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Jobs are always evolving, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence. But if the work youre doing bears little resemblance to the role you were promised, and especially if no one has explained or discussed the change with you, you might be experiencing a career bait-and-switch. When ResumeBuilder surveyed 1,000 U.S. employees, nearly one in five said their role had changed significantly or was completely different from what they were hired to do. Additionally, 30% felt undervalued or overlooked, according to the survey report, and 74% found conversations about career growth inconsistent, delayed, or addressed only after an issue arose. Its very unlikely someone will be in exactly the same role for their entire career. But what distinguishes normal changes in responsibilities from something more worrisome is clear communication and expectations, says Stacie Haller, ResumeBuilders chief career advisor. Normal changes build on the skills you were hired for, come with a conversation, and move you forward, she says. Its cause for concern when the job you’re doing barely resembles the one you interviewed for, when youve quietly absorbed the work of two people without a new title or a raise, or when your priorities shift overnight with no explanation. If youre spending more time adapting to shifting demands than doing the work you were hired for, she adds, thats a big sign something is wrong. A changing role can become a poor fit for the person performing it, says Anthony Belluccia, an industrial and organizational psychologist at the talent optimization platform The Predictive Index. Being capable of handling new responsibilities doesnt necessarily mean they suit your strengths or professional needs. People can only flex into a mismatched role for so long, he tells Fast Company. Drifting roles wear people down even when theyre capable of doing the work. Get clear on what your job is now Sometimes employers may fail to update a role as the business changes, which adds to the confusion. Restructuring, understaffing, and AI all stack new tasks onto a role, and unless someone redefines what success looks like, the person in the seat absorbs the difference, Belluccia says. Before you decide what to do next, ask your manager to explain how your responsibilities have changed and what you are now being assessed against. That’s the recommendation of Lisa Leath, chief people officer at the community management platform Vantaca. I think much of the time employees have no idea what theyre accountable for, she tells Fast Company. At Vantaca, Leath says, the role of an engineer changed significantly when it became more focused on AI. Changes like these put the responsibility on managers to explain how employees can now do their job well. As jobs change, we owe it, in a manager role or a leader role, to be explicit in how people can be successful, she says. Another thing: Suddenly doing a substantially different role can take you away from the experience you hoped to gain. A mismatch between your title and responsibilities can make it harder to explain your experience to your next employer. If you took a job to build specific skills or reach a certain goal and youre now doing something else entirely, thats time and momentum you dont get back, says Haller at ResumeBuilder. Haller recommends considering other opportunities if you have raised your concerns and nothing changes within a few months, or if the role has become so misaligned with your career goals it will hinder your progress. Looking while youre still employed gives you more control over your next move, rather than forcing you to make a decision under pressure, she says. Look for red flags during the interview The warning signs an employer is inconsistent may become apparent even before you take the job, so go into your next job search with your eyes open, Haller says. Be cautious if the job description is vague, if different interviewers describe the role in different ways, or if no one can clearly explain what success looks like, she says. Pressure to accept an offer quickly, or evasive answers about why the position is open, are also red flags. María José Lorenzo, VP of talent acquisition at Hire With Near, a recruitment agency that helps U.S. companies hire remote talent in Latin America, tells Fast Company that a career bait-and-switch is probably not done on purpose most of the time. “It starts with a role that was never fully defined, she says. When a company comes to us, we spend a lot of the kickoff call making sure we understand what the person will be doing day-to-day, not only the title and the list of requirements. If that step is rushed, the job description can end up describing the role the company wishes it had, not the one it’s actually offering. The person finds out about the real one after they start, Lorenzo says. So be aware of poorly defined job descriptions before you apply. My advice for candidates is to ask in the interview: What would success look like in my first month? And in my first three months? Who will I be working with day-to-day? she adds. If the hiring manager can’t answer, that doesnt necessarily mean its a bait-and-switch,” she says. “But it tells you the role may change once youre in it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Emily Foran, a creative director and graphic designer, has not been asked by clients to come up with an original idea from scratch in a year. Thats kind of killing my soul, Foran says. Im having clients, new and existing, send me crap they had Claude or ChatGPT mock up for them, and then ask me to either clean it up or straight up work with it. And I hate that. Its such an insult. These days, she feels more like a pixel pusher than a creative, a concern echoed by many of her peers. Foran, the president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Maine, is one of more than a dozen graphic designers Fast Company interviewed who say that generative artificial intelligence has completely changed their relationship with their bosses, clients, and work itself over the past 18 months. Clients have asked for lower rates, because they claim theyre now the ones coming up with images alongside an AI assist. Some designers have been laid off and explicitly told that AI would replace