A look at some themes at this year's Hill and Valley Forum: embracing government-led industrial policy to onshore manufacturing, AI's unpopularity, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
The forum’s agenda suggests a change in the tech-policy conversation from the earlier CEO-led push to loosen AI rules toward a more state-centered bargain: support for domestic capacity alongside greater attention to AI’s social legitimacy.
That framing also connects AI strategy to manufacturing and national capability, echoing coverage of India’s chip ambitions and AI constraints. It matters because industrial-policy goals and public skepticism can pull in different directions for AI companies.
First-order effects
- Forum participants are elevating government-backed onshoring as a practical priority, making domestic production capacity a more central part of the AI and technology policy agenda.
- AI’s lack of public appeal becomes an explicit constraint on industry messaging and policy advocacy, rather than a concern that can be separated from deployment plans.
Second-order effects
- AI firms and investors seeking public support may need to pair pro-innovation arguments with clearer accounts of employment, local investment, and distributional effects.
- Manufacturing policy, AI infrastructure, and technology regulation become more tightly linked: companies pursuing state support face greater pressure to show that their expansion serves broader economic goals.
Third-order effects
- If this alignment persists, AI policy could move toward a state-mediated model in which access to support, procurement, or favorable rules is increasingly tied to domestic industrial capacity and public legitimacy.
- The resulting political bargain remains unsettled: the same concerns about AI’s benefits and income effects could either broaden support for deployment or strengthen demands for constraints on it.
The trend: AI is becoming an industrial-policy issue as much as a software-policy issue, with governments and companies linking technological leadership to domestic capacity and political consent.