Adrian was glued to his phone.
Milo had noticed this because Adrian had been looking at his phone for nearly five minutes without saying anything, which was unusual. Normally Adrian was quite decent with his phone habits.
They were sitting in Milo’s backyard. It was late afternoon in mid-September. Some pink and red cosmos inspired Milo to open a bottle of wine.
“Oh, what is that?” Adrian finally asked, looking up from his phone.
“It’s from a little town on the shore of Lago di Garda.”
“So what grape would that be?”
“Who knows? But super light, no?” Milo poured a glass for Adrian, the sun showing it off like a ruby.
“So what have you been reading?” asked Milo.
“Oh, you have to see this. It’s hilarious. Some drunk liberal writing an op-ed for The Washington Star. I started it at home and had to finish. Here, look. You have to read it now.” He laughed.
“I’ve made it fifty-four years without having to read The Washington Star.”
“The author is Julian Wainwright.”
“Give it here.”
Julian Wainwright had once been a respected political correspondent. There were photographs of him in Baghdad wearing body armor and in Moscow wearing a very good overcoat. He had interviewed presidents. He had won awards. He had written a book about the Senate that people in Washington claimed to have read.
In recent years his journalism had acquired a different quality.
His copy was still beautifully reported. His facts were, for the most part, impeccable. His columns, however, had begun to stress the relationship with his editor and also the billionaire owner of the paper.
Adrian handed Milo the phone, and Milo scrolled back up to the headline.
“The Communist Revolution of Donald Trump.”
“Subtle,” Milo sighed.
“Read it.”
Milo read aloud. “Donald Trump has spent ten years warning Americans that the communists are coming. I regret to inform readers that the president was correct. They have arrived. They have taken over the Republican Party.”
Milo stopped.
Adrian was smiling. “Keep going.”
“The revolution has not unfolded exactly as Marx predicted. There have been no barricades. The proletariat has not seized the factories. Donald Trump has seized 9.9 percent of Intel.”
Milo laughed.
“That is good.”
“I told you.”
He continued.
“At this week’s Republican convention in Dallas, after Americans had once again been warned about the socialist menace, President Trump announced his latest economic program. If Republicans retain Congress, every adult American will receive five thousand dollars.
“Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your direct deposit information.”
Milo laughed again. “He is drunk. But I’d go for the idea of Trump’s Mao Revolution or Trump’s Chinese Revolution. It’s really nationalism.”
“Keep reading.”
Milo scrolled.
“Those of us who grew up during the Cold War were provided with certain diagnostic criteria for communism. Does the government own the means of production? Communist. Does the government set prices? Communist. Does the government decide which industries should exist and where things should be manufactured? Communist. Does the government distribute enormous quantities of money to the population? Extremely communist.
“The Trump administration has now managed some version of all four while warning the country about Marxism.”
Milo stopped. “Wainwright better have some good lawyers.”
“Not sure, but I like his editor,” said Adrian.
“Less apparent.”
Milo kept reading.
“The federal government owns part of Intel. Washington has taken interests in strategically important mining and mineral companies. It acquired extraordinary powers over U.S. Steel through a golden share. It pressures pharmaceutical companies over the prices they charge Americans. It imposes tariffs designed to determine which foreign goods Americans will buy and which industries capital should favor at home.
“President Trump has even proposed a sovereign wealth fund.
“This raises an uncomfortable question for those of us who spent the 1980s learning that government ownership was the first rest stop on the highway to Moscow.
“How many companies does the United States government have to own before Ronald Reagan comes back and asks what the hell happened?”
Milo smiled.
“I like that one. Although Reagan used industrial policy too.”
“Don’t ruin it.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“You’re editing a drunk man’s column.”
“You don’t know he was drunk.”
“I am increasingly confident.”
Milo scrolled farther.
“Oh, this is too much.”
“What?”
“Venezuela.”
“Read it.”
Milo shook his head.
“When I began this column, I intended to argue that Donald Trump had become a communist. I was then reminded that in January the United States sent troops into Venezuela, captured Nicolás Maduro, carried him off to New York, announced that America would temporarily run his country, and immediately began talking about its oil.
“I confess that this has complicated my thesis.
“Kidnapping the leader of another country and taking over the oil is difficult to place on the traditional left-right spectrum. Is it communism or is it capitalism?
“Or is it simply capitalism that no longer cares about the virtues Republicans gave it for fifty years?”
Adrian burst out laughing.
Milo chuckled. He continued.
“Marx, after all, proposed the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. He did not propose invading the country next door and sending in Chevron.
“On this point I am prepared to concede that President Trump remains an innovator.”
Milo put the phone on the table.
“Ah… that’s funny. So what’s been going on with you?”
“You haven’t gotten to the good part.”
“That wasn’t the good part?”
“The sober paragraph.”
“He has one?”
“Near the end.”
Milo found it.
“The truth is that Trump is not a Marxist. Marx wanted capital ultimately abolished as a separate source of social power. Trump adores capitalists. He surrounds himself with them. He celebrates wealth. He has no apparent objection to private property and certainly none to rich people.”