them. Others are only getting guidance from their bosses that amounts to Ask ChatGPT. Many still have jobs, yet feel like their work and perspective are undervalued or seen as replaceable. Foran has put her foot down; she has an AI policy on the website for her studio, Foran Concepts, that asks clients not to upload her work into generative AI systems or use it to generate feedback for her. Most of the designers Fast Company interviewed dont view themselves as dogmatically anti-AI, but theyre wary of how the technology is affecting their industry. Overall, theres a sense that ChatGPT, Claude, and other generative AI systems now get to do the most fulfilling part of the work, while humans are left with the tedious aftermath. ‘IVE ALREADY CREATED IT’ Amanda, a graphic designer in Canada, initially felt optimistic about the potential for AI images in the industry. A lot of people have a hard time articulating what theyre looking for, and now heres a tool that just shows it, she says. She thought it might help her clients share their vision for the project, which she could use as inspiration for the creative part of the process. But in her experience, that isnt how the technology has played out. Not even close. They always say, Make it look more professional, and then get it ready for the printer, Amanda says. Then, they add, By the way, now that Ive saved you the trouble of developing the creative, it should be cheaper, right? But using AI hasnt led to any cost savings on the design side. In fact, designers say that images rendered by AI ultimately result in more work for them on the back end. “By the way, now that Ive saved you the trouble of developing the creative, it should be cheaper, right?” One graphic designer at a small firm based in Boston, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss her workplace candidly, says that AI might be streamlining the process for whoever is prompting it, but for me, its definitely not cutting down my time. What used to take me an hour to do might be taking me three hours, because I have to collapse 20 bullet points that are in 20 different boxes into one text box. The formatting on AI-made assets is wacky, and the sizing is all wrong. When I sit down and I open up a project and I can tell that Claude built it, like, okay, there goes the rest of my afternoon, she says. Still, her company leadership is pushing the use of AI in their daily work and she sees it from clients too. Its just coming from all sides, she says. Many clients have bought into the hype that AI will make things faster, and are trying to set timelines accordingly with designers. We have had clients come to us and say, Well, since we gave you the concept, this shouldnt take that long, says Michele Kasl, owner and creative director of Premier Designs. I have never heard that more in my life than I have the past six months. Kasl sees it as part of the devaluation of design work. Just because AI can do something doesnt mean it should, or even that the result it will produce is good or good enough, Kasl says. Clients are dabbling in areas where they lack the expertise, but they feel like theyve gotten the expertise because of the output that AI has put in front of them. So what happens when clients ask Premier Designs for a truncated timeline because theyve generated their own assets? Frankly, weve lost business because of it, Kasl says. Robert Lodi, whose company Rock Pixel Scissors builds and fixes websites for companies of varying sizes, says this year he has seen an influx of AI-built mockups, designs. Some people think theyre ready to go and we look at them and at a glance, were like, all right, this isnt bad. . . . But once you start looking more, like with a lot of AI content, you start to see some issues. “If you come back with a bunch of AI stuff, then the price is going up” AI-generated handoffs are happening so often that Lodi has added a redesign phase to the companys workflow, where we try to take what theyve sent and work with them to make it something thats functional and usable. One major issue he sees? None of the AI-made websites are designed for accessibility. I have yet to see one thats going to pass an accessibility test, he says. And thats important because there is now a thing called accessibility lawsuits. Over the summer, he worked with a nonprofit to design an email newsletter. The client gave him AI-generated mockups that were simply unusablethey were way too big. If you tried to cram it into an email, its never going to display well or its going to take 17 times their budget to actually make it work and its going to have to be custom code that they can never edit or reproduce in their email system, Lodi says. Despite these clear issues, the client insisted on seeing his mockup formatted for the email system. Were getting more of that now because theyre happy with their things, theyve put work into their prompts, but they dont realize that its not ready for the real world, Lodi says. Managing clients or bosses expectations and figuring out graceful ways to tell them their ideas arent doable has long been something that designers need to navigate in their jobs. But even though it isnt a new problem, it has been exacerbated by AI. Theres a disconnect, Lodi says. They think they have finished products when really, theyre further behind than if we had just done it right from the start. He even told one client that if you come back with a bunch of AI stuff, then the price is going up, Lodi says. The client laughed wen he said that, and then returned with more AI-generated mockups. The price did go up, he says. AN AVERAGE DESIGN BY DEFINITION When clients decide to hire designers, theyre spending money to get something original. By creating mockups with generative AI, though, theyre effectively ensuring the opposite. I did try to have conversations with either prospects or clients to say, You realize that AI is the average of everything that already exists out there? says Amanda, the graphic designer in Canada. Do you want to look like the average sum of your 30 competitors? For some clients, the answer seems to be sure. Its like, if its good enough, theyre happy with it, says Foran, the creative director in Maine. And certainly, there are many businesses adopting AI that were never going to pay a designer to help them. But Foran has been