To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long.
> For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds.
What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself. That there is some value doesn't mean that it will develop that capability. We have nothing to say that it will.
I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley.
It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.
Morality would dictate that we stop spending enough money to end hunger in not just our country but the entire planet on this stupid venture. We are gutting our future entirely on our own and hoping that AI will save us. That’s moral suicide, not an imperative.
Hear me out: what if we let China be the biggest, and then tried to make life for our citizens awesome, and competed on our ability to come up with new stuff? What if we solved the problems we had like housing
Where's this can-do attitude towards housing, healthcare and stronger social safety in general? It sounds like woo to me, more specifically, Roko's basilisk by proxy.
What's doubly duplicitous is that even if LLMs achieve general intelligence, the whole idea is to enrich a tiny fraction of humanity that happens to be shareholders.
AGILMs that have anything like a working internet connection will likely find a way to replace these shareholders sureptitiously --- and without alerting/injuring their caregivers. how you feel about that? depends on your temperament..
EDIT: trying to address the Roko part..I'm assuming once AGI is achieved.. the AGI doesn't need more compute to increase its intelligence beyond those of an average activist employee (I can assure you that in OpenAI there are such employees, and they know to shut up for now)
the antisocial part: it's already happening. What can you do about that.
More likely than not, they'd work as they were designed to: increase profitablity of whatever company that authored them.
As a thought experiment, say you were the CEO/board member of a company that's told your new platform is choosing public benefit over profits. What would you do? Now filter down the decisions going down the heirarchy, considering job security and a general preference for earning bonuses.
For all the discussions around "alignment" - any AI that's not aligned with increased profits will be unplugged posthaste, all other considerations are secondary.
The funny thing about disembodied superintelligence-- what if a collection of normal intelligences are fundamentally unable to extract net value from it?
The first example that comes to mind is OpenAI's Sebastian Bubeck (& others) giving underwhelming examples to illustrate that GPT has surpassed human mathematicians. Or earlier, when SamA says that he has seen things you wouldn't believe, whereas the top replicant in a proper sci-fi will at least be specific about the I-Beams.
Another parallel which you would be familiar with is nuclear power. Humans can plainly see it's an unworldly tech, but I'd say the value extracted so far has been a net negative-- mainly because our collective engineering chops are just too.. profane. And SamA/Musk/Thiel/Luckey just don't seem as wise as Rickover (who is the Rickover of our age? I think the Rickover pipeline is broken, tbh)
From my vantage point, I agree with you: China sees AI as less important as solar, so charitably, I'd say that Thiel's contrarian strategy is actually to get the Chinese so riled up they zuzwang themselves into providing the progress but keeping the whirlwind for themselves (so proving he has learnt the post-mimetic game from the atomics opening)
There could be another interesting post-mimetic line exploring how a hybrid chabuduo-"festina-lente" culture is required for developing supertech.. which.. only a Rickover can play
(I don't know if you're army or navy but there's this millenniums old cultural divide between a conservative army engineering culture -- that develops atomics -- and a progressive naval engineering culture -- that makes headway harnessing it. AI bulls smell like they are more aligned with land-forces
You're making the (imo incorrect) assumption that a revolutionary moment isn't the exact thing the US needs right now. Morality dictates we have to try and force one.
We need a change, but I don't think we have the unity and will to force a revolution right now. I think our best chance is a massive win in the 26 elections, but barring that I think we're struck bailing out the oligarchs for now, and striking back with collaborative economic warfare.
I outline it in my article. Don't do business with unethical companies. If 50% of the American populace used its power of the purse in a collaborative fashion, it could kill every unethical company within 1-2 years.
Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately.
I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.
Secondly, hypothetically, the US achieves superintelligence, what is stopping China from doing the same in a month or two, for example?
Even if China achieves a big breakthrough first, it may benefit the rest of the world.
It's a US/China centered article, because that's the game, Europe is not a meaningful player and everyone else is going to get sucked into orbit of one of the superpowers.
