Newt Gingrich and the New Conservative Techno-Optimists

America’s Golden Age: Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities
By Newt Gingrich
Center Street, 288 pages, $32

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I am not a techno-optimist. I would rather sit in my house, cuddle my baby, go on a walk, read an old book, pray, cook and bake, and spend time with my husband. A future optimized to every degree by artificial intelligence does not sound particularly appealing to me. Further, I enjoy the friction and human touch of, for example, finding recipes from a cookbook over asking artificial intelligence to generate a recipe, or even, as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich predicts will happen in his new book, having a machine in my house that will cook for me based on its predictions of what I would like to eat.

The never-ending machine of American technological progress is unlikely to abate anytime soon, however. Artificial intelligence, everyone tells us, is necessarily bound to be integrated into every industry and corner of American life, to the extent that when you go to the grocery, go on vacation, or spend time with your family, all of it will have as its backbone artificial neural networks. (READ NEXT: Glossary of the Postmodern and Pretentiously Intelligent Home)

This has produced some pessimism among young people currently in high school or college who feel that there is nothing left for them to accomplish and that human culture faces decimation. Everything can, or will be able to, write itself, create itself, and generate itself, we’re told. Further, there will be robot gardeners, cleaners, plumbers, and health care aides that will make physical work likewise obsolete. Humans’ role in any of these tasks will be inferior, we’re told. (READ NEXT: The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 5 — What You Hate About AI Is Not Really About AI)

It was in answer to this sense of pessimism that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich penned his new book, America’s Golden Age: Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities. He says that he felt compelled to write the book “because the negativity and passivity that have gradually infected American culture are an enormous threat to our future.” This is, he said, “pessimism verging on nihilism.”

“Even with all this happening,” Gingrich said in reference to developments in artificial intelligence, “there is not the general sense of optimism, excitement, and eagerness that the facts would seem to justify.”

Gingrich tells us that we should feel great hope for the future, recognizing that the past 250 years in America have brought with them extraordinary technological transformations that have grown America’s economy exponentially and improved our way of life. We should rest assured that, in the next 50 years, the engine of American capitalism will leverage artificial intelligence to create extraordinary improvements for Americans and bring about a golden age. (READ NEXT: While the Public Fears AI, These Ohio and Iowa Business Owners Are Finding Relief)

Gingrich is as decidedly optimistic about America’s future as it is possible to be. He believes that, thanks to artificial intelligence, the next 50 years will represent a transformation that will perhaps eclipse all of the changes of America’s past 250 years:

The period from 2026 to 2076 will be defined by artificial intelligence. It will be the most powerful single force of transformation. In fact, as a term, artificial intelligence may be too narrow a description of the dramatic changes we will see. It could also prove misleading because it suggests a lesser status, as opposed to enhanced, augmented, or perfect intelligence. Furthermore, the breakthroughs it will enable will extend far beyond what we currently consider to be artificial intelligence.

This is what is surprising about Gingrich’s book: the extent to which he predicts an absolute transformation of American life.

Let’s focus on education because this is where Gingrich brings a wealth of knowledge and experience. In the 1970s, he spent seven years as a history professor at West Georgia College. Gingrich views today’s education system as close to obsolete. In his perspective, “a bureaucratic teacher-dominated school setting” cannot compete with AI-powered individualized learning or apprenticeship programs.

“By 2076, this expensive, age-defined, classroom-bound system of being dictated to by people who do not know much and have not accomplished much outside a classroom will have decayed and been replaced by dramatically different systems,” he says.

Gingrich predicts that the system of teachers teaching students in a classroom will be replaced by “a much more self-directed, episodic, and real-time kind of learning.” He explains how these new “systems of autonomous learning” will work: “The more time your artificial intelligence tutor spends with you, the more it will understand you and be able to guide and coach you.”

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This transformation in education, he says, “will be both breathtaking and exhilarating.” It will, he says, “liberate and empower human capital on a greater scale than anything we have seen since the development of the printing press and the emergence of affordable books.”