disheartened to see some of her long-term clients hop on the AI train, too. On one hand, Im grateful because I can still pay my bills, support my family with my job, Foran says. On the other hand, where did the fun go? Where did the innovation go? Where did the art of it go? Kasl thinks that, with a tricky economy, businesses with a budget crunch see design as one of the first line items on the chopping block. Theres no immediate consequence to bad creative, Kasl says. The fallout isnt immediate. No one ends up in the hospital because of a bad flyer design, or no one ends up in jail because they put together an ugly postcard. . . . Brand perception is going to be affected by these choices that theyre making. Erik, a marketing designer, experienced this when he worked for a small hobby company where AI kept getting more deeply embedded in the design process. Shortly after he started working there, his employer set him up with a corporate ChatGPT account to use for quick iterations to use in-house. It made sense at that level, he says. But then, the CEO began asking for ever-quicker turnaround times to make up for a lack of planning. We have a Memorial Day sale coming up in a week. Nothing gets talked about. Nothing is discussed. We have ideas, we pitch them, its put on the back burner, he says. Then, mere days before the event, leadership wanted to move forward with kitschy ideas. When the design team brought up that there wasnt enough time to go through a proper design process, Erik says, higher-ups said that, Well just throw it in ChatGPT. When he was tasked with new projects, hed try to get insight from his direct boss about the messaging or the look they wanted. The constant answer? Just ask ChatGPT. And his manager would ignore Eriks decade-plus of design experience in favor of whatever the AI model spit out. Ultimately, the company got called out for using AI slop in its Facebook and Instagram ads. Erik eventually lost his job because he kept clashing with others over AI use. TROUBLE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF DESIGNERS A designer who spent the last half decade working in-house for tech startups began to hear AI as a major buzzword over the past few years. (She asked to remain anonymous because she is searching for work.) She and her product design team told higher-ups they would use AI for efficiency and workflows, but not to generate ideas. That pushback led to internal tensions. During one product launch, she recalls that leadership tried to show how much quicker they could be by creating a landing page using AI without any help from designers. I said, But your information hierarchy is all over the place. The product animation looks like any other product. Plus, the landing page included information about the product that wasnt accurate. Ultimately, that version did not go live. Still, she kept getting feedback that the team needed to go faster, but never got a sense of what they were supposed to do with the time they were allegedly gaining. Youre just outputting a lot of noise, she says. It all looks exactly the same. She advocated for building out a brand asset library using original photography and video shoots to distinguish the look of the company. That idea did not fly. I was encouraged to just generate video from AI, she says. The startup decided to cut out the middle man: her. Eventually, the company leaned into using AI and a lot of roles were eliminated, she says, including hers. Which is sad to see because all the work that I had done to make that brand differentiate and lead with human-first storytellingnow it just looks exactly the same as with all the other competitors. Alan Peters, a designer and brand builder with Jupiter Visual, has a similar story. He worked as the lead graphic designer at an online sticker company before the business laid off the creative team in marketing in favor of an online AI service. But the product isnt better, he says; its just cheaper. “With the generative AI, its like, Well, okay, we prompted it. Ship it.” Its not doing a better job than a designers going to do for creating an asset from scratch, Peters says. Its just completely generic. It references the colors in a vague way but it misses all the marks on typography, misses all the marks on representing the products properly, on brand voice and then just the design quality is very poor. In the lead-up to the layoff, Peters noticed the companys higher-ups gravitating towards using AI for design tasks. His team used it too, but mostly to make workflows more efficient. For example, while Peters pushed for actual product photography, he was fine using AI in post-production to do things like adding a background. But Peters noticed a gradual shift in the way company leaders approached the back-and-forth of a design process. As he sees it, the willingness to collaborate changed. There was a lot of feedback when it was the human designers. . . . You might see rounds of revisions on assets to get where the marketing team wanted something to be, he says. But then with the generative AI, its like, Well, okay, we prompted it. Ship it. As bosses and clients require designers to use AI for more of their job, those decisions ripple through the industry. Its leading some designers to leave the industry altogether. Foran has observed this through her work with AIGA Maine, especially [among] younger people who barely even got their feet in the ground, she says. Its like they dont see the possibility because there havent been opportunities. Thats a concern for Amanda, too, who says that theres something lost when AI will do the work that traditionally fell to younger designers, like business cards, postcards, and flyers. Thats where you get yor reps in, right? You get your 10,000 hours doing these smaller things and then eventually move up to the more strategy work, she says. As an experienced creative, were still being hired for strategy work, whereas a junior can now easily be replaced by AI to turn out those sort of smaller things. While some companies will continue to place an emphasis on good design, the rise of the AI-abetted armchair design boss amounts to a great unmasking. Suddenly, designers see more clearly than ever before who values their work and who is willing to kick them to the curb or ignore their insights as soon as theyre able.