If you read the article carefully, I work hard to keep my priors and the priors of the people in question separate, as their actions may be rational under their priors, but irrational under other priors, and I feel it's worth understanding that nuance.
I'm curious where you got the writer "clinging to power and money desperately."
Also, to be fair, I envy Europe right now, but we can't take that path.
My cynical take is that this is the US committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen.
The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.
I also disagree with your conclusion of a moral imperative to make sure that AI succeeds. I believe it's the opposite. AI failing would finally create the long-needed revolutionary moment to throw off the shackles of the oligarchy that got us into this mess in the first place.
Not with how much pulling teeth is required to get them to invest in defense. I don't see how you can unironically make the claim that a written down investment would sink the ship that is the US economy.
I assure you, this is not a game where “the only winning move is not to play”, in spite of whatever your domestic politicians are feeding the population.
Are you sure? Based on what? All I see is people desperately throwing money they don't have at AI like a gambling addict who just converted their child's college fund into chips.
Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.
I think you missed the point. The EU is "winning by doing nothing" whereas the US is liable for the huge failing investment it made. US economical growth is now entirely reliant on AI, so an AI crash guarantees immediate recession and out-of-control stagflation. The EU with its "less advanced" economy will keep growing just fine with or without AI, surviving the front-line bloodbath by staying behind.
As for defense, they are spending exactly as much as necessary at each point in time: just enough to keep credible US backing until 2025, and as much as they can without destroying their economy since. There is no good argument for an irresponsible spending spree, as the only powers that can realistically challenge the EU without triggering nuclear holocaust are the US and China anyways (Russia don't stand a chance).
I don't see odds on a good outcome from a revolution. Keep in mind which faction in the united states is generally militant. The best possible scenario there is broad civilian unrest that the administration tries to forcefully quell, triggering a military coup, but it's unlikely that the coup would be unified, and right wing militias and hardcore trump supports would go down fighting.
We need political Aikido to hold this country together.
So often, I see comments that seem to make sense only in a vacuum. If the US disappeared from the scene tomorrow, how do you think the geopolitical landscape might change?
The competition between the US and China is pertinent to everyone.
What do you mean? I don't see how the commenter was saying anything about the irrelevance of US-China competition, in fact some of their points hinge on the existence of that competition, which is why they described the asticle as very US-centric.
Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game.
Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And you also need money for it so tariffs.
There's only one problem with a race to superintelligence, and that's that nobody has evidence that mere intelligence is coming, much less superintelligence.
(There are a thousand more problems, but none of them matter until that first one is overcome.)
Today's AI does exhibit some intelligence, period. It is absurd to claim that an intelligent-looking entity doesn't have intelligence, only because we might not be able to determine which part of the entity has one. The superintelligence is an entirely different problem though because there is no clear path from intelligence to so-called superintelligence, everything has been just a speculation so far.
> It is absurd to claim that an intelligent-looking entity doesn't have intelligence
Is it? I am pretty sure biology will solve good old "are viruses alive?" sooner than we agree on definition of intelligence. "Chinese Room" is at least 40 years old.
And so do tons of counterarguments against the Chinese Room argument.
Practically speaking, the inherentness of intelligence doesn't really matter because both intelligent-looking entity and provably intelligent entity are capable for societal disruptions anyway. I partly dislike the Chinese Room argument for this reason; it facilitates useless discussions in most cases.
In that case there was still some intelligence. It turns out that a composite entity of Hans and its trainer was intelligent, and people (including the trainer) unknowingly regarded that as Hans' own intelligence.
Good gods, I can't wait for a second AI winter. Maybe we'll come up with fundamental breakthroughs in a couple of decades and give it another college try?
For the folks who lived though it; were the Expert Systems boosters as insufferable in the 80s as the LLM people are now about the path to machine intelligence?
No, because they mostly got military funding, not private equity.
ARPA would throw relatively large sums of money at you, but demand progress reports and a testable goal. Very little got rolled out based on hype. (Let's not talk about vehicle design.) If your project didn't show signs of working, or not enough signs of working, funding ended.
