About the Author

My name is Mark Howard.

I started The Race because three long-running interests have converged for me: history, technology, and democracy.

History is where I learned to ask how things work, why they work that way, and how they change. I first fell in love with history in high school, studied it in college, and still return to it constantly. It helps me see that powerful technologies never arrive in a vacuum. They move through institutions, markets, politics, culture, and public choices.

Technology has also shaped much of my working life. I am a techno-optimist, though I hope a realistic one. I believe technology can extend human capability in astonishing ways. I have seen it make work easier, knowledge more accessible, and organizations more effective.

But technology is not automatically democratic.

It can widen access. It can also deepen dependence.

It can help people act. It can also make important decisions harder to see, challenge, or control.

That is why democracy matters so much to this project.

For me, democratic values are not abstract. I grew up surrounded by people who took different paths through life: teachers, nurses, professors, journalists, ministers, rabbis, business leaders, government leaders, coaches, builders, and many others. They did not all think alike. That was part of the point.

What they modeled, again and again, was a belief that people deserve respect, that different viewpoints make us stronger, and that we can usually accomplish more together than separately.

Those beliefs sit underneath The Race.

AI may become one of the most important technologies of our time. It could spread knowledge, tools, capacity, and problem-solving power more broadly. It could also concentrate power in fewer companies, governments, institutions, and technical systems.

The outcome is not predetermined.

This site is my effort to study that race carefully, explain what I am seeing, and build a framework others can use.

One more note: ChatGPT is part of how this project is made.

I set the direction, choose the questions, decide the themes, make the judgments, and edit the final work. ChatGPT helps as a research assistant, drafting partner, and exploratory tool. Used well, it lets me spend more time on the substance of the project and less time on the mechanics around it.

That, too, is part of the experiment.

Technology and democracy are both unfinished. They have to be questioned, tested, shaped, and improved.

Thank you for joining me as this project develops.