Even if the American AGI unicorn were to appear, China's increasing energy infrastructure lead shows that the United States won't have enough in the tank to fuel it. The willful and ideological destruction of renewable energy and infrastructure initiatives by the current administration in preference to fossil fuels will be noted as the historic error that ended superpower status.
Sounds about right to me. He’s not quite smart enough and not quite evil enough to be a proper dictator, but he’s selfish enough, greedy enough, and reckless enough to do a lot of long term damage. All to feed a colossal ego built on historically world class self delusion.
I have a theory about Tr*mp that I welcome someone to disabuse me of. After his semi-successful first term, which he didn't expect to win, he was able to secure a nearly unimaginable power base both across the country and among conservative political elites. Which he was clearly reluctant to let go. We foolishly fumbled the opportunity to put a stake through the heart of his political career after seeing the damage he is willing to inflict on our body politic. Ooops! You know what they say about attacking the king. You get one chance, and you'd better kill him. Well... We didnt 🤷🏼♂️.
So now he's back with Tr*mp v2.0, and he's pissed off. We impeached him, twice, then dragged him through the courts on multiple charges in multiple venues. He miraculously(?) managed to evade all those slings and arrows to emerge relatively unscathed. But his reputation was tarnished and his dignity impugned.
Which leads to my relatively simple theory. He obviously had to win, or else face the real possibility of jail time. And he did, Ugggh. But now, he's got nothing to lose. He's old and doesn't need a third act. His reputation as a one-of-a-kind political maelstrom is confirmed, so there are two goals left, both driven by his excessive narcissism. First, to harvest as much cash as he can, from any and all sources. The second, more disastrous one, is revenge. It is impossible to miss that he is systematically destroying every bastion of civil society, technological achievement, and governmental efficacy he can. It churns my stomach to watch. The only motive I can discern is revenge. If someone can convince me otherwise, I'm all ears!
Somewhat tangential, but when I read articles like the one you wrote in Foreign Affairs, it's always a given that the US has a larger economy. Is this because of GDP? How much of that is based on insane financial instruments and speculative assets with no material bottom?
If China is producing far more energy, far more infrastructure, is advancing faster than the US in key technologies, is producing massive amounts of skilled engineers and researchers, and has a focus on manufactured goods and the refining of raw materials - how do we define their economy as smaller? Because someone makes a calculation that their financial institutions aren't as swelled up with funny money, so our economy is larger? A better accounting of economy would ignore a lot of the speculative cruft that at the end of the day has no material basis.
Living in America one really starts getting the sense that the economy is mainly based on scams, all the way from the bottom of the lower classes betting endlessly on sports apps, to crypto "assets", to the top of the speculative bubble in AI and software, and all the finance that is also betting on the growth of these questionable systems.
Can you eat an NFT? Will I retire on this house of cards?
If you measure national GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP) rather than exchange rates, China's economy is about 3% greater than the US' and potentially increasing the gap. (I say potentially, as China's GDP growth figures are suspect, as the US' figures may also be going forward.)
This is spot on. There just is not the underlying technology to support the bet made and, when we should be focusing on implementation and refinement of current technologies to solidify gains, we are pouring good money after bad chasing LLM shadows.
I love your deep dives on GAI. However, sometimes we need to look at the simple side of things. I think the bit quoted below surfaces all the craziness in our current political and economic culture. Sam Altman and company are as delusional as Trump. If the US economy and/or society crashes, it’ll be more because of the Sam Altmans than the Donald Trumps.
From a recent interview on Theo Von’s podcast, noted in an article on GAI by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic:
“Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.
Theo Von: Do you really?
Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”
Von: Yeah.
Altman: I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you, but, like, we’re stumbling through this.”
"We build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system..." Umm, what? Good luck with that! This guy is one of the bright lights of the next technological revolution? Hoo-boy! Buckle up folks.
In the light of this, how is Silicon Valley’s big bet on Trump 2.0 looking? It may be that it is not just the grail quest for AGI that they should abandon.
Really good articles, especially the FP one linked to.
I may be naively idealistic, but it seems to me that nations have always played power games to stay ahead of others. Britain did plenty of arm-twisting and naked power projection when it was a global empire. When the US and then Britain got the atom bomb, Churchill wanted to nuke Moscow. The US used its post-war power to block Britain and France from trying to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Europeans were very concerned after WWII that the US was using its economic strength and military power to control business in Europe. The selfishness of the US and other Western powers was evident during teh COVID-19 pandemic, restricting the vaccine from poorer nations and preventing them from producing their own with the mRNA technology. Pharmaceutical profits trumped saving millions of lives.
When Paul Kennedy wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - 1500-2000" (1987) it was an analysis based on relative force projection relations vis-à-vis territorial borders. But since then, we have shifted more to economic competition, and the 2000 CE multipolar world predicted in 1980 became the attempted US hegemony after the breakup of the USSR, and the still-to-be-seriously-rising China..