Anything which met goals and worked, we now think of as "automation" or "signal recognition" or "solvers", not "intelligent systems".
This take is way too generous to the current US administration’s quality of long term planning.
Tariffs aren’t there to pay for a race to superintelligence, they’re a lever that the authoritarian is pulling because it’s one of the most powerful levers the president is allowed to pull. It’s a narcissist’s toy to feel important and immediately impactful (and an obvious vehicle for insider trading).
If the present administration was interested in paying for a superintelligence race they wouldn’t have signed a law that increases the budget deficit.
They also wouldn’t be fucking with the “really smart foreign people to private US university, permanent residence, and corporate US employment” pipeline if they were interested in the superintelligence race.
While I agree about the competence of the high level decision makers in the administration, the people advising them are incredibly smart and should under no circumstances be underestimated. Peter and his circle are totally crazy, but if you're playing against them you better bring your A game.
I would submit the idea that the people advising this administration are not very smart. In what discernible way has this administration biased its selection process to include “smart?”
I don’t underestimate their ability to do damage but calling them smart is generous.
Not even Peter Thiel, he’s one of the most over-hyped people in tech. Access to capital is not intelligence, and a lot of his capital comes from the equivalent of casino wins with PayPal and Facebook.
It says the people running the US right now think that is the game we are playing - it doesn't say it is the one we actually are playing. America is utterly fucked if they are wrong, and only a bit less so if they are right.
What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs due to a large part in spying. The point here is wouldn't the country that spends less in AI development actually have an advantage over the country that does as they will obtain that knowledge quickly for less money? Also the time of discovery of AGI may be less important than the country that first implements the benefit of AGI.
This is actually an interesting question! If you look at OpenAI's change in behavior, I think that's going to be the pattern for venture backed AI: piggyback on open science, then burn a bunch of capital on closed tech to gain a temporary advantage, and hope to parlay that into something bigger.
I believe China's open source focus is in part a play for legitimacy, and part a way to devalue our closed AI efforts. They want to be the dominant power not just by force but by mandate. They're also uniquely well positioned to take full advantage of AI proliferation as I mentioned, so in this case a rising tide raises some boats more than others.
The AI labs have settled on a definition of AGI: "AI that can do the vast majority of economically valuable work at or above the level of humans."
They don't heavily advertise this definition because investors expect AGI to mean the computer from Her, and it's not gonna be that. They want to be able to tell investors without lying that they're on target for AGI in 3 years, and they're riding on pre-existing expectations.
Ain't happening in 2026 or 2028. Democrats havent positioned anyone compelling and there positions are too flaky to capture a culture that is captivated by the idea every position is zero-sum.
Gavin Newsom has shown himself to be a savvy operator, I think he has a legitimate shot in 28 if there are free and fair elections. That caveat is pulling way too much weight here though.
While I'd support a Newsom run, I feel like he's never going to get strong support from the Progressive side of the party and they'll sink one of the few viable candidates.
2026 midterms really don’t look grim at all so long as they actually happen and restricting doesn’t destroy the gains that the democrats will inevitably pick up.
And I mean inevitably in the strongest way possible. This happens at basically every midterm with the opposition party picking up seats and republicans barely control Congress as it is.
The Democrats haven't run anyone but moderates since Bill Clinton, so I'm pretty sure that won't happen unless they do finally decide to run a progressive (which is still much less likely than running another moderate).
I live in the U.S. and would like to support our businesses, however the U.S. is neither the leader in semiconductor/electronics manufacturing nor in power production and availability, and without those, they will not end up being the world leader in AI- China will.
This is basically my take as well. Even if we sprint ahead at first, it's not going to be the magical superpower we think it will be, and their systemic advantage will win over the long horizon.
> Chinese will not pull back on AI investment, and because of their advantages in robotics and energy infrastructure, they don't have to.
> The gap matters because AI's value capture depends on having the energy and hardware to deploy frontier models in the physical world.