Category:
E-Commerce
Thanks to Siri AI and Shortcuts in iOS 27, I’ve finally created a better version of Shazam. Shazam is great for identifying songs you hear in the wild, but not so great at revisiting them later. It requires either Apple Music or Spotify to play the songs in full, and there’s no way to add more context about what made you tag a song to begin with. Now, I can press a button on my iPhone to make Shazam work the way I want: After identifying a song, it adds the name and artist to a “Shazam Tracks” page in Obsidian, includes a link to a free stream of that song on YouTube, and provides space for me to jot down where I was or what I was doing at the time. None of this required any coding knowledge on my part. Instead, I just described my ideal Shazam setup in Apple’s Shortcuts app, and it assembled the whole thing for me. Apple’s Shortcuts app has been around since 2018, letting you chain a series of actions into powerful routines. But while it’s a neat tool for power users, in the past it’s required a lot of tinkering with variables and if-then statements. The new “Describe a Shortcut” feature in iOS 27 makes the process much simpler, and it’s got me looking at iOS automation with some new energy. Describing a Shortcut To use Describe a Shortcut, you need an iPhone, iPad, or Mac that supports Siri AI: iPhone 15 Pro models or any newer iPhone. iPads with M-series processors or the A17 Pro iPad Mini. M-series Macs or the MacBook Neo. You will also need iOS 27, iPadOS 27, or MacOS 27 Golden Gate, and will need to opt into the Siri AI beta under Settings > Siri. There’s a waitlist, but getting through it only took a day in my experience. Once you have Siri AI access, open the Shortcuts app and hit the “+” button. Then, describe in natural language what you want to accomplish. Here are some examples of Shortcuts I’ve created by describing them: “Full charge” shortcut that overrides my usual 85% battery limit until the following day. “Urgent reminder” shortcut that schedules a task in the Reminders app with a full-blown alarm instead of a simple chime. “Rambler” shortcut for dictating a lengthy amount of text, cleaning it up using Apple’s cloud-based AI models, and then sharing or copying it to the clipboard. “Turn on grayscale” shortcut that switches the screen to black-and-white mode at bedtime, while also showing options to turn grayscale back off or delay it by five minutes. Companion “Turn off grayscale” shortcut that activates at wake-up. “Scan Document” shortcut that loads the document scanner in Apple’s Files app. Once you’ve created a Shortcut, trigger it by tapping its icon in the Shortcuts app or asking Siri to run it by name. For even easier access, add it to your home screen (long-press the Shortcut and hit “Share” to see this option), assign it an iPhone’s physical Action Button (under Settings > Action Button), or use Back Tap. You can also run Shortcuts automatically, based on triggers like time of day, your location, phone settings, charging status, battery level, Focus mode, or when a specific app is running. These triggers now live directly inside each Shortcut, so you can include them while describing the Shortcut you want to create. Fine-tuning Like an AI chatbot, Apple’s “Describe a Shortcut” prompt will respond to follow-ups, which is helpful if the Shortcut doesn’t do exactly what you wanted. While creating my “Urgent reminder” Shortcut, for instance, the app misinterpreted my request and merely added a “flag” toggle to the reminder. I had to make clear that the reminder should trigger an alarm instead. The more precise and descriptive you can be, the better. The old way of creating Shortcuts also remains available by tapping the “Edit” button. This brings up a menu where you can manually chain together new actions or modify existing ones. While you shouldn’t have to mess with this menu too much, it can be a useful reference for all the things that Shortcuts can do. In a way, Apple’s new “Describe a Shortcut” feature is like a diet version of vibe coding, letting you bypass all the confusing steps that iOS and Mac automation once required. Even if there’s no actual code involved, it’s a way to accomplish things that may be just a bit beyond your technical grasp, and it’s quietly one of iOS 27’s best new features.