Great Power competition and teh "Great game" of the 19th century seems to be reasserting itself, but with new players (Russia is the remaining original player). The world is much more integrated today than it ever was, even from the prior, pre-WWI 1914 peak. If there were less rivalry and more cooperation, benefitting the global population, there could be a much richer world, with fewer existential risks. We abandoned teh obsolete economic doctrine of Mercantilism, yet the US under Trump seems to be trying to reassert it. Weaponizing interdependence is a recent approach that exploits the global supply and value chains.
While I can understand the suspicion that the "other nation" is trying to exploit us, we seem to be unable to understand that the competitor believes the same of us, and more importantly, it isn't just suspicion, but actions.
The FP essay ends with:
"As during the nuclear era, the United States needs to turn away from unilateralism, toward détente and arms control, and, perhaps in the very long term, toward rebuilding an interdependent global economy on more robust foundations. A failure to do so will put both American security and American prosperity at risk."
I wish it would happen, but we seem to have leaders who are interested only in winning and the other side losing, rather than creating win-win solutions. We see this playing out with the failure to deal with global heating,
It reminds me of a management game that we played in a very large company's training session. We were split into 2 teams, based, I think, on how we acted. The conditions were set up to play an iterated win-lose based on cooperation or defections, with the "winner" having teh most wins. The result was predictable. Defections dominated, and the wins were few. After the game, it was explained that it was really a "prisoner's dilemma" scenario, and the best result would have been cooperation to gain the most wins. The arch-defecting team would not accept that and insisted they had "won" by getting a couple more wins than the other team. This seems to still be how many nations still operate. The current administration and controlling political party are very much operating in that mold. *sigh*.
For historians, how has this weaponization of some new technology or needed resource played out in the past, say 2000 years? Did ancient powers/empires play the same games and win, or lose, or did they manage to reach mutually successful win-win agreements that were sustained?
In one metaphor, you can throw people under a bus. In another metaphor, the wheels come off the bus. So what happens if you throw people under a bus, as the wheels come off? Yikes!...
Even if the American AGI unicorn were to appear, China's increasing energy infrastructure lead shows that the United States won't have enough in the tank to fuel it. The willful and ideological destruction of renewable energy and infrastructure initiatives by the current administration in preference to fossil fuels will be noted as the historic error that ended superpower status.
Sounds about right to me. He’s not quite smart enough and not quite evil enough to be a proper dictator, but he’s selfish enough, greedy enough, and reckless enough to do a lot of long term damage. All to feed a colossal ego built on historically world class self delusion.
I have a theory about Tr*mp that I welcome someone to disabuse me of. After his semi-successful first term, which he didn't expect to win, he was able to secure a nearly unimaginable power base both across the country and among conservative political elites. Which he was clearly reluctant to let go. We foolishly fumbled the opportunity to put a stake through the heart of his political career after seeing the damage he is willing to inflict on our body politic. Ooops! You know what they say about attacking the king. You get one chance, and you'd better kill him. Well... We didnt 🤷🏼♂️.
So now he's back with Tr*mp v2.0, and he's pissed off. We impeached him, twice, then dragged him through the courts on multiple charges in multiple venues. He miraculously(?) managed to evade all those slings and arrows to emerge relatively unscathed. But his reputation was tarnished and his dignity impugned.
Which leads to my relatively simple theory. He obviously had to win, or else face the real possibility of jail time. And he did, Ugggh. But now, he's got nothing to lose. He's old and doesn't need a third act. His reputation as a one-of-a-kind political maelstrom is confirmed, so there are two goals left, both driven by his excessive narcissism. First, to harvest as much cash as he can, from any and all sources. The second, more disastrous one, is revenge. It is impossible to miss that he is systematically destroying every bastion of civil society, technological achievement, and governmental efficacy he can. It churns my stomach to watch. The only motive I can discern is revenge. If someone can convince me otherwise, I'm all ears!
If it doesn't end in extinction.
Somewhat tangential, but when I read articles like the one you wrote in Foreign Affairs, it's always a given that the US has a larger economy. Is this because of GDP? How much of that is based on insane financial instruments and speculative assets with no material bottom?
If China is producing far more energy, far more infrastructure, is advancing faster than the US in key technologies, is producing massive amounts of skilled engineers and researchers, and has a focus on manufactured goods and the refining of raw materials - how do we define their economy as smaller? Because someone makes a calculation that their financial institutions aren't as swelled up with funny money, so our economy is larger? A better accounting of economy would ignore a lot of the speculative cruft that at the end of the day has no material basis.
Living in America one really starts getting the sense that the economy is mainly based on scams, all the way from the bottom of the lower classes betting endlessly on sports apps, to crypto "assets", to the top of the speculative bubble in AI and software, and all the finance that is also betting on the growth of these questionable systems.