I understand energy infrastructure because of power-hungry GPUs and ASICs, but I was wondering about the nexus between AI and robotics. I have my own thoughts on how they are linked, but I don't think my thoughts are the same as the author's and I would like to know more about them.
Early day for robotics and AI still. But for a superpower, the potential for (more) autonomous weapons in that intersection is something that (unfortunately) cannot be ignored.
It's not tho. We've been at it for about 70 years now. Returns have been diminishing exponentially if you look at the amounts invested and we still have bumbling contraptions that are useful in very narrow and contrived use cases.
The whole hype is based on wishful/magical thinking. The booster arguments are invariably about some idea in their minds that has no correspondent in the real world.
Personally I do not think that we have seen the full battlefield impact of the last 10-20 years developments in microcontrollers, battery, power electronics, electromotors, MEMS sensors, imaging sensors, control firmware, computer vision and object detection. Capability per dollar has increased by a few orders of magnitude in each of these domains. We are seeing some hints of the potential impact now after Russia invaded Ukraine - low-cost drones are now killing and damaging just as much or more as existing high tech weaponry. These systems are crude, with limited autonomy, but it is already enough to wreck havoc. I do not think development of these systems have stopped, unfortunately.
I have the knowledge of a layman in robotics, but rather that autonomous control systems, I'm more curious about the prospect of improving world models in AI by sensor fusion at an unprecedented scale, addressing the limitations of today's models only having empirical knowledge pretty much second-hand from literature.
Im not convinced the geopolitical rivalry between US and China is a given. To a large degree it’s been manufactured - Friday’s antics a case in point.
The US indeed seems destined to fall behind due to decades of economic mismanagement under neoliberalism while China’s public investment has proved to be the wise choice. Yet this fact wounds the pride of many in the US, particularly its leaders, so it now lashes out in a way that hastens its decline.
The AI supremacy bet proposed is nuts. Prior to every societal transition the seeds of that transition were already present. We can see that already with AI: social media echo chambers, polarization, invading one’s own cities, oligarchy, mass surveillance.
So I think the author’s other proposed scenario is right - mass serfdom. The solution to that isn’t magical thinking but building mass solidarity. If you look at history and our present circumstances, our best bet to restore sanity to our society is mass strikes.
I think we are going to get there one way or another. Unfortunately things are probably going to have to get a lot more painful before enough people wake up to what we need to do.
I think prior to Trump, Europe could have been mediator to a benevolent China. Now the hawks are ascendant in Beijing. Trump has shown that his ego pushes him to escalate to try and show others who the "big man" is, this will not end well with China, and I'm not sure he's wise enough to accept that.
Do you really prefer brutal serfdom to the AI supremacy scenario? From where I sit, people have mixed (trending positive) feelings about AI, and hard negative feelings about being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. I'd like to understand your position here more.
I just don’t think the AI supremacy scenario is realistic. I think it ignores our current context and postulates a clean break, almost a kind of magical thinking to be frank. AI is likely to intensify current trends not suddenly subvert and reverse them. Palantir, deepfakes, LLM propaganda. The seeds are all here today. To think otherwise - that’s just not how human societies work, not history, none of it. AI is likely to continue to be weaponized, only more so as tech advances.
What I found persuasive was the argument that this bubble could be worse than others due to the perceived geopolitical stakes by US leadership, plausibly leading to mass serfdom as our society implodes, based on the argument that we already have a version of serfdom today. I found that astute.
I do NOT think that scenario is favorable - it just seems like the most likely future. I hold that we should view our situation with clear eyes so that we can make the best decision from where we stand.
Thinking through this, what does that mean for how we should face our present moment? Eventually people will throw off their chains; our leadership is so incompetently invested in class war that the working class is going to continue to be squeezed and squeezed - until it pops. It’s a pattern familiar in history. The question in my mind is not if but when. And the sooner we get our collective act together the less painful it’s going to be. There’s some really bad stuff waiting for us round the bend.
