Masterminds mull in the mountains

Editor’s note: In the second of a two-part series that examines the potency of the Aspen Institute’s 2024 annual Aspen Ideas Festival, humor, reality and hope marble ongoing topical issues.

Things got underway at the 20th anniversary Aspen Ideas Festival this past June, following the Aspen Ideas Health Festival, with guest festival curator Tina Brown’s interview of commentator/comic Bill Maher. Out of a black limo and flanked by security, Maher took the stage with tousled hair and his characteristic sardonic side-grin. “Welcome maestro, the man of the hour, which says more about the hour than you,” Brown said, eyes expectant, as if waiting for a jack-in the-box to pop open.

Sure enough, while tossing F-bombs like water balloons, Maher said that the American people are at “peak stupid” because we’ve stopped educating people. “The left went nuttier than the right and they blame me for noticing.” In sum, he said, “the over-sensitivity culture, cancel/victim culture, identity politics, pointless white self-loathing and forcing complex ideas about race and gender on kids who can’t spell yet” are overcooked.

Not to be spared, “The Republicans are in complete denial about everything, about bigotry, racism and reality. They always blame the under-privileged when they should blame the privileged. … They think climate change is a hoax, while the weather girl’s tits are real.” As the assembled laughed, he goaded the opening session audience for their lack of diversity and white privilege, “like an Aspen Klan meeting.” 

In contrast, at the beginning of the 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival, former CEO of the Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson proposed that “a really good idea is when common sense and imagination collide.” A good example of this happened at the 2010 Ideas Fest when Salman Khan, an MIT math whizz and former hedge fund employee with a big conscience, met Bill Gates. 

After finding that the internet tools to tutor his family came up short, Khan founded the on-line Khan Academy, a nonprofit that offers a free tutorial curriculum of STEM, humanities and skill courses for learners and as an aid for teachers. Struggling at first with financing, Khan’s contact with Gates led to a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, coupled with another $2 million from Google, enabling him to build out his organization. 

Today, the academy has 137 million users in 190 countries in 50 languages, and is powered by an AI program developed by OpenAI, a company started by Silicon Valley prodigy Sam Altman. Notably, women in Afghanistan are using academy material. “Khan Academy gave me a reason to wake up hopeful for a new day. Had I never come across it, my life story would be like millions of other Afghan girls stuck in the cage of ignorance,” one woman wrote in a testimonial on the KA website. 

At this year’s six-day Aspen Ideas Festival, subjects ranged from “World on Fire: The Root Causes of Populism, Authoritarianism and The Whole Global Mess” to “Hope in Troubling Times’” — and everything in between. With many intriguing sessions in the same time slots per day, titled like educated clickbait, hustling between multiple concurrent sessions for their opening points or closing summations became a strategy, while others commanded full attendance. After a provocative day, the 5 p.m. mixer for drinks, food and chattering under the Marble Garden tent served as the daily decompression zone. There, local food vendors Topper’s Big Red Food Truck, Gerb’s Grub Food Truck and Slow Groovin’ BBQ provided fresh dinner options to the neck-lanyard set. 

Locals who bought day passes clustered there. One in the press corps described the day’s events as “hot air rising” and another suggested the free on-campus dermatology exam booth ought to be in downtown Basalt. A masseuse, after attending “Are American Women Going Backwards,” chuckled at an audience comment about the loss of Roe v. Wade that “women should deny sex to men until they behave.”

Most of this year’s 100-plus sessions from Ideas Fest (June 23-29) and the preceding Ideas Health (June 20-23) are available to watch on video using the free Aspen Ideas 2024 app, or online at aspeninstitute.org, along with many from past festivals. Not in chronological order, and without necessarily chasing the headliners, the following looks at some interesting highlights of Ideas Fest with continuing relevance — particularly space exploration, social media and AI.

Opening day leaves earth

In “Lifting the Veil on Iran,” which also took place during the opening session on June 23, Masih Alinejad, Iranian-American journalist and Time Magazine 2023 Woman of the Year, who launched a 2014 disobedience campaign against compulsory veiling in Iran, showed the audience her under-bicep tattoo, “Women like freedom,” and said she had more social media followers than all the ayatollahs together.