It is fascinating to have arrived at this moment in the conservative movement. We have on one side a classical education movement that has doubled down on the most traditional of education methods: Latin, rote memorization, and the reading of the classics of Western Civilization, with all the students seated at desks and wearing uniforms. The growing Classical Learning Test measures aptitude by testing students’ deep understanding of classic texts; the test has recently included Homer, Tertullian, Charles Dickens, Plutarch, Aristotle, James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Confucius, Susan B. Anthony, St. Catherine of Siena, John Milton, Langston Hughes, Oscar Wilde, Sophocles, Cicero, Martin Luther, Franz Kafka, and Sojourner Truth. (READ NEXT: Owning and Reading Books May Be the Most Countercultural Thing You Can Do)

On the other side, we have those, including Newt Gingrich, who have become alienated by America’s university elites, whom they view as teaching subjects useless to the American economy, such as Latin American Studies or socialist theory, that do nothing to help students find success and instead leave them saddled with debt they struggle to repay for the rest of their lives. In fact, such professors spend most of their time propagandizing radical progressive ideology. This is to such an extent, posits Gingrich, that we have reached a point at which the Ivory Tower props up an entirely “Alternative Reality.”

“The amount of human potential that has been diverted by the academic Left’s insistence on ideas and rules that are antithetical to reality has significantly slowed progress in America,” Gingrich writes. “It has also condemned a substantial number of smart people to spend their lives propping up and arguing in favor of ideas and models that simply do not work.”

The modern education system children are forced into, Gingrich writes, “believes in control and sets elaborate standards for lesson plans and examinations.” It “determines appropriate topics and correct sequences.” Contrast this with the future of autonomous learning, in which students will be able to pursue the subjects that are interesting to them, useful to the economy, and updated to the minute in America’s rapidly transforming landscape. “Compare the amount of information being imparted in a typical classroom with the volume of information available from Google, ChatGPT, Siri, Claude, and other systems,” writes Gingrich. He is thrilled that advances in technology could ring the death knell for the liberal academics and bureaucrats who have a stranglehold on American ideas and sap scores of money out of the American economy.

The difference between conservative techno-optimists like Gingrich and the classical education movement is profound. While the classical education movement directly combats modern technology’s domination of the classroom, Gingrich believes the cell phone bans of recent years have been an enormous mistake. “The effort to ban cell phones from schools is a perfect example of how out of touch with reality the modern obsolete, backward-looking, control-focused educational system is,” he writes in America’s Golden Age. So far, 22 states and the District of Columbia have enacted “bell-to-bell” bans on the use of cell phones during school hours. A further 19 states, according to the Harvard Kennedy School, allow school boards to institute such bans.

Newt Gingrich represents the advent of a new movement of conservative techno-optimists, who, in contrast to Democrats seeking greater regulation of artificial intelligence, believe that the technology, unlocked by American capitalism, will bring about wondrous social, cultural, and economic changes. He imagines a world in which employment rates skyrocket, health care becomes vastly cheaper and more effective, and myriad societal problems are solved. As a result, the “enormous, expensive systems” set up by the Left ostensibly to solve these problems but which really exist to perpetuate their bureaucracies — like the university system — will crumble.

*****

Gingrich has a strong argument for why he is the man best-suited to predict America’s next 50 years.

In the introduction to his book, he describes how, as a child, he had an interest in psychohistory, an idea put forward by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov. Psychohistory is, according to Gingrich, the idea that historians can “use their knowledge of the past to project possibilities (not certainties) about the future.” While a graduate student at Tulane University in 1969, Gingrich taught a class predicting what the world would look like in the year 2000. He was then hired by West Georgia College with the understanding that he would “work on more than traditional history.”

Gingrich is also a driver of history with incredible foresight. It is thanks to him that the modern conservative movement came into existence. He single-handedly, like a protagonist from an Ayn Rand novel, led conservatism out of hibernation and into the heights of power using his own vision and force of will. (READ NEXT from NEWT GINGRICH: America Faces a Republican Revolution)

We are very well advised, then, in listening to Gingrich when he tells us where America is headed. His extraordinary predictions include that hospice will “largely be replaced by robotic personal support companions”; lifespans will extend to the average age of 140; your house’s artificial intelligence system will order groceries and cook “exactly what you want to eat”; instead of learning history and geography, you will experience it via virtual reality; you will dance as a performer in a ballet in Vienna’s Staatsoper in a simulated world; an android partner will be a “much bigger part” of your life than your “relatives, coworkers, or neighbors”; asteroid mining settlements and space resorts will attract American citizens; and physical disabilities will be virtually eliminated.

I count myself among those whose imagination is limited to reading a book in front of my fireplace, but we are embarking upon transformative times, and we are in great need of conservative intellectual might to learn how to navigate it. Newt Gingrich, representative of the new conservative techno-optimists, offers us necessary and instructive reading on that front in America’s Golden Age: Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities.

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