Governor Dukakis’s Preface reminds us that anniversaries matter most when they become moments of renewal—when a nation looks honestly at its challenges and chooses, again, the values that first gave it meaning. The pages that follow build on that call. They introduce America at 250: A Beacon for the AI Age as both a blueprint and a story: a blueprint for how the United States can modernize democratic governance and lead responsibly in the age of artificial intelligence, and a story of how these ideas were formed through real initiatives, debates, and partnerships—bringing together American public leadership with distinguished scholars and global allies who believe that AI must be guided by transparency, accountability, and human dignity.
The Introduction begins where the Preface leaves us: with the conviction that America’s greatest strength is not only what it invents, but what it chooses to stand for—and what it is willing to build, with others, for the common good. For America has never been only for Americans or only of America; at its best, it is also for the world and, in a profound sense, of the world—a nation shaped by the hopes, talents, and moral imagination of people who came to it, learned from it, challenged it, and helped renew it.
That spirit lives in the story behind this book. It includes the journey of a Vietnamese public leader who left a distinguished position as CEO and Editor-in-Chief of VietNamNet to come to Harvard University as a research scholar and advisor, and then founded the Boston Global Forum—not merely to observe America’s democratic experiment, but to contribute to it. From that vantage point, and in partnership with Governor Dukakis and many leading scholars and public servants, the authors seek to offer a model worthy of the Semiquincentennial: a practical, hopeful blueprint for U.S. leadership in the AI Age—one that can be welcomed at home and shared with the world.