Milo nodded.
“Better.”
“But Trump has abandoned another idea, one that American conservatives once considered almost synonymous with capitalism. He no longer believes that the state should stand outside the marketplace and establish neutral rules within which private actors make economic decisions.
“He wants the state inside the market.
“He wants it negotiating prices, directing investment, protecting industries, punishing foreign competitors, controlling strategic companies and occasionally distributing the proceeds to citizens.
“The capitalist may keep his factory. He may become fabulously rich from it. He must merely remember that if the president decides the factory matters to the nation, the nation may have something to say about the factory.”
Milo read the next paragraph silently.
“Well?”
“I’m reading.”
“Out loud.”
Milo continued.
“This is not Marxism. It is something simultaneously more ancient and more modern. It is state capitalism organized around nationalism rather than class. The state does not destroy capital. It recruits it.
“Marx said workers had no country.
“Trump’s answer is that capital damn well does.”
Adrian reached for the bottle and filled his glass.
“That’s the piece,” Milo said.
“Yes.”
“He could have deleted the first two thousand words.”
“Then you wouldn’t have laughed.”
“No.”
“And you wouldn’t remember it tomorrow.”
Milo handed back the phone.
“No.”
They sat for a while.
A blue jay squawked at them from the neighbor’s yellowing maple tree. In this new place, Milo had begun paying more attention to birds. He found their smallness appealing.
Adrian was back on his phone.
“You know what else happened this week?” Adrian asked.
“No.”
“OpenAI solved Navier Stokes.”
Milo turned toward him. “What?”
“Navier Stokes. . . Fluid!”
“Fluid?”
“Fluid dynamics.”
“That is not an explanation.”
“It’s considerably more than you knew thirty seconds ago.”
Adrian googled.
“The Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem. One of the Millennium Prize Problems.”
“Oh, I see.”
“A million dollars. Unsolved for more than a hundred years. You don’t know this?”
“I do read.”
“You play the clarinet.”
“One can do both.”
Adrian handed him the phone.
Milo read.
After a minute he said, “They have allegedly solved it.”
“There’s a formal proof.”
“Which still has to be understood and checked.”
“By whom? Mathematicians?” Adrian asked, smiling. “Do you know that some mathematicians are giving up their careers and going to work for OpenAI?”
Milo went back to reading.
OpenAI had deployed roughly ten thousand agents. The agents had been divided into groups. They had pursued different approaches, exchanged promising ideas and discarded bad ones. The system had generated millions of messages.
Eighty-eight hours after the effort began, a group of agents had produced the proposed Navier Stokes solution. Another AI system had formalized and verified it in Lean.
Milo put the phone down.
“Eighty-eight hours.”
“Yes.”
“That’s grotesque.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s exactly what I thought.”
Milo picked up his wine.
It was an odd problem. If a mathematician had spent thirty years trying to solve Navier Stokes and finally succeeded, Milo would have found the story beautiful. The years would have mattered. The failures would have mattered. The mathematician walking home at night thinking about Beethoven or an inequality would have mattered. If ten thousand artificial minds did the same thing in eighty-eight hours, why did it feel different? The proof was still the proof.
They were quiet again.
“When you understand a proof,” said Milo, “when you suddenly see why something must be true, there must be a feeling attached to the thought.”
“Relief?”
“More than relief.”
“Pleasure?”
“More than pleasure.”
Adrian waited.
Milo couldn’t find the word.
“That may be the interesting question about AI,” he said finally. “Whether anything happened to it when it does what it does.”
Adrian looked at him.
“Ten thousand agents exchanging two million messages.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe quite a lot happened.”
“Maybe. Maybe they had a wonderful weekend.”
Milo laughed.
“That would be considerably more disturbing.”
“Why?”
“Because I was counting on consciousness being our consolation prize.”
Adrian smiled.
A breeze moved through the maple and gave an appealing tussle to Adrian’s hair.
“It’s funny,” Adrian said. “We spent the last half hour worrying about whether Trump is a communist. And now I’m worried about whether mathematicians are obsolete.”
“They’re not obsolete.”
“Yet.”
“Stop saying yet.”
“Why?”
“Because you enjoy it too much.”
Adrian poured himself the last of the wine.
“Capitalism versus communism,” said Adrian.
Milo nodded. “The great argument of the twentieth century.”
“Maybe that’s not the argument anymore.”
“What is?”
“AI versus mankind.”
Milo looked at him. “That escalated quickly.”
“Didn’t it?”
“We went from a five-thousand-dollar government check to the extinction of humanity in one bottle of wine.”
“Wainwright would be proud.”
Milo looked at the empty bottle.
“AI versus mankind,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“And what happens to capitalism and communism?”
Adrian thought about this. “Maybe AI resolves the dispute.”
“How?”
“It seizes the means of production.”
Milo laughed.
“Then Marx was right.”
“Almost.”
“How was he wrong?”
Adrian raised his empty glass. “He thought human workers would do it.”