Can you eat an NFT? Will I retire on this house of cards?
If you measure national GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP) rather than exchange rates, China's economy is about 3% greater than the US' and potentially increasing the gap. (I say potentially, as China's GDP growth figures are suspect, as the US' figures may also be going forward.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
This is spot on. There just is not the underlying technology to support the bet made and, when we should be focusing on implementation and refinement of current technologies to solidify gains, we are pouring good money after bad chasing LLM shadows.
I love your deep dives on GAI. However, sometimes we need to look at the simple side of things. I think the bit quoted below surfaces all the craziness in our current political and economic culture. Sam Altman and company are as delusional as Trump. If the US economy and/or society crashes, it’ll be more because of the Sam Altmans than the Donald Trumps.
From a recent interview on Theo Von’s podcast, noted in an article on GAI by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic:
“Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.
Theo Von: Do you really?
Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”
Von: Yeah.
Altman: I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you, but, like, we’re stumbling through this.”
"We build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system..." Umm, what? Good luck with that! This guy is one of the bright lights of the next technological revolution? Hoo-boy! Buckle up folks.
In the light of this, how is Silicon Valley’s big bet on Trump 2.0 looking? It may be that it is not just the grail quest for AGI that they should abandon.
Really good articles, especially the FP one linked to.
I may be naively idealistic, but it seems to me that nations have always played power games to stay ahead of others. Britain did plenty of arm-twisting and naked power projection when it was a global empire. When the US and then Britain got the atom bomb, Churchill wanted to nuke Moscow. The US used its post-war power to block Britain and France from trying to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Europeans were very concerned after WWII that the US was using its economic strength and military power to control business in Europe. The selfishness of the US and other Western powers was evident during teh COVID-19 pandemic, restricting the vaccine from poorer nations and preventing them from producing their own with the mRNA technology. Pharmaceutical profits trumped saving millions of lives.
When Paul Kennedy wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - 1500-2000" (1987) it was an analysis based on relative force projection relations vis-à-vis territorial borders. But since then, we have shifted more to economic competition, and the 2000 CE multipolar world predicted in 1980 became the attempted US hegemony after the breakup of the USSR, and the still-to-be-seriously-rising China..
Great Power competition and teh "Great game" of the 19th century seems to be reasserting itself, but with new players (Russia is the remaining original player). The world is much more integrated today than it ever was, even from the prior, pre-WWI 1914 peak. If there were less rivalry and more cooperation, benefitting the global population, there could be a much richer world, with fewer existential risks. We abandoned teh obsolete economic doctrine of Mercantilism, yet the US under Trump seems to be trying to reassert it. Weaponizing interdependence is a recent approach that exploits the global supply and value chains.
While I can understand the suspicion that the "other nation" is trying to exploit us, we seem to be unable to understand that the competitor believes the same of us, and more importantly, it isn't just suspicion, but actions.
The FP essay ends with:
"As during the nuclear era, the United States needs to turn away from unilateralism, toward détente and arms control, and, perhaps in the very long term, toward rebuilding an interdependent global economy on more robust foundations. A failure to do so will put both American security and American prosperity at risk."
I wish it would happen, but we seem to have leaders who are interested only in winning and the other side losing, rather than creating win-win solutions. We see this playing out with the failure to deal with global heating,
It reminds me of a management game that we played in a very large company's training session. We were split into 2 teams, based, I think, on how we acted. The conditions were set up to play an iterated win-lose based on cooperation or defections, with the "winner" having teh most wins. The result was predictable. Defections dominated, and the wins were few. After the game, it was explained that it was really a "prisoner's dilemma" scenario, and the best result would have been cooperation to gain the most wins. The arch-defecting team would not accept that and insisted they had "won" by getting a couple more wins than the other team. This seems to still be how many nations still operate. The current administration and controlling political party are very much operating in that mold. *sigh*.
For historians, how has this weaponization of some new technology or needed resource played out in the past, say 2000 years? Did ancient powers/empires play the same games and win, or lose, or did they manage to reach mutually successful win-win agreements that were sustained?
Fantastic assessment. Thanks for the very thoughtful share.
It is one thing to say you’re for building. It’s another thing to understand how your policy choices can either enable that or cripple it.
"It is increasingly using its tools in a haphazard way that invites miscalculations and unanticipated consequences".
This is the M..O of the misadministration - and this isn't even the worst of it.
In one metaphor, you can throw people under a bus. In another metaphor, the wheels come off the bus. So what happens if you throw people under a bus, as the wheels come off? Yikes!...
Excellent! This is such an important conversation to have right now. Can't wait to read Dan's book.
Though with all due respect to Eric and Selina, Kevin Frazier and I were there first with the "stop obsessing over AGI" op-ed!
https://www.thecentersquare.com/opinion/article_9e8cf0a6-4af1-4065-8f99-ea0bce2064ba.html