Greater Israel—Building a Multi-trillion Dollar Economy
Part 1 of 2
Israel Invictus!
“Zionism 2.0: Themes and Proposals” is dedicated to developing an inventory of actionable projects that will contribute to the development of a Greater Israel, to a Zionism Potentia — a Zionism, perforce, of Virtue and Fortitude (Virtus et Fortitudo). Zionism 2.0 views the Zionist project as not having ended with the creation of Israel in 1948, but rather as a starting point of a long process of social and intellectual evolution in which deep and meaningful aspects of Hebraic civilization will come to the fore and flower to the immense benefit of humankind. In our view, modern Zionism did not emerge with Theodore Herzl, under whom multiple movements and tendencies briefly coalesced due to his charismatic and mercurial leadership in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, the beginnings of modern Zionism go back to the 15th and 16th centuries, and were coterminous with the Age of Discovery and the scientific and philosophical breakthroughs of the European enlightenment. Modern political Zionism was fashioned in an unbroken historical continuum, religiously and ritually encoded, between Eretz Israel and the Jewish people; Zionism was intrinsically aligned with rituals of patterned remembrance that were woven deeply into everyday life and the religious calendar that governed Jewish life for millennia. We view modern day Zionism as a project of enormous duration and ambition, functioning on a civilizational scale that seeks nothing less than to reshape and transform the world.
Zionism 2.0 seeks, amongst other objectives and aims, to advance Israel over the course of the coming generation, between 2025 and 2048, to the very top tier of the world’s most advanced nations — economically, technologically, intellectually and socially. In the fields of medicine, disease amelioration, drug development, pharmacological therapeutics, and medical technology and instrumentation, we plan to catapult Israel to the position of the world’s unchallenged leader, and, furthermore, to make Hebrew the lingua franca of medical knowledge, teaching and practice (a more detailed elaboration of this project is described in an earlier post on this blog).
The world stands at the threshold of an era of staggering wealth creation and transformation. The scope of these events can be gleaned through the bold and astonishing announcement by President Trump on the first full day of his Presidency (January 21st, 2025). Trump’s announcement referred to a vast technological undertaking involving $500-billion of planned investment and allocation for building the infrastructure necessary to support the development of industrial undertakings and applications in Artificial Intelligence. The largest US tech companies, including such firms as OpenAI, Oracle, Google, Facebook, Amazon, the Japanese technology powerhouse, SoftBank, and the investment arm of the UAE sovereign wealth fund, are said to be party to the discussions.
This commitment by President Trump follows closely on a number of grand investment proposals circulating around the world’s business and financial capitals this past year. These proposals are seeking support for multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments in machine intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. Some of these proposals, including that of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creator of the AI application, ChatGPS, have sought to raise as much as five trillion dollars, a sum of money that exceeds the GNP of all but four countries — i.e., USA ($29 Trillion), China ($18.5 trillion), Germany ($4.92 trillion) and Japan ($4.39 Trillion), with England and France trailing not too far behind.
The available pools of capital globally to finance such massive investments, it goes without saying, are extremely limited. Although weak in comparison, the only parallels historically to such gargantuan investments would be such projects as: the development of the rail networks in the middle of the 19th century; the electrification of most of the world in the first half of the 20th century (utilizing high-voltage, alternating current, centralized electrical energy infrastructure); and the vast computing/telephony and communications infrastructure investments of the late 20th century. Transposed in adjusted dollars, and calculated as a proportion of total global capital and GNP, these historic projects in railways, electricity and computing/information would each amount to about 10 trillion dollars in inflation adjusted terms, at a minimum. Contemporaneously, and contextually for comparison’s sake, the global investment in energy worldwide amounts to approximately three trillion dollars annually. Commitments to carbon capture and clean ‘green’ energy are estimated to have reached close to 1.5 trillion dollars, although the current commitment to ’green’ conversion is on increasingly shaky ground with the new Trump administration’s commitment to hydrocarbons and drilling. However staggering and preposterous these sums might seem on their face, it is apparent that some germane context and reference points can be found appropriate to the scale of what is being planned. Trump’s commitment of $500 billion, an astronomical sum for ‘seed capital’, would have seemed inconceivable, and would likely have been greeted with complete incredulity prior to his inauguration on January 20th, 2025.