What should we do? The economy depends on us the serfs and soon-to-be serfs. It’s the workers who can take control of it and can shut it down with mass strikes. It’s only this in my view that can plausibly free us from our reckless leadership (which goes beyond the current administration) and the bleak future they are preparing for us.
Let’s say any of these would take off. Let’s put aside the US’ inferior energy picture, industrial base, or key natural resource access that would block the US from making some of these a reality. What are these new techs going to be used for? Many of them: war. Both internationally and domestically - the US is already invading its own cities. Deepfakes are regularly shared among some social media echo chambers already, and LLM propaganda farms have anlready seen documented use. Even pharmaceutical breakthroughs will be used to extract higher prices for the shrinking number of Americans who can afford it. The trends are all here already with no sign of abating. AI isn’t going to address the structural cause of these problems: extreme wealth inequality. AI is a tool to make it worse.
I think holding on to these beliefs about AI must give some people a sense of hope. But a hope based on reality and is stronger than one based in denial. The antidote I believe is solidarity founded on our shared vulnerability before this bleak future.
I feel like on the one hand you're exactly right that this is kind of like a cold war level investment... and it's not necessarily being pursued through a business return lens; something deeper and more visceral is driving it.
However your conclusions are what throw me off.. you kind of have this Doom and Gloom mindset which may be fair but I don't really think it's related to this particular bubble.. in other words our decline is happening off to the side of this particular bubble rather than it being caused by that particular bubble too. To me the core take away your post is that this bubble is a little bit like the Apollo program was... in a massive investment capturing a lot of people's imagination... likely lots of great things come out of it in a sense but also not clear that it all adds up in the end for a business perspective. But that's potentially okay
That would be my take under different circumstances as well, but there are two key differences in this situation:
1. The debt bomb. Not dealing with this could cause a great depression by itself. Having it go off at the same time as we're underwater on bad capex with a misaligned economy could produce something the likes of which we've never seen.
2. We have an authoritarian president that has effectively captured the entire government, and the window to prevent consolidation of power is closing rapidly. Worse, he's an ego driven, reckless, ham-fisted decision maker with a cabinet of spineless yes men.
Are you sure the debt bomb is a bomb? Private debt can be a major concern, but government debt may not work the way you think it does. In fact, the great depression was preceded (and possibly in some ways triggered) by a significant paying down of public debt, counterbalanced by an increase in private debt that kept the money supply growing through the roaring 20s.
I understand the Keynesian dynamics of maintaining money velocity through government spending, but it's a balancing act, and I'm pretty sure we're way off balance now.
> If you think I'm being hyperbolic calling out a future of brutal serfdom. Keep in mind we basically have widespread serfdom now; a big chunk of Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. The only thing keeping it from being official is the lack of debtor's prison. Think about how much worse things will be with 10% inflation, 25% unemployment and the highest income inequality in history. This is fertile ground for a revolution, and historically the elites would have taken a step back to try and make the game seem less rigged as a self-preservation tactic, but this time is different. As far as I can tell, the tech oligarchs don't care because they're banking on their private island fortresses and an army of terminators to keep the populace in line.
This is suggesting an "end of history" situation. After Fukuyama, we know there is no such thing.
I'm not sure if there is a single strong thesis (as this one tries to be) on how this will end economically and geopolitically. This is hard to predict, much less to bet on.
I'm not proposing and end of history, but things can remain in stable equilibrium for longer than you'd expect (just look at sharks!). If we slide into stable dystopia now, my guess is that there will be a black swan at some point that shakes us out of it and continues evolution, but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
> but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
I mean if you are talking about USA itself falling into dystopic metastability in such a situation, maybe, but even so I think it misses some nuance. I don't see every other country following USA into oblivion, and also I don't see the USA bending the knee to techno-kings and in the process giving up real influence for some bet on total influence.
The only mechanism I see for reaching complete stability (or at least metastability) in that situation is idiocracy / idiotic authoritarianism, i.e. Trump/his minions actually grabbing power for decades and/or complete corruption of USA institutions.