Category:
E-Commerce
You can read endless online advice telling you how to train AI to sound like you. Most suggest using AI to analyze your blog, your newsletter, and your social posts. Thats all fine, but you should also be asking AI to analyze your customersthe words they use to describe their pain points. A voice of the customer analysis or document is what companies often use to guide everything from web pages to sales material. If youre a solopreneur, you’re the whole research team for a voice-of-customer analysis. The good news is that AI can help you build this document from conversations you’ve already had with clients. And the results might change how you describe your own work. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to \u003Cem\u003E\u003Cem\u003EWork. Better.\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldnt suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.workbetter.media\/\u0022\u003Eworkbetter.media\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457605,"imageMobileId":91457608,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}} How a “voice of customer” document helps your business Earlier in my career, I was the product manager at a financial technology company. Part of my job was translating what customers asked for into something the development team could build. I conducted endless interviews because it was critical to hear how customers described their problems, in their own words. You probably have similar context and conversations for your solo business, just not compiled in one place. A voice-of-customer analysis should capture your clients problems and goals. It’s understandable that most solopreneurs skip this step. You talk to clients every week, so you probably feel like you already know what they need. But when you write about their problems, you’re likely using your own vocabulary. Your clients’ words are useful anywhere you market your business, whether you use generative AI to help or write entirely from scratch. You can use your voice-of-customer analysis to guide proposals or to guide the questions you ask during discovery calls. They also work for email sequences or landing pages. When potential clients see their problems described using language they connect with, it’s easier for them to trust that you understand what they need. Gather what your clients have already told you Start by collecting raw material from wherever it already exists: Call transcripts. (If you use an AI notetaker, you probably have a record of your discovery calls and client meetings.) Emails and inquiry forms Testimonials and reviews Social media comments Conversations with people who didnt hire you are also useful. Their objections often show you why someone hesitates. One word of caution: You’ll want to strip out client names and identifying details before you upload anything, especially if you have agreements with your clients that govern the use of their data with AI tools. Ask AI to quote your clients directly AI is good at sorting through a big pile of transcripts and other documents. The catch is that AI summaries tend to smooth out the specific language you’re after. So your prompt needs to ask for direct quotes, along with the source for each one. Here’s a prompt you can use: I’m uploading [describe documents] from my clients and prospects. Find the problems they mention most often and the outcomes they want. Also flag any hesitations they had about hiring me, and any words or phrases they use again and again. Group everything by theme. For each theme, include direct quotes word for word, with the source. Don’t paraphrase or summarize. When the results come back, you’ll want to spot-check some of the quotes against your original transcripts, since AI is known to hallucinate. If a quote doesn’t appear anywhere in the source material, remove it from the document. Keep it current as your business changes I plan to refresh my voice-of-customer analysis regularlyat least once a year, and maybe more often. Now that I have the prompt and baseline document, it should be a quick update. Most of the work comes afterward, when you go back through your website and sales copy. The voice-of-customer analysis is simply a starting point to rework the language you use to describe your business. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to \u003Cem\u003E\u003Cem\u003EWork. Better.\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldnt suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.workbetter.media\/\u0022\u003Eworkbetter.media\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText""SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457605,"imageMobileId":91457608,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}}
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E-Commerce
Since World War II, the United States has dominated science and technology. With more than 400 Nobel Prizes, it dwarfs every other country. Major breakthroughs like nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and the internet were all led by researchers and engineers in the U.S. Today, it leads in every major technological category. To a great extent, this has been the result of government action. Federal agencies such as the NIH, NSF, and DARPA spearheaded many of the most advanced technologies, and U.S. research universities have become beacons for top scientific talent. These advances have brought us greater prosperity, better health, and enhanced well-being. Thats why the recent news of an executive order that would give political oversight to scientific grants provoked such an uproar. Although the administration quickly backed off, the incident represents a troubling trend of political interference in science that has led to a major brain drain of scientific talent. Without a major change in course, the damage could be permanent. Science, The Endless Frontier America wasn’t always a scientific mecca. In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, bright young students often had to go to Europe to pursue advanced degrees in the sciences because American universities were considered second-rate. Yet as the U.S. industrialized, that began to change and, by the 1930s, with