasized. In that regard, the choice of flying cars as a campaign issue has an obvious benefit: They’re easy to visualize. There’s also the fact that President Joe Biden has already staked his claim on electric cars, leaving Trump nowhere to go but up. Trump’s plan tacitly aligns him with a favorite Silicon Valley critique of American society: that it has lost its ability to produce truly mind-bending new technology. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” as Peter Thiel famously lamented a decade ago. Since then, visions of flying cars have crept closer to reality. Startups around the world are working on vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, with some impressive demo videos to show for it. Much like a stand-up comedian, Trump often inserts new bits into his stump speech and sees how they play with his audience. Whether the promise of flying cars becomes a campaign mainstay will come down, in part, to whether he can make it an applause line. And whether Americans actually get them in the near future is another matter. Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border began as a gimmick proposed by a campaign aide to play to the real estate mogul’s image as a “builder.” The wall was easy to visualize and caught on with rally attendees. It led to years of political fighting over the proposal, but little in the way of actual border wall. If Trump makes flying cars a campaign issue, it might be another president who actually sees the idea through. It was Douglas and his fellow travelers in the Young America movement who pushed for a transcontinental railroad, but Abraham Lincoln who saw to its completion. So, whether it's flying cars, asteroid mining, liquid hydrogen or cold fusion, whatever space-age tech wins the “Vision Thing” primary stands to gain ground in the years to come, no matter who ends up sitting in the Oval Office.
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![uh, gpt-3 can correctly identify vulnerable code and offer mitigation strategies 🤯[in this case i copy-pasted a function that wasn’t known to be vulnerable when GPT-3 was trained but has since been confirmed to be vulnerable to directory traversal exploits as of Sept ‘22]](https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/cd4cdf9/2147483647/resize/500x/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F8e%2F97%2Fb2d0949e4770bbb0825fa0e21546%2Fscreen-shot-2023-03-06-at-2-36-07-pm.png "Screen Shot 2023-03-06 at 2.36.07 PM.png")
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