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DANTE RAMOS

Trump to tech world: Yeah, whatever

A pilot model of the Uber self-driving car displayed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images

As Donald Trump crisscrossed the Midwest this fall, making unfulfillable promises to bring back the Eisenhower era, he showed little interest in new technology — other than, maybe, Twitter.

When a man at an Ohio campaign stop brought up driverless cars — our best hope of preventing crashes that now kill 38,000 Americans a year and rising — Trump scoffed at the idea. “Sort of a weird thing to look over and there’s nobody in the car,” he said. And he joked, “Safer or catastrophic? I’ve seen some things.”

His comic timing was decent, I gather, but his dismissive attitude boded ill for the new economy. From autonomous vehicles to the gene editor CRISPR, lots of advances need a boost from enlightened technocrats — that is, government officials who promote good research and help society absorb innovations by establishing safety rules and marketplace norms.

Trump doesn’t think in those terms. By blowing off details and rejecting specialized expertise, he’s expressed an underlying nihilism: No matter what the government does, it’ll screw everything up. So why even bother?

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Yet even if the private companies working on driverless cars succeed in preventing 100 percent of crashes without the Trump administration’s help, there’s still plenty more to figure out — at all levels of government. Recently, Cambridge-based entrepreneur Robin Chase produced a terrific animated video laying out some stark choices.

Without enlightened public leadership, explains Chase, the cofounder of Zipcar and the vehicle-network communications firm Veniam, a shift to autonomous vehicles could swell the unemployment rolls and fill the streets with zombie cars. But with the right mix of rules and incentives, driverless cars could clean up the landscape and save commuters time and money — without hurting social equity.

When Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx showed up at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit to announce $4 billion in pilot research on driverless-car technology, he showed that the Obama administration was at least thinking about the potential risks and rewards.

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But earnest bureaucrats beware — and not just in the transportation field. On a host of tech issues, Trump’s brain trust combines the boss’s contempt for public policy with boilerplate antigovernment rhetoric.

Key adviser Newt Gingrich has called for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration, which keeps watch over medical devices and pharmaceutical advances. A top adviser on tech issues, Mark Jamison, has questioned the need for the Federal Communications Commission. Yet even as these agencies vex the fast-moving industries that they regulate, somebody needs to look after the public good and mediate among clashing commercial interests.

Right now there’s a war raging between tech giants like Apple and Google and the legacy telephone and cable monopolies. They’re fighting over so-called net neutrality and racing to snap up media companies. There’s an existential question before the FCC: In a rapidly consolidating communications sector, how harmful will it be if a handful of giant companies control what people see?

Citing this threat, Trump vowed in October to block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner. But his main complaint was with how CNN, a Time Warner property, was covering him. Will he base antitrust and telecom policies on personal beefs, like tinpot dictators do? Alternatively, will he keep making vaguely populist noises but hire various industry shills to run things behind the scenes.

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In a host of industries, lawmakers and regulatory agencies already struggle to find people with the technical chops to make good policy. “As more and more technology gets into our businesses, the information asymmetry gets larger and larger,” Chase says. “It’s the companies that have the guy saying, ‘How are we going to harvest big data on this?’ They have people thinking about these issues all day. The public sector is completely at the short end of the stick.”

On driverless cars, at least, much of the necessary regulation can happen at the local level. Chase hopes a coalition of mayors can to work out common rules now, while the autonomous-vehicles industry is still taking shape.

Either way, technology marches forward. The question is whether public policy keeps up with new advances — or merely reacts to them afterward. Rather than being ignored or dismantled, the regulatory agencies that touch the tech economy need to be staffed with, as Trump might put it, “the best people.” The kind of cynicism that sets public policy up to fail, thereby begetting more cynicism, is a threat to the new economy — and a whole lot more.


Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Facebook: facebook.com/danteramos or on Twitter: @danteramos.