Europe increasingly in turmoil, world-class scientific talent began to flock to American shores. In 1940, Vannevar Bush, who at the time was serving as president of the Carnegie Institution for Science, went to see President Roosevelt. His proposal led to the establishment of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which mobilized the countrys scientific resources for World War II. It was, by all accounts, a resounding success, resulting in breakthroughs such as radar, penicillin, the proximity fuse and, most famously, the atomic bomb. As the war was winding down, Roosevelt asked Bush to write a report proposing how America could continue the success of the OSRD in peacetime. That report, Science: The Endless Frontier, was delivered to President Truman in 1945 and would set the stage for Americas technological dominance during the second half of the century. Bush wrote: Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. It was that vision that led to U.S. technological dominance. Look at any major technology we use todaywhether it is the internet, GPS, or lithium-ion batteriesand the initial breakthrough came from government funding. A study from the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019 benefited from government grants. Even major private firms, such as Google and Qualcomm, started out with government funding. A key tenet of that vision is that decisions about research grants be made by scientists, not political appointees, so that we are funding scientific, not political priorities. That principle is what has come under threat. The Visceral Abstract There is a long history of politicians being hostile to science. In a 2012 interview, then-Sen. and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the age of the universe and the Big Bang has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. Former Vice President Mike Pence expressed doubts about Darwins theory of natural selection. Paul Broun, a former Georgia congressman, called it lies straight from the pit of hell. Yet the Big Bang is not just a thery, but the result of a set of theories, including general relativity and quantum mechanics, combined with many observations over a period of decades. Darwins theory is core to our understanding of life sciences. Students learn about these things not to shape their religious beliefs, but because they underlie basic scientific work. Politicians attack science because its an easy target. Its not hard for the public to imagine that their tax dollars are funding overeducated elites thinking up wacky theories in ivory-tower institutions. Scientific theories take time and effort to understand and can be maddeningly difficult to explain. The truth is that we live in a world of the visceral abstract, where strange theories underlie much of our everyday existence. Technologies that we use every day, such as the lasers that scan our purchases in the checkout aisle and the semiconductors that drive our devices, arose from these same strange ideas. Darwins theory underlies everything from fighting diseases like COVID-19 to guiding logistics systems. If we are to master the advanced technologies of the futuresuch as quantum computing, synthetic biology, and materials sciencewe need to master the scientific theories that will drive them. The Tragedy of Trofim Lysenko While Vannevar Bush showed what can be achieved when a government invests in science as a public good, Trofim Lysenko showed what happens when science is politicized. A Soviet agronomist who considered the concept of a gene a “bourgeois invention,” Lysenkolike Pence and Brounwas skeptical of Darwins theories. Yet he was able to get Joseph Stalin to support his ideassuch as his theory that exposing seeds to low temperatures will help them grow in the winterwhich were mainly based on political expediency and personal belief, not on empirical evidence. He promised miracle crop yields that never materialized, but his power allowed him to suppress legitimate scientists. The effect on Soviet biological science was chilling. Anybody reporting results that contradicted Lysenkos theories risked not only professional suicide but, in many cases, imprisonment and even execution. To adopt bourgeois science was not just to have a different idea, but to be branded an enemy of the people working to undermine the Soviet project. Meanwhile, those who went along with Lysenkos program gained authority, and competency in Soviet biological sciences was greatly undermined. Crop yields steadily declined throughout the late 1930s until his downfall in the mid-1960s. Many believe that his theories contributed to the Great Famine in China. If Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible One thing that struck me during the 15 years I lived in post-communist countries was how problems seemed to build on themselves. In Kraków, the abandoned frame of the Szkieletor building stood frozen for decades. Construction had stalled in the 1970s, so the frame just stood there rusting. It became almost a metaphor for the Soviet space as a whole. In a healthy society with checks and balances, someone would have been brought to account. There would have been litigation. A court would have mandated a cleanup. But in a command economy, power flows from a single source, with no one to hold it accountable. Those in power dont have to admit their mistakes. Questions of truth become questions of loyalty. We have a similar process underway in the U.S. When politicians and unelected bureaucrats seek to make scientific funding conform to their ideological preferences, they are not merely making budget allocations. They are seeking to control what is true and what is not. Weve seen this enough times before to know how it ends. America achieved technological dominance, in part, because of the scientists who fled Europe to escape similar populist tyranny. Now, that process is reversing, with scientists leaving America for Europe. The advantages we built after World War II are quickly eroding, threatening our prosperity and security. Thats why we dont want politicians running science. It diminishes science and leaves us with only politics.
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