Инфраструктура США требует не ремонта, а полной перепроектировки под эру искусственного интеллекта

Reema Khan is the Founder and CEO of Green Sands Equity. Every few centuries, the scaffolding of the world is replaced. This includes the roads, the laws, the machines, even the assumptions about what a human life is for. I have spent my career at the intersection of deep technology, frontier science and diplomacy, betting on what comes next. Yet, I did not expect that the most clarifying question of that career would turn out to be the oldest one: What is all of this actually for? We are living through an infrastructure renaissance at every level, yet our attention stays fixed on individual threads. I believe what demands our attention is the loom itself. Let me try to pull it apart, and then put it back together. America's Infrastructure Problem Isn't Decay: It's Design America's highways, bridges, water systems, and grid were largely built in the Interstate Highway era. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, and since then, the country has built almost 47,000 miles of interstate, along with the ports, dams, and transit systems that defined a century of economic possibility. That was seventy years ago. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave U.S. infrastructure a C-minus, with 39% of roadways in poor or mediocre condition. The deeper problem isn't decay. That infrastructure encoded a worldview: cheap oil, daily commutes, a manufacturing economy, a stable climate, abundant water. Nearly every one of those assumptions has now expired. Remote work, aging populations, autonomous vehicles and new climate demands require new models entirely, not patched-up versions of the old ones. The Legal Infrastructure In Information Abundance But infrastructure is not only concrete and steel. It is also our legal architecture. Our legal systems were calibrated for a world where the state had to labor to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Place that standard inside a world of continuous surveillance and AI systems capable of reconstructing anyone's location, biometric state and behavior at any moment, and the evidentiary landscape inverts entirely. The question is no longer whether the state can prove what happened, but whether any of us can credibly claim we didn't do something. The architecture of innocence was built for opacity. It has not been rebuilt for transparency. The same pressure runs through contract law, which assumes negotiation under imperfect knowledge; insurance, which assumes individual fates are unknown; antitrust, which assumes market power is legible. As genetic data and predictive AI erase information asymmetry, these structures need to be reimagined from their foundations, not amended at the margins. Beyond Silicon: The Rupture After Moore's Law The redesign extends even deeper into the physical machinery that makes our information economy possible. For six decades, the semiconductor industry doubled transistor density roughly every two years (Moore's Law). But many believe that the silicon transistor is approaching its physical limits. What follows is not refinement, it's rupture. Photonic computing replaces electrons with light, already appearing in data center interconnects that generate a fraction of silicon's heat. Quantum computing goes further, using qubits that exist as 0, 1, or both simultaneously, entangled across distance, exploring an astronomical number of solutions in parallel. It makes tractable, for the first time, problems in drug discovery, materials science and cryptographic security that classical computers cannot solve. I foresee the computers of 2040 bearing the same relationship to today's machines that today's smartphones bear to the ENIAC. The New Cathedrals Of Our Era Alongside the decay of our tangible infrastructure, we are constructing an entirely new category of it: the physical embodiment of data, language, intelligence. I see data centers as the capital heavy cathedrals of our era, warehouses the size of small cities housing the substrate of collective knowledge. By 2030, they're projected to consume nearly 20% of U.S. electricity generation. The nuclear renaissance, from plant revivals to next-generation SMRs and fusion research, isn't a separate story from AI. It's the same story, told from a different angle. On First Principles What makes this moment singular is that the framework is being rewritten at every level simultaneously: roads, courts, chips, buildings, and our own sense of purpose all under renovation at once. For business leaders, this means: • Treat social norms and infrastructure shifts as strategic input, not backdrop. • Build for information symmetry as intelligence and access to data become commoditized. • Study yourself: Where you deploy capital is the clearest evidence of what you actually value. • “Harvest now, decrypt later" makes the quantum decryption race matters years before anyone wins it. For policymakers, it means: • Frameworks built for information scarcity cannot simply be patched for a world of abundance. • Antitrust, insurance, evidentiary standards and contract law all need rebuilding from their assumptions up. • Quantum-resistant cryptography can't wait. Today's encrypted data is tomorrow's open book. And, most importantly, both business and policymakers must answer: What are we actually building toward? Efficiency, automation and growth are not destinations in themselves. Life involves two distinct games. The first is the one you're born into: the existing structure of markets, institutions and norms. Learning it quickly and navigating it skillfully is what most people mean by success. The second is the game you construct: the values, purposes and systems you actually choose to build, the layer you contribute rather than merely inherit. It’s not about predicting the future, it is about imagining and designing it. That is not a crisis. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?