With a big yellow flower in her muffin-stacked hair, her unbridled passion dominated the panel, recounting how the Iranian regime blinded activists in one eye if they spoke out, and blinded them in the other for a second offense, while they raped women imprisoned for disobedience. Women, she said, are not allowed to sing in Iran because it arouses men, and she launched into exotic song, then asked if the men were aroused. She scolded the West for insufficient sanctions and called on Iranian men to campaign against “gender apartheid” there.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who as a senator spent six days orbiting earth on the Space Shuttle Columbia, waxed on outer space, where the baseline temperature is minus-455 Fahrenheit. In his “To Infinity and Beyond” interview with SpaceX director Gwynne Shotwell during the Ideas Fest opening session, he said the experience — called the “overview effect” that astronauts feel after returning from space — changed him. Nelson said he saw the earth as “a creation suspended in the middle of nothing, the green cut of the Amazon, and I didn’t see racial or political division from my window in space.” 

Shotwell and Nelson then discussed how SpaceX, the space-transportation company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 to reduce space travel costs and colonize Mars, planned to launch orbiting Starship fuel stations and supply depots as timesaving stops for future moon and Mars missions. In the rush to privatize space travel, Musk dominates with his deep pockets and reusable rocket booster systems. “SpaceX is hardware rich, while NASA is operating on a taxpayer budget,” Nelson said. In the rush to develop a robust “low-Earth-orbit economy” where NASA is but a customer, the private sector leads the way. 

In a May 28, 2024, New York Times story on Musk’s space domination, Eric Lipton wrote that “the U.S. government is concerned about its reliance on a mercurial billionaire for access to space,” with a significant part of NASA’s budget going toward contracting out what used to be its mission. 

As of this past July, Musk’s Starlink internet service already has 6,281 satellites in orbit, with up to 34,000 more projected to spin around the globe. According to several NPR stories about satellite debris, over 35,000 objects orbit the Earth today. When they collide they send off thousands of bullet-sized debris at 18,000 miles per hour that can splinter satellites. This repetition of multiplying fragments, called the Kessler syndrome, has the potential to periodically cause internet blackouts.

As billionaires aspire beyond super yachts to reusable space vehicles, SpaceX competes with  competitors such as Sir Peter Beck’s RocketLab “Neutron,” with return-to-launchpad reusability marketed as “your mission, your way;” and, Jeff Bezos’ launch of Blue Origin, offering payload rockets and space tourism flights into low Earth orbit. A center seat costs up to $30 million, with no carry-on luggage.

Nelson later spoke on the June 29 “Are We Alone Out There” panel, where moderator Garrett Graff opened with “when the aliens show up, first thing is to explain Taylor Swift.” From there, the panel agreed the math is on the aliens’ side. Astronomers guesstimate that there are at least one sextillion (a billion trillions) habitable planets across the universe that are in the “Goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cold.” These are planets orbiting their home star, like Earth, just the right distance from their sun to sustain oxygen and unfrozen water. “In a 13.8-billion-year-old cosmos, do we really think that we on earth are the one in sextillion chance for life?” Nelson asked.

Today, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) is the preferred term instead of UFO, because the latter is freighted with the idea of aliens. Nelson said that though “popular belief is that the Department of Defense is hiding something,” he found after consulting with NASA scientists tasked with studying possible alien visitation, that “to my knowledge, there are about two unexplained sightings.”

Meanwhile, NASA is looking for signs of lower lifeforms out there, Nelson continued. One example is the Perseverance Rover, currently digging in the Jezero Crater on Mars for evidence of microbes in what was once a lakebed. Hopes are higher with the Europa Clipper probe, set to launch in October 2024 to research Jupiter’s moon Europa, where images sent from Voyager 1 and 2 in 1979 indicated a frozen ocean with a volume of salt water beneath greater than the Earth’s oceans. Conceptually, a follow-up Europa Lander mission would land on Europa’s surface to study composition and habitability. 

Meanwhile, the James Webb telescope — the newest and strongest among 29 active telescopes in space — is peering into outer space-time, time-traveling back 13.5 billion light-years (one light-year equals six trillion miles) to the formation of the oldest galaxies. Nelson said the technological Webb wonder, the pride of NASA, had to perform “344 complex tasks perfectly to deploy, and it did.” 