My maximum is that the courts restrain Trump enough that we still have at least the shell of a democracy after he's gone. But he blazed the trail, and in 20 or 30 years someone will walk it better, having done a better job of neutralizing or politicizing or perhaps deligitimizing the courts first. Then it's game over.
You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom."
Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.
The US is ranked 14th in terms of standard of living in (in order):
Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Oman, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, United States, Estonia.
Based on these metrics: Quality of Life Index, Purchasing Power Index, Safety Index, Health Care Index, Cost of Living Index, Property Price to Income Ratio, Traffic Commute Time Index, Pollution Index, and Climate Index.
That’s a fair point and looking at most of the countries on the list with higher ratings, it looks like they are more socialist and have higher equality.
No doubt in my mind that if you are wealthy in the US you can have a very good life, but on a whole and for most people there it’s probably fitting that it’s lower down the list for quality of life.
Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years.
People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.
Take a look at how the median American lives compared to the median resident of nearly every country on earth. If that's suffering, I'm not sure what to call life elsewhere.
And to this specific comment, wages outpaced inflation since the 1970s for everyone but the poorest households (I believe the bottom 10% are the exception, who I would probably agree are suffering in some sense). Working class real wage growth actually outpaced white collar real wage growth for a couple years post-COVID, for the first time in a long time. Also, wage measurements don't normally measure total compensation, notably health insurance which has been increasing much faster than wages or overall inflation for decades.
Also, there's no reason to expect wage growth to match productivity growth. Productivity gains are largely due to company investment, not increased effort from workers, and household expenses are not positively correlated with productivity metrics.
Few people in the US are living "paycheck to paycheck" out of economic necessity. We have extensive data on this separately from BLS and the Federal Reserve. The percentage of US households that are living paycheck to paycheck out of economic necessity is 10-15% last I checked. That isn't nothing but it is a small fraction of the population. Retirees comprise a significant portion of that for obvious reasons.
There is an additional ~30% that is notionally living paycheck to paycheck as a lifestyle choice rather than an economic necessity.
The median US household has a substantial income surplus after all ordinary expenses. There may be people suffering economically but it is a small minority by any reasonable definition of the term.
Is my life as easy as my parents. Probably not. But the idea that life is bad is a wild take. But if I spent all my time on social media/reddit/watching the news. I'd be pretty depressed too and think the sky is falling. I feel like the USA could turn it round pretty quick with the slightest of social policy to support the lower income earners?
>Though to be honest with Trump at the helm they're already ~50% there.
Those people have never felt real pain. They may say they have but they haven't. If this article is real and the whole shitbox falls apart, I don't think even loyalty to Trump will stop these people from finally reckoning with reality.
As someone who grew up in a very religious country (not the US), Trumps followers will endure any suffering if it means being in service to him (or if it means their enemies will suffer more, or is portrayed to be suffering more).
I don't really know. I think a lot of them migrated off of Bush. I don't have the clip right now but I had old interview videos showing how high and mighty Bush supporters were and how they supported the Iraq war all in going into his second term. They went so far as to act like Trump supporters against anyone who didn't support the "commander in chief" (ie. those people should be put in jail or kicked out).
The GFC really set those people straight. Enough of them got desperate enough that they switched sides and voted for Obama.
As evidence of this point, “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was originally “Bush Derangement Syndrome”. I have to roll my eyes anytime someone mentions TDS seriously. Although Trump has a cult of personality that Bush did not have; you didn’t have people adorning their lawn with Bush gear in the same way as Trump.
It was a different era. Bush and the old Republican guard were never imaginative nor were they product people. Trump started with his signature red hat but look at what it blossomed into.
No one should have been surprised. Trump has a long history of being a product person (Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Fragrance, Trump Mattresses, Trump: The Game etc.)
You also have to consider that the pre Web 2.0 world of the internet during the Bush years also had less opportunity of flooding the market with branded crap. You had to call a phone number or mail out a money order to order merch.