Developing a new world economy around AI, robotics, and the industrial revolution that will inevitably ensue, requires developing entirely new types of FABs, and radically new semiconductor fabrication facilities. These facilities will in turn involve the sub-nanoscale implementation of new physical structures (still at the theoretical stage), and new types of exotic materials; in turn, these will require utterly new processing technologies, perhaps functioning on the atomic level. Such facilities will cost tens of billions of dollars. The raw material requirements for these facilities, to say nothing about the energy requirements involved, will be enormous, and will necessitate a global hunt for scarce minerals and rare earth metals.
The entire global communication framework will also have to be redesigned and reinforced to support the massively enlarged bandwidth demands of this AI-centred economy. Existing cloud storage frameworks will have to be rethought and redesigned to support the four or five order of magnitude increase in storage needs. Fault tolerance, quadruple redundancy, and new types of active cyber defence will be necessary to ensure that these vital systems are proof to subversion and attack. In fact, much of the entire world’s industrial manufacturing and processing facilities will have to be entirely re-engineered to support adjacent developments. New educational, learning and vocational models, will also have to be established.
Importantly, many of the authors of these proposals, as well as the scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors responsible for many of the seminal breakthroughs and inventions in encryption, computing, algorithms, logic, linguistics, neurology, system engineering, semiconductors, and dozens of other related disciplines, are Jewish (see previous post on Jewish intelligence and achievement). From my personal knowledge, many of these individuals, perhaps the majority, have close ties to and sympathies for Israel, as well as relationships with Israeli firms, scientists and academics. These personal relationships and connections will be crucial to negotiating a very significant stake in all that is being contemplated, and in mobilizing the tremendous financial and intellectual resources that will be required. A survey and canvas of all the figures who can be recruited to work in academia or specialized laboratories in Israel needs to be performed.
The author of this blog, it should be disclosed, is himself promoting the development of an institution that would be built on top of the AI infrastructure that Trump’s plan is introducing. We refer to this new type of economic and technological institution as the Von Neumann Universal Constructor and Tool Facility, abbreviated as the Von Neumann Facility (VN Facility). This facility can ostensibly manufacture ‘anything’ — that is, anything that can be physically described (similarly, and philosophically akin, with what the brilliant Israeli-British Oxford theoretician David Deutsch, the architect of the quantum Turing machine [QTM], has elaborated and described). Although greatly elaborated, the premise for the Universal Constructor rests on ideas put forward by the preeminent polymath John von Neumann, who was the architect and father of the underlying architecture of modern computing and one of the great and supreme geniuses of human history–his contributions are such that it could be said that we live ostensibly in a von Neumann universe!.
The Von Neumann Universal Constructor and Tool Facility is envisioned as a network-linking hundreds of millions of people around the world, that revolves around a proprietary model of enterprise creation; this framework of enterprise creation will enable millions of startups and companies to be organized and launched with unprecedented efficiency and with an order of magnitude decrease in cost. The writer and his associates (it should be disclosed) plan to develop one of the first such Von Neumann Facilities in the Negev Desert in Israel. The proposed framework would tap Israel’s great intellectual aptitudes and talent, and employ these intellectual resources at the pinnacle of its ecosystem. The enterprise will link millions of people around the world inextricably and deeply with the VN Facility in Israel. The entire global infrastructure for what is envisioned would indeed involve in excess of a trillion dollars over the course of its first decade or two-a scale of investment not dissimilar to OpenAI, Sam Altman’s proposal. A more detailed description of the Von Neumann Universal Constructor will appear in a future blog post.
Part 2 of 2 to follow
- This post is dedicated to the 36 year old special forces commander Arnon Zmora who on June 8th , 2024 laid down his life while rescuing Noa Argamani, Almog Meir, Andre Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv. May his memory be a blessing.