This included the origami unfolding from its rocket cocoon of 18 gold-covered mirrors dovetailing into the flat 21-foot-diameter Webb telescope. Able to take images through dust and gas clouds using infrared wavelength into deepest space, the Webb scope took 30 days to reach and open in its own orbit around the Sun, one million miles from its launch pad, the Guiana Space Centre — Europe’s spaceport — in French Guiana. 

Living in digital sickness

Back down to Earth, the “Teens and Screens” panel enlarged upon the known unknowns of social media, featuring Laura Narquez-Garrett, an attorney trying to make digital media safe; Amy Neville, a parent who lost a child from digital abuse; Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and brain development; and Larissa May, a once digitally-addicted young woman campaigning for digital media literacy in classrooms.

With the full gamut of topics throughout the week asking for attention to worthy causes and answers to political logjams, the damage being done to children and teens during their foundational social skills development period — often secondary to absent parenting — was the most affecting. “Five billion people, 63% of the world population, are on social media, while 75% of the U.S. have accounts,” May said. And, “one in three teen girls say they’ve considered suicide in the past year,” the panel’s setup reads. 

May, who heads the nonprofit #Half the Story and offers “Digital Media U” classes, said she was headed to speak with Aspen Middle and High School administrators that afternoon to advocate for digital literacy classes.

Moderator Perri Peltz, journalist and public health advocate, set up the dialogue with examples of video clips depicting suicide methods that circulate on social media and were viewed by four unrelated teens. She explained how each of them were served up this toxic content before taking their own lives.

The young son of panelist Amy Neville, Alex, a history buff who wanted to work at the Smithsonian when he grew up, became curious about opioids. After searches, he received offers featuring emoji-illustrated menus through his Snapchat, showing coded availability for popular drugs, sent from online “plugs” (dealers) who harvest search-pattern algorithms. Soon he got an unknown pill in the mail, took it, and died in the emergency room, Neville said.

So many don’t fully grasp how their phone or “device” is a Trojan horse generating coldblooded algorithms that harvest search trends and target users with damaging or specious content. Prinstein explained how the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s wiser-decision-making brake pedal — is not fully developed until age 25, leaving a big window between 10 and 25 where mental health damage can be done. 

An online algorithm gathers search data into programmed responses. Tablet addiction can start with babysitting cartoons as early as pre-K, and later lead to significant harm from an algorithmic feed of extremist, misogynistic and suicidal content. And the newest entry in this brutal arena, often propelled by teen scheming, is AI realism that can steal faces and voices of others and concoct compromising videos into next-level cyberbullying.

At the same time, social media companies continue to oppose meaningful regulation. They argue that there is no direct causation, only correlations between social media, time spent online and mental health.

While these distortions root exponentially worldwide, the panel said no regulation has been passed in the U.S. since 1996: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that internet platforms, or message boards as they were called, are not legally liable for false or defamatory information posted by users. This early unleashing is now called “the 26 words that made the internet,” referring to the word count in the statute that opened the wanton gate. 

Are there solutions?

Violence against others can be another social media-related byproduct, often confirmed by analysis of platforms used by shooters and terrorists. Another panel, “Insurrectionists Among Us,” explored how we might disrupt or counter such extremism before it occurs.

One hopeful example is Moonshot, a company working with governments, tech companies and communities around the world to counter violent extremism and “disrupt disinformation networks, gender-based violence, child sexual abuse and exploitation and organized crime, among other harms,” Moonshot’s website reads.

Moonshot founder and panelist Vidhya Ramalingam said that “those leaking their violence plans online are crying for help,” and that media literacy classes in schools as well as counter-messaging campaigns are positive tools. Currently, Moonshot has “over 120 such projects in over 60 countries in 30 different languages” with governments and private sectors around the world.

In constructing their algorithms, Moonshot developed the redirect method, “an open-source methodology that uses targeted advertising to connect people searching online for harmful content with constructive alternative messages.” Using clickbait such as “Are you feeling lonely, isolated,” a trained counselor can respond and rechannel someone on the cusp of a violent act. At this point, with AI already marbling the cyber system, what troop strength might be on either side of the algorithm front is hard to measure.