This is written by somebody who’s never been to Louisiana and Mississippi. The saying in Russian that they never had it any good in the first place comes to mind. Where’s thriftwy when you need them?
The south is pretty modern all things considered. You wanna see real pain? Go ask Chinese people who had to sacrifice these past few decades to make China the powerhouse it is today. Its the reason why they can tolerate anything the US throws at them. Their pain threshold is much higher than whatever the west has.
These southerners could have lost their culture, the local industry has long since left, and fentanyl is the name of the game. Yet thats still nothing compared to what Chinese (or even Russian people post USSR) had to go through.
I'm a southerner, and I road trip a lot. Driving through parts of the southeast you will pass through a sea of dilapidated trailers with yards full of junk, run down chain restaurants and industrial lots. It's not India or the Philippines, but it's still pretty third world in a lot of ways.
Of course its third world in some ways, but take those Chinese people I spoke about, swap them into the same spot as the people currently living there and I GUARANTEE you that they will turn those places around and probably make a whole super competitive region that could go toe to toe with any of the urban areas of the country.
It goes back to my point. These people in those areas think they are in for bad times but they have not seen REAL pain yet and yet they are playing games right now because they think they have nothing to lose.
Imagine if your theory comes true and the government has to cut services to the bone. No more medicare/medicaid/maintaining their infrastructure(however shit it is now it gets worse)/state subsidies for states like Nebraska.
There are probably horrors that im not even thinking of.
Honestly I've never wanted to be more wrong in my life. There were so many moments when I was doing research and analysis for this article that I said to myself: "We're so fucked"
Ironically, only the charts were AI generated and I'm a barbecue eating, truck driving, metal enjoying, weight lifting (or I used to be, before I got T-boned by a drunk driver going 135mph) American.
Compares China's current 2025 energy capability with US at the end of 2023. Then starts throwing 2025 uptake numbers for solar and wind into the 2023 numbers as if having a TWO YEAR GAP in the numbers dont matter at all.
Comparing to China is tricky because Chinese investment is almost by default bubbley in the sense of misallocating capital. That's what heavily state-directed economies tend to do and China's still a communist country. Especially they tend to over-invest in industrial capacity. China's massively overbuilt electricity grid and HSR network would be easily identified as a bubble if it were in the west, but when it's state officials making the investment decisions we tend to not think of it as a bubble (partly because there's often never a moment at which sanity reasserts itself).
I read an article today in which western business leaders went to China and were wowed by "dark factories" where everything is 100% automated. Lots of photos of factories full of humanoid robots too. Mentioned only further down the article: that happens because the Chinese government has started massively distorting the economy in favor of automation projects. It's widely known that one of the hardest parts of planning a factory is figuring out what to automate and what to use human labour for. Over-automating can be expensive as you lose agility and especially if you have access to cheap labour the costs and opportunity costs of automation can end up not worth it. It's a tricky balance that requires a lot of expertise and experience. But obviously if the government just flat out reimburses you 1/5th of your spending on industrial robots, suddenly it can make sense to automate stuff that maybe in reality should not have been automated.
BTW I'm not sure the Kuppy figures are correct. There's a lot of hidden assumptions about lifespan of the equipment and how valuable inferencing on smaller/older models will be over time that are difficult to know today.
All fair points, and it's hard to know exactly how robust the Chinese system will turn out to be, however I would argue that their bets are paying off overall, so even if there is some capital misallocation, overall their hit rate in important areas has been good, while we've been dumping capital in "Uber for X, AirBnB for X, ..."
Well, their bets haven't been paying off, Chinese government is in huge amounts of debt due to a massive real estate bubble, and lots of subsidies that don't pay back. It's a systematic problem, for instance their HSR lines are losing a ton of money too.
It's easy to think of Uber/AirBnB style apps as trivialities, but this is the mistake communist countries always make. They struggle to properly invest in consumer goods because only heavy industry is legible to the planners. China has had too low domestic spending for a long time. USSR had the same issue, way too many steel mills and nowhere near enough quality of life stuff for ordinary people. It killed them in the end; Yeltsin's loyalty to communist ideology famously collapsed when he mounted a surprise visit to an American supermarket on a diplomatic mission to NASA. The wealth and variety of goods on sale crushed him and he was in tears on the flight home. A few years later he would end up president of Russia leading it out of communist times.
