Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch.

America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on unregulated AI, Trump is acknowledging the power of the engineer.

So would Jensen Huang make a better president than Donald Trump?

In our weekly tech roundup, That Was The Week tech news publisher Keith Teare voted for king Donald. Whatever Trump’s flaws, Keith argues, he is at least a politician. Society isn’t logical, Keith said. It’s chaotic and messy, and so should be run by messy, chaotic people. A society run by king Jensen would, Keith warns, end up “drone-like”.

But the Trump vs Huang choice might have already been made. Huang won’t appear on a ballot because he doesn’t need to. His five trillion dollar company is not only driving our economy but our politics too. Most importantly, Jensen Huang’s drone-like mindset of imagining society as an endless engineering problem is emerging as the AI policy of the current administration. Think of it as the ethic of the engineer. Only it claims there are no ethics, just engineering challenges and solutions.

Earlier this week, Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz reminded us that Arendt linked Plato’s ideal of philosopher kings with the utopian promises of 20th century totalitarian leaders. I don’t think she would have been too keen on philosopher engineers either.

ALSO THIS WEEK

•   Keith’s editorial, Men and Machines — subtitled Are You Afraid of Your Light Bulbs? — at That Was The Week — the line is Arvind Narayanan’s, from the Ezra Klein interview Keith builds the week around

•   Anthropic’s usage-policy change — worth reading before you form a view: it covers election interference, weapons and surveillance as well, and the cruelty clause is narrower than the headlines suggest

•   Jill Lepore at the Frankfurt Book Fair, urging publishers to declare their independence from Big Tech — the piece I sent Keith, to which he replied with a single word: dinosaur

•   Stephen Witt on this show last year, on the rise of Nvidia and its relentless chief executive: listen or watch

•   Anthropic’s Matthew Botvinick on Thursday, whose AI and Political Freedom is the engineering take on democracy that came up here: listen or watch

•   Kailash Satyarthi yesterday, arguing the exact opposite of Keith — that compassion has to be designed into AI at the foundation stage: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The argument isn’t whether to hand power to engineers. They have it. This is whe