Editorial

A quick catch-up for anyone joining late. On Aug.

Twenty-five years ago, our nation experienced the deadliest terrorist attack in our history. Nearly 3,000 lives were lost on Sept. 11, 2001. Like all Americans, I will never forget where I was and what I was doing that day.

For more than thirty years, American communications users—really, American consumers—have been charged roughly $1 billion to $3 billion a year to subsidize Internet and related services for schools and libraries through the government's E-Rate program, which is one component of what's called the “Universal Service Fund.” That is a lot of compulsory generosity. Yet only now are policymakers asking the obvious question: Is this money helping students learn—or is it doing harm? Some treat that question as out of bounds. It is not.

As artificial intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself or a small set of experts who control it should decide what is best for humanity. We disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters in their own lives. We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

The question I hear from CFOs everywhere is simple: how do we get more value from our AI spend? For years, the market measured the success of software through adoption: seats purchased, users active, licenses renewed. Understanding the value of AI demands a more powerful measure: work accomplished. The basic economic question facing CFOs and other business leaders is whether the value of the work AI completes grows faster than the cost of producing it. Answering that question requires looking more deeply than a metric such as cost per token.

Hindsight is 20/20. But you didn’t need a crystal ball in 2019 to know that the U.S. government’s decision to tap Dish Network (eventually, Dish Wireless) to become the country’s fourth wireless carrier wouldn’t pan out well. And the regulators who waved it on—both at the time and as cracks in the plan became more evident—need to be held accountable. I’d argue that we never should have even gotten to this point. Not even close.

Now that the Federal Communications Commission is freeing up spectrum once again, we have an opportunity to build on that momentum and deliver the 800-megahertz pipeline Congress envisioned—and in a timely way. Doing so is critical to ensuring that AI innovation stays where it belongs: here in the United States. The pressure on timing is real.

In 1838, the invention of the camera sparked predictions that photography would make artists obsolete. When the noted French painter Paul Delaroche first saw an early photograph on a metal plate, he declared that “From today, painting is dead!” As he reasoned, why would anyone pay an artist to slowly and laboriously paint a scene when a camera could do the job more accurately, more quickly, and at a lower cost? This question has echoed through technological shifts and has resurfaced with intensity in recent weeks, as university students graduated on campuses across the United States.

AI’s exponential progress has created an urgency and a pace of change that the policymaking process is ordinarily ill-equipped to handle. But it has also created a unique window of opportunity.

In May, Verizon’s new CEO Dan Schulman spoke at a MoffettNathanson conference, and one thing he said stunned me.