> […] because the Chinese government has started massively distorting the economy in favor of automation projects. It's widely known that one of the hardest parts of planning a factory is figuring out what to automate and what to use human labour for.
… or it is an early manoeuvre – a pre-emptive measure – to address the looming burden of an ageing population and a dearth of young labour that – according to several demographic models – China will confront by roughly 2050 and thereafter[0]. The problem is compounded by the enforced One-Child Policy in the past, the ascendance of a mainland middle class, and the escalating costs of child-rearing; whilst, culturally and historically, sons are favoured amongst the populace, producing a gender imbalance skewed towards males – many of whom will, in consequence, be unable to marry or to propagate their line.
According to the United Nations’ baseline projection – as cited in the AMRO report[1] – China’s population in 2050 is forecast at approximately 1.26 billion, with about 30 per cent aged 65 and over, whilst roughly 40 per cent will be aged 60 and over. This constitutes the more optimistic projection.
The Lancet scenario[2] is more gloomy and projects a 1 billion population by 2050, with 3 out of 10 being of the age of 65+.
It is entirely plausible that the Chinese government is distorting the economy; alternatively, it is attempting to mitigate – or to avert – an impending crisis by way of automation and robotics. The reality may well lie somewhere between these positions.
Robots installed now will be obsolete and broken by 2050. Demographic change is the sort of thing where market mechanisms work fine. You don't build out assets like those ahead of demand, you wait until you need them at which point you get the latest tech with economies of scale as demand ramps up everywhere.
The most optimistic reading of this move is that it's just more of the same old communism: robotic factories seem cool to the planners because they're big, visible and high-tech assets that are easily visitable on state trips. So they overinvest for the same reason they once overinvested in steel production.
The actually most gloomy prognosis is that they're trying to free up labour to enter the army.
Serious question, why load up the army with people? Drones and autonomous weapons are 100% here now. We don't need a mass of general infantry, the new pattern is spec-ops spotting and targeting for autonomous kinetic munitions. Think ghosts in starcraft.
The only way to genuinely control captured territory on the ground is with infantry, and it'll remain that way for a while yet. America demonstrated the limits of what you can do with Predator drones in Afghanistan; the tech worked great and posed a huge threat but the Taliban was never truly defeated and continued training and recruiting at scale.
For something like an invasion of Taiwan or (gulp) other territories beyond that, the only way to completely subdue the captured population is with lots of soldiers.
That was true 10-20 years ago, but in a world with "terminators" I don't think it's true anymore.
Regarding effective conquest, we can look at the historical lesson of Rome. Conquest is effective when you can co-opt local leaders and cultures to cause them to identify with the conquering culture. Conquest that doesn't cause integration is historically unstable.
At no juncture did I suggest that the machines presently entering commission in the year 2025 would remain unaltered in perpetuity. Technological progress proceeds with unrelenting velocity — it is both natural and inevitable that subsequent refinements and augmentations will be introduced. The systems deployed today, in all likelihood, represent but preliminary trials and iterations — a proving ground — for capabilities yet to be fully revealed.
China, indeed, possesses a longstanding tradition of curating information to satisfy the sensibilities of its ruling class — a practice traceable to the dynastic courts of antiquity. Yet, to dismiss a potential adversary solely upon the architecture of its political order is — at best — ill-advised, and at worst, a grave miscalculation. The probability of threat must be judged on capacity, not narrative. Whether such an adversary proves formidable or farcical is immaterial at present — the truth will emerge within the span of a decade or so.
AI is too dumb to succeed. It's built in symbols and statistics predicting tokens based in contexts. This has nothing to do with intelligence or general things like free navigation. Most of it is a write-off, and the things that succeed will be sequestered in pivots with expert supervision.
