| Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The Future in Five Questions. This week I interviewed Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), whose home state was designated a technology and innovation hub for quantum last year under the CHIPS and Science Act. Hickenlooper talked about growing the tech economy to encourage the creation of jobs that don’t require four-year degrees, his belief that Congress should tackle data privacy before AI, and why he thinks it wouldn’t be such a big deal if TikTok just went away. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? Skills training. Everyone assumes that in technology everyone’s going to be Ph.Ds. And yet, there are going to be high-paying, mission-critical areas of job creation in quantum, aerospace, artificial intelligence, you go down the list and a lot of jobs are going to need four-year degrees but a lot of them aren’t. We're still at a point in this country where 65 percent of our kids don’t have a four-year college degree six years out of high school, so we’re going to have to do skills training at a level we've never dreamed of. If you look at the bipartisan infrastructure law, CHIPS and Science, even the Inflation Reduction Act, there's a lot of skills training and investments there to make sure new technology jobs are kept in this country. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? TikTok. Everyone's saying we can't possibly ban it, what would happen, so many people use it. So many people use social media, and I think if TikTok goes away you'll find people automatically migrate to other platforms and look at the same type of short video format. I asked 40 or 50 young people over the past few weeks when I was back in Colorado about what would happen if TikTok went away. With one exception — there was one person who got really agitated and said “how dare the government do this” — everybody else said they'll go to various other platforms. I think it's overhyped that TikTok is a necessity for our young people, and I think allowing our major rival access to so much data about who we are is terrifying. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “The Coming Jobs War” by Jim Clifton, CEO and chairman of Gallup. He argues that a lack of job creation is one of the great challenges of this country and to the global economy. As we add more automation, and there's a globalization of technology, if we don't keep up the investment in education and skills training, the workforce is going to dramatically constrict and restrain job growth in this country. A point he made that was very powerful was that most people who start a small business — and this is Gallup, they’re polling people all the time — aren't doing it to try and get rich and make more and more money. Most people just don't like having a boss, and they want to control their own destiny. They want to control their own work schedule and create their own future. Job creation, our ability to incentivize entrepreneurship and make the workforce more accessible, is a huge part of what's going to make sure the United States continues to lead. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? The subcommittee I chair is on consumer protection, data security, and product safety. We're never going to get our arms around AI if we can't get data privacy done. The essential building block of generative AI is data, and making sure that data privacy is regulated and managed is essential to being out ahead of the potential damage that could come from AI. We need to have a comprehensive data privacy law, we already have 14 states that have done it. You don't want software companies and AI companies to have to worry about all these different sets of rules and regulations. We should have a base set of regulations that lays the groundwork and then allows the states to, if they want to, go further in one place or another. We want to set a big, strong baseline to allow everyone to choose the framework into which they can build their business. What surprised you most this year? [Oklahoma Sen.] James Lankford, a very conservative Republican, worked with [Connecticut Sen.] Chris Murphy, a pretty liberal Democrat, to create the most powerful border security bill in the history of the United States. No investment like this was ever going to be made. We had 70 votes counted in the Senate to support it. And then because a presidential candidate, in this case a former president, came out and said “This a bad idea, I don't want to lose this as a campaign idea,” suddenly we couldn't get 51 votes to pass it in the Senate. We were told that it wouldn’t be brought to the floor of the House. This is a place where a bipartisan group of senators came together to pass something that might not have solved everything, but would have dramatically changed what we do at the border, about two and a half months ago, and all of a sudden they killed it just for political benefit. I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I know how partisan everything is, but to have gone through that work, James Lankford talked to Republicans up and down and was going to get this to pass with a large majority. With the impeachment articles against [U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security] Mayorkas in the Senate, these are problems that could have been solved. It truly makes this impeachment look like a media stunt.
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