Stepping up to the situation, the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) took effect on Nov. 16, 2022, with an aim to protect online users’ individual rights by regulating targeted advertising, safety, transparency and liability for illegal content. The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill (OSB), passed on Oct. 26, 2023, holds online platforms to a legal “duty of care” obligation to avoid reckless harm against others and pursues action against illegal or harmful content.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the colonists are stuck in ideology trying to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), introduced in the Congress in 2022. Framed around a similar duty of care obligation, KOSA passed the U.S. Senate on July 30, 2024, by a 90-3 vote, but has since stalled in the U.S. House because many there are opposed to any censorship of guns, abortion, sexuality and speech in general. 

The AI elephant

In an interview session titled “AI Super Thinker,” new-technology Pangloss and CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman prophesized a positive future. The possibility that AI could become the invaluable new tool for mankind is possible, he maintained. However, doubt arises if one looks back at the promise of the internet, which Aspen Ideas speaker and author Kara Swisher nailed in another panel as “rather than turning out to be the best café, it turned out to be the worst boys’ bathroom.”

When interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin asked if AI could be “the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between,” Suleyman countered, “Don’t fear the downside of every tool.” Undeterred, he explained AI’s next steps: AGI (artificial general intelligence) and EDR (emotional detection recognition). AGI will peak when AI can do every human task better than humans, while EDR will develop conversational bots able to “feel” human emotions across the techno-pheromonal bridge, supplying meta-advice and information.

As a counter to Sorkin asking “who is the god of right and wrong with AI,” Suleyman answered that safety regulations will be needed, remarking that Europeans don’t fear regulation the way Americans do. He pointed out how the car was developed and the many necessary regulations followed. 

But, fear not, he implied, at the rate that AI is currently gobbling up the world’s data like an uber Pacman, data will run out perhaps in a decade. There’s the rub: AI would then assemble and analyze that total data, leading to AI synthesizing new postulations. From there AI models could generate new “synthetic data” beyond the wattage of man’s mind. Yikes! And, if AI creates airtight false data, it may be ingested as true by future AI. By 2035, Suleyman speculated, people may go to court to give their emotionally literate bots humanhood.

Currently, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon are the big guns developing AI, while China and Russia are developing their own AI systems. Could rogue nation-state acquisition of AI be the new nuclear weapon to compete in a fail-safe, mutual self-destruction scenario, where misinformation and AI-escalating weaponry are the currency? Or, maybe, AI can surpass our petty turmoil, with a moral arc that bends toward a benign conscience and enforces peace and equity like a philosopher king. 

Among other issues

At “Wolves at Our Doorsteps,” Nashira, a seven-year-old wolf, made her Aspen debut, leash-walking among the audience and acknowledging those she deemed notable. Attendees were told to not make sudden movements and to look her in the eye if she approached, and to hold an open palm below her chin before petting her. Eye to eye, she triggered primal knowledge in us of our lower-predator status, as she assessed our souls in a single glance.

A resident at the Mission: Wolf nature center in Westcliffe, Colorado, where unwanted captive-born wolves and horses can roam, her mission is to tame the fear of wolf reintroduction in the American West. After Colorado voters approved reintroduction in 2020, 10 wolves were released in December 2023 in Grand and Summit counties. With one reportedly killed by a mountain lion and another two recently found deceased, the remaining have had pups and roamed as far as Rio Blanco County. Of late, some of the wolves have been recaptured for redistribution elsewhere because of livestock predation.

Much like the reintroduction of 25 moose into Colorado in 1978 near Walden, which have subsequently populated statewide, wolf introduction is meant to remedy environmental imbalances sustained since the last Colorado wolf was eradicated in Conejos County in 1945. The panel explained that wolves keep wildlife moving, particularly elk, which without predation tend to graze longer near rivers. With more ungulate movement, river habitat fills in with more trees, plant life, insects, birds, beavers and muskrats.

At “Facing Down the Mexican Drug Cartels,” the panel offered no solid solutions except to cut demand in the U.S., while pointing out that there were 10,000 gun shops along the border in California, Texas and Arizona, and only three in all of Mexico. And the reason fentanyl — originally from China — is so prevalent is because of its addictive potency as an opioid and because it’s cheaper to make in Mexican labs than meth. Both are more profitable than the work-intensive agricultural drug derivatives such as heroin and marijuana. 

