For what comes next, however, Mr Trump needs a strategy, not just tactics. A starting point must be to promote America’s values. Mr Trump acts as if he believes that might is right. He shows a cynical disdain for the values America enshrined in global institutions after the second world war. If he follows that course America will be diminished as an idea and as a moral and political force. When America competes with China as a guardian of a rules-based order, it starts from a position of strength. But any Western democracy that enters a ruthless race to the bottom with China will—and should—lose.
The tradition lives on. Many contemporary AI systems do not so much mimic human thinking as they do the less imaginative minds of bureaucratic institutions; our machine-learning techniques are often programmed to achieve superhuman scale, speed and accuracy at the expense of human-level originality, ambition or morals.