Read the full transcript of Brendan McCord ‘s talk titled “A $1 Trillion AI revolution Is Coming – Are We Ready?” at ARC 2025 [Mar 2, 2025].
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
BRENDAN MCCORD: Every technology revolution presents a choice. Build for freedom, or watch as others build for control. In 1728, Benjamin Franklin took the technology of the printing press and built a network of libraries and independent publishers that put knowledge beyond the control of authority. Two centuries later, the same technology that spread enlightenment under Franklin’s hand would serve as a tool of mass manipulation under Josef Goebbels.
Franklin was one of history’s great philosopher builders. Franklin showed us that while we can never guarantee that technology will be used well, we can design technology to serve freedom rather than control. The lesson of these contrasts is clear. Technology raises human potential only when its shapers build systems that amplify human reason, that preserve human autonomy, and that resist central control.
Three Decisive Forces Shaping Our Future
Three forces make the next five years decisive. First, we face the largest infrastructure build in human history, over a trillion dollars in AI compute by the early 2030s. This transformation will reshape how humanity thinks and decides. It will eclipse the printing, industrial, and digital revolutions.
Second, we’re in a global race for AI control. Governing bodies from Brussels to California to my home state of Texas are rushing to impose top-down controls. Meanwhile, China demonstrates how AI fused with government creates a perfect police state in which dissent is anticipated and crushed.
Third, AI is becoming the invisible mediator of human life. Today, it shapes 20% of our waking hours. 20%. Tomorrow, it’ll be our civilization’s new operating system. The leaders we develop and the systems, companies, institutions that they build will determine whether this AI revolution elevates human potential or enables perfect control.
The Institutional Vacuum
As we know well here at ARC, institutions shape the character of those they educate.
But when it comes to AI, today’s institutions fall far short. Modern universities produce technicians and conforming ideologues. Tech companies breed optimizers who master the means without questioning the ends. Think tanks cultivate theorists who do not build.
Yet history shows what’s possible when institutions rise to meet their moment. Cambridge’s mathematical tripos turned mathematicians into engineers who powered the Industrial Revolution. MIT’s radiation lab turned physicists into inventors who won World War II. Chicago’s economics department turned scholars into reformers who freed markets across five continents. Each succeeded by uniting deep theory with urgent purpose.
Today’s challenge calls for that very same synthesis. Yet our institutional vacuum has instead yielded four fundamentally flawed responses:
The doomsayers, who have attracted billions to their cause and are the intellectual incumbent. Their prophecy, AI will destroy us all. Their solution, hit the pause button. Centralized control radically remakes society on the basis of risk avoidance. And do this even if it means forfeiting progress while inviting tyranny.
The accelerationists, those who would unleash the development of artificial intelligence as an end in itself. That is to say, humans become the mere instruments of an optimization, of a sweeping technology trajectory that is exponential, inexorable, transcendent. The dignity of humanity, expressed through countless lives lived and lost, is flattened, reduced to a variable in a thermodynamic equation, to a link in an evolutionary chain.
The regulators, who answer every challenge with rules that stifle both innovation and freedom.
And techno-authoritarian China, which demonstrates AI’s dark potential for automated social control at the scale of billions of lives.
If you’re a builder today, it can feel like you have only two choices, two stories about the future. Stop everything, or continue without thinking. This poverty of imagination denies us what we desperately need, a substantive vision of technology in service of human flourishing.
The Need for Philosopher-Builders
Just as Franklin saw the printing press, not merely as technology but as a tool for enlightenment, we need a new generation of philosopher-builders to take the project even further. If the printing press democratized access to knowledge, AI will transform how we recover, transmit, and create it. But knowledge demands both the clash of ideas and the rigor to test them. Today’s tech culture suppresses the first and neglects the second.
Elon Musk speaks of raising AI to be truth-seeking. Fine words. But we must ask, what kind of truth? And sought in what way? Because there are two fundamentally different answers.
The centralized approach treats truth as a monolith, something decreed by the few, frozen into doctrine and forced by machines. This is the AI ministry of truth, an Orwellian oracle dispensing approved answers through opaque mechanisms. The danger here runs deeper than censorship. In the name of alignment, or safety, these systems won’t just suppress certain viewpoints. They will gradually, imperceptibly, narrow the bounds of thought itself, homogenizing and flattening our intellectual landscape.
The alternative is a vibrant marketplace of ideas, where truth emerges from the clash of perspectives, not from authority’s decree. Here, knowledge grows and evolves and is shaped by contestation. It draws upon wisdom past and present, and every mind becomes an active participant and not a passive consumer in the search for truth.
Principles for Truth-Seeking AI
In preferring the second approach, we need a set of principles to help us stay on the path to genuine truth-seeking AI. Our patron saints for this journey are John Stuart Mill and Socrates.
In On Liberty, Mill makes a bold case for free speech as the lifeblood of truth. Every opinion, he insists, no matter how unpopular or seemingly wrong, must compete in the marketplace of ideas. Even false views often contain fragments of truth, and their collision with accepted opinion helps us grasp truth more deeply. Because human minds drift toward passivity, what Mill called dead dogma, only open debate can jolt them awake. So Mill shows us the social process of truth-seeking, the clash of minds.
But how should each individual mind proceed? For this, Socrates is our guide. In the Theaetetus, Socrates teaches that wisdom begins not with answers, but with questions that expose our ignorance. Through inquiry, we transform from collectors of certainty into seekers of truth, each question revealing a complex of further questions. In the marketplace of ideas, the deepest knowledge comes from those who question best.
These aren’t just philosophical ideals, free speech, decentralized inquiry. These concepts must suffuse the architecture of our civilization-scale AI systems. 250 years ago, the American founders built a philosophy-to-law pipeline. They turned these principles into the architecture of a free society. Today, as builders, we must create a philosophy-to-code pipeline to do the same for our time.
The Cosmos Institute’s Mission
That is why I founded Cosmos Institute. That is why I’m proud to announce our partnership with Oxford’s new human-centered AI lab to do exactly that, to translate philosophy-to-code, to build the world’s first truth-seeking AI.
This is our civilizational moment. For over 200,000 years, we as humans have been building AI. For over 200,000 years, we as humans have created technology as tools, as means to our ends. Today, with AI, we’re building technology that has the potential to shape both the means and ends of human endeavor.
The printing press never determined what was printed. Today’s AI systems mediate what information we consume and even shape how we decide what’s good for us. We can build AI that amplifies human reason, that preserves human autonomy, that resists centralization, and that enables us to seek truth in ways unimaginable by our predecessors, but worthy of our inheritance.
To save our civilization, we need those leaders like Franklin, who not only understand the principles of a free society, but can realize them in the systems that will come to dominate it. The moment for philosopher-builders is now. Thank you.