Anabel Hernández, Mexican investigative reporter, said that by 2015 the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels controlled 60% of the planet’s drug traffic. Between 2019 and 2023 in the U.S., 336,000 died of fentanyl overdose, with most being white and middle class, two-thirds male and one-third female. On the Mexican side, the cartel mystique inspires narcocorrido music and a “buchona” (showoff) fashion trend that markets the blingy look of drug dealers’ girlfriends. 

Former Secretary of State and White House special envoy for climate John Kerry, in “The $38 Trillion Dollar Question” panel, rang the bell of alarm while offering hope in the form of the free market for improving the climate crisis — but not without nuclear energy. He said economics will drive the change, with some $2 trillion in venture capital ready to profit in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. During his stint as climate envoy, Kerry said he’d enlisted “the six biggest banks to switch to net-zero carbon,” and thus their clients, too, calling it “a flywheel start.” 

Reeling off grim statistics of a warming planet hotter in the last 12 months than any previous, of accelerated ice melt in the Arctic — some accounts predict ice-free summers by mid-century — Kerry reminded us that 1,300 people died from the heat at the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca this past June, where temperatures peaked at 125 degrees Fahrenheit. 

An afternoon of conversation

A grand gathering in the Music Tent on the June 26 peak Saturday ended the first part of this year’s two-part Ideas Fest. Annually, the “Afternoon of Conversation” features headline speakers and interviews that highlight topical subjects. In past years, such speakers included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Ehud Barak, Madeleine Albright, Stephen Breyer, Sandra Day O’Connor, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, in 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This year, astronaut Mathew Dominick of Colorado, part of the SpaceX crew “stranded” on the International Space Station, greeted the audience on screen from aboard the ISS. While floating in zero gravity, he said from his view of the earth he “hoped the 20th Aspen Ideas Festival would forge relationships and develop ideas that would have a positive impact on the world.” With that, he mike-dropped a floating mike and drifted up and off camera.

Next, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and developer of ChatGPT, scared the bejesus out of many with his fait-accompli attitude about AI. Next to him, his longtime friend Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb — who started the platform by renting out his San Francisco apartment and then growing his company to 4 million hosts worldwide and 1.5 billion guests — stirred mixed feelings. 

Though convenient for countless travelers, many feel that Airbnb has been a detriment to mountain towns throughout the West, while upsetting cities around the world by creating a froth of short-term rentals at the expense of long-term housing, aggravated by pay-any-rent remote workers and investment capital hoovering up real estate to convert into STRs. Unfortunately, interviewer Lester Holt, anchor of NBC Nightly News, never questioned Cheskey about this topic.

Both ambled on stage wearing the Silicon Valley tux — plain colored T-shirts, jeans and new white sneakers. Thin and a little uncomfortable, Altman sported a loose beige T and a just-slept-upon hair style. In contrast, his bro Chesky wore a sculpted oil-comb look and a tight black muscle-T, looking like an Aspen real estate agent photo. Both were interesting, genial, cheeky, talking in the staccato-phrasing style that accelerates toward the end of the sentence, made emblematic by Mark Zuckerberg.

Holt, like many elders, exhibited a baffled curiosity with the phenoms as he dove right into the perils of AI. Chesky recalled having already ridden the rocket of success with Airbnb, and how he coached Altman to prepare for his 2022 launch of the consumer-facing ChatGPT. Newer versions in pricing tiers can write everything from your great American novel to your PhD thesis and answer emotive questions as your personal consultant. 

Chesky waxed about the good old days in Silicon Valley when trust ran deep and “Facebook helped connect with friends, YouTube was cat videos and Twitter was just about what you’re doing today.” He recalled Steve Jobs saying never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window, while at the same time he rhapsodized how AI will be implanted in every company, including Airbnb. “AI will understand your personality and place you wherever you want to travel or live throughout the world.” 

How do we teach values to a computer, Holt asked. Altman waffled back with a paradox, “What society agrees on as values to teach will be the hardest challenge.” Chesley offered, “It’s like driving a car. The faster you go the more attention you have to pay to the upcoming curves.” Yet neither were ideologically opposed to regulations.

