Quote · Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Michael Kratsios on the New Golden Age of American Science | EP #276
Where this was said
Governing at Exponential Speed: How Washington Keeps Up with AI
At 3:16 · chapter starts 3:06
With Ray Kurzweil's prediction of a century of progress in the next decade as backdrop, Peter pushes Kratsios on whether the US government can possibly keep pace with exponential technological change. Kratsios responds not with defensiveness but with a framework: technologies are either 'born free' — like the 1990s internet, where government's best move is to step back — or 'born in captivity,' like AI-powered medical diagnostics and commercial drones, where the technology cannot reach Americans unless government affirmatively changes the regulatory landscape. [1] — Michael Kratsios "Kratsios splits all technologies into two categories: 'born free' (like the 1990s internet) where government should do nothing, and 'born i…" 03:05 The EU AI Act becomes his sharpest illustration of failure: it was written and finalized before ChatGPT was even invented, making it structurally inapplicable to the large language models it was supposed to regulate. For Kratsios, this is the original sin of technology governance — regulating before you understand what you're regulating.
The Genesis Mission is the administration's crown jewel: a government-wide initiative to apply AI to scientific discovery across every federal agency, not just one. Kratsios wants to double scientific productivity over the next decade — and has now privately upgraded that ambition to 10x.