Holt noted that Altman once said AI would produce $100 trillion in new wealth to be distributed into the economy. Altman reflected that a 7% yearly GDP growth could get us there. Then he enthused, “What’s it going to be like when we can say hey computer, discover all of physics or start a great company?” 

General Petraeus eyeballs world

In the “Closing Session” interview of the second part of this year’s Ideas Festival on June 29, retired U.S. General David Petraeus spoke with the sangfroid of a four-star, as he and interviewer Simon Sebag Montefiore, a British historian with old European roots, exchanged pithy quotes. Montefiore opened with Leon Trotsky’s words, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” to which Petraeus grinned and replied that as a senior officer, “We deal with the world as it is, not the way you’d like it to be.”

As commander in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars under presidents Bush and Obama, Petraeus orchestrated the 2007 U.S. “surge”— rather than withdrawal — that held the Iraqi insurgency in check and secured Baghdad. With that, Obama put him in charge of securing Afghanistan. Under Petraeus, surgical airstrikes and counter insurgency led to a tit-for-tat standoff with the re-emerging Taliban, who eventually took over after allied withdrawal from the 20-year war in 2021. 

At Obama’s request, Petraeus retired from the military to become CIA chief in 2011, but stepped down a year later after admitting an extramarital relationship with his biographer Paula Broadwell and pleading guilty to misdemeanor sharing of classified documents with her. He paid a $40,000 fine and served a two-year probation. After her Patraeus book, “All In,” but before the scandal broke, Broadwell gained a speaking slot at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival.

Montefiore fired a rapid salvo of world hotspots at Petraeus. Beginning with Ukraine, Petraeus said, “In the wars I was privileged to lead, the troops averaged 19- and 20-year-olds, but in Ukraine they are mostly 40.” He said we should be all in on Ukraine because Putin will head into Moldova and Lithuania next in his revanchist quest to restore the glory of the former USSR. Like Stalin, “Putin is throwing humanity at the enemy” to achieve an outcome, he said. If we withdrew, as with Afghanistan — still a burr under his saddle — we would show weakness to China, Russia and Iran. He allowed that President Biden had done well uniting allies, but should loosen weapon restrictions for Ukraine.

Petraeus, a West Point grad with a Princeton PhD in international relations, next focused his battle knowledge on Gaza, which he coolly characterized as “a fiendishly difficult urban operation with a battlescape of 350 miles of subterranean tunnels,” occupied by Hamas. With little mention of 40,000 Gazan casualties, he said that Israel needs “to clear and hold” Gaza, and, as per the Geneva Convention, not withdraw but rebuild under “temporary” occupation. 

He proposed erecting walled sections from north to south with biometric entry points, as he did in Baghdad. Once Gaza is secured in this system of connecting canal-like locks, then deploy peacekeepers, rebuild infrastructure and restore appropriate Palestinian governance. As for Hezbollah in Lebanon, they could be beaten, “but not without great damage.”

Vis-à-vis Iran, he said the country should never be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Now, “their nuclear capabilities are just below weapons grade” and the U.S. and Israel could easily erase their nuclear facilities. To contain them, maintain economic sanctions, sustain military threat and appease them by permitting oil export, which keeps the price of gas down through the U.S. elections. After the elections, he predicted more pressure and higher gas prices. 

Looking at China, he said that they are the economic disruptors because of their disproportional, low-cost economic capacity, making more of everything cheaper. Any economic solution, such as tariffs to protect domestic markets, begins with “it depends” — meaning, be aware of after effects. To discourage China from invading Taiwan, we must keep them fearful of our unmanned, algorithmically-driven “technical weapons from underwater, in the air and from space,” which would create a “hellscape across the gap from the mainland” in the 110-mile wide Taiwan Strait.

As a finale to the festival, the general buoyed the standing-room-only troupe of influencers under the tent at the Greenwald Pavilion as if they were about to enter a theater of battle: “Great countries fall because of lack of will!” he pressed. “The U.S. must maintain the will to push both in AI and the energy revolution,” and sustain our “will to improve education and prevent crime. … The big idea, at the end of the day, is American ingenuity and the innovative power of our workforce and economy.”

On that note, armed with multiple days of powerful information, participants in the annual Aspen Ideas Festival blended back into the human stream, each carrying the possibility of germinating conscious evolution in their families, neighborhoods, or on the world stage.