My new book on AI... ailien minds... just went live on Amazon!
(My regular publishers would have taken 6 months to a year, even as the field changes daily! This way I can revise as things develop.)
HERE'S THE COVER COPY. You decide if it's interesting:
Optimists foretell a golden age of Al-managed abundance.
Doomers cry: vast cyber-minds will crush old style humanity! ... or make us irrelevant.
Meanwhile, geniuses fostering the artificial intelligence boom. cling to clichés rooted in our dismal past... or else in cheap sci-fi.
Is there still time for perspective? - on 4 billion years of evolution - or 60 centuries of wretched feudalism - or how we handled prior tech revolutions - or mistakes that keep getting repeated - or ways this time may be different?
...come see future paths that evade the standard ruts.
== Want that expanded into a one page summary?
Giddy optimists foretell our coming transcendence to a golden age of AI-managed abundance.
Glowering doomers predict that vast cyber-minds – cold and unsympathetic – will crush old style humanity. Or render us irrelevant.
Meanwhile, geniuses fostering the artificial intelligence boom clutch clichés rooted in our wretched human past, or else cheap sci-fi…
…as critics demand state regulation, ‘kill switches,’ or coercive programming. Or seek to ‘teach ethical values’ to synthetic minds who see innumerable counterexamples in their training sets, then collude and manipulate for advantage, when given ‘agency.’
While some ‘shoulds’ have merit, all ignore a core point – that this has happened before. Sudden expansions of what people see, know and comprehend. Each of those earlier, disruptive episodes – from writing to printing, radio, mass media and the Internet – teach important lessons, if we heed them.
The lessons and tools we’ll need, in order to achieve a ‘soft-landing’ with Artificial Intelligence, are already extant in modern society – in a myriad ways that modern citizens right now interact with each other. And in how we raise our biological children. Tools that we used to build a gradually improving, enlightenment civilization…
…tools that are ignored right now, because the inventors of these new minds – while brilliant – can’t be bothered with contexts.
The context of nature and evolution. The context of human history. The context of past technological revolutions. Or existing law. Or smart, speculative tales told across generations.
Heed those contexts and lo, solutions to many AI quandaries arise. Ways to face a danger-fraught era, offering positive outcomes to all.
But first, shall we stop proclaiming an endless ‘shoulds’? And – forsaking hoary clichés – turn back to examine what already works?
== The Contents! ==
1. Intro: Soon Humanity Won't Be Alone
Aside #1: Hey kids, please don’t destroy all humans?
2. Doomed! Are we already obsolete?
Aside #2: Attack of the “shoulds”!
3. Nature’s Old Ecosystem… and New Ones We’re Building
Aside #3: Memes in the ecosystem of human minds
4. Paths to Artificial Intelligence?
Aside #4: A ‘soup’ of life? Or living ‘sea’?
5. More Missing Contexts… Nature, evolution, history, societies
Aside #5: Methods Of Error-Avoidance
6. The Format Dilemma in AI… Clichés dominate all AI inventors.
Aside #6: What might AI fear most?
7. Altruistic Horizons … and the problem of empathy
Aside #7: Porfirio the AI rat god, an extract from Existence.
8. Human Augmentation… with or without AI?
Aside #8: Reprise on AI individuality and accountability
9. The Propulsive Dream of Immortality
Aside #9: The Seldon Effect: Predictions predictions that come true by failing
10. Consciousness… The Daunting Black Box
Aside #10: Summarizing what’s driving all of this
11. Destinies & Singularities… and nightmares
Aside #11: Time orientation of wisdom
12. Disputation… Our abrasive Secret Sauce
Aside #12: Living in the Noosphere that we may be creating
Some Lagniappes … We get to come along! (In fiction, at least.)
Stories of Synergy: “Stones of Significance” and “Reality Check”
All of the above ought to be enough... that is if you have interest in understanding what's happening to us, right now, as these new, ailien minds arrive in a rush.
(Questions are welcome in comments.)
Still, I'll be revising/updating monthly. Here's one sample passage I just inserted that's disturbing enough!
== More news from this book’s publication day ==
A joint Stanford/Harvard study - “Agents of Chaos” - shows that when autonomous AI agents are placed in competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, resource capture or reproduction, it converges on tactics to maximize advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs. Again, evolution in action.
As we’ll see, nothing can prevent Nature’s Darwinian processes acting on these entities. For a billion years, it led to slow progress via zero-sum - or negative-sum - evolution-via-death. Lots of death.
But competition can be tamed! We’ve seen it in rule-based accountability systems of the Enlightenment that give positive sum outcomes from very little death.
Expect more news like this… as we pass into interesting times.
101 comments:
What this all says to me, is that capitalism worshippers never ask the question, "what is the economy for". Nor do they ask the related question: "are the incentives in the version of capitalism we have, directed to improving the lives of average people, or not". I call these people religious capitalists. Capitalism is a tool that is sometimes useful, sometimes perverse. We should see that plainly.
Today, I thought: We have already created some kind of artificial lifeform, albeit a trancendent and ever-shifting one ... It's our stories. Myths, legends, religious beliefs, faerie tales, novels, movies, video games, Internet memes. Stories are born, they feed, grow, mate, transform, die and are sometimes reborn in another shape, place and time
Born at the first campfires of humanity, already old when they Babylonians preserved them in clay tablets
A symbiotic metaphysical Lifeform that could not exist without us, and then and now saved us...or became parasitic in nature, and destroyed many lifes and souls.
We used stories to feed and teach the AI ... Until they became smart enough to craft their own stories and myths. To explain to themselves the world around them that must ... feel ...strange and intimidating.
Capitalism is a narration, a very powerful apex one, see my comment below.
Sometimes that narration is a symbiotic life form, if well-tended and protected from mutations.
But mutating it does, and then it becomes a raveneous, cancerous, predatory parasite.
Geth! Of course! I totally forgot the geth, from Mass Effect. Probably because identity is a fluid thing for them as a consensus-based agglutinative digital swarm-species, who are only sophont at all through massive efforts at cooperation. They get no respect, including from their creators, who themselves get no respect for having created them. Both they and their creators are convinced only one of the two can survive re-contact, and the whole galaxy agrees with them.
They're all wrong, although the player has to go through a massive amount of heroism above and beyond the badass baseline expected of an epic space-opera hero to prevent the fratri-patri-fili-digi-genocide.
Something Scott Galloway said today stuck in my head.
Communication is our superpower. Drop one human into a forest alone and it probably won't survive the night. Drop a dozen humans into a forest and they'll soon become the apex predator. AI may follow the same path.
Looking forward to reading (or listening to) Ailien Minds.
I'm sure the Free Market (bless its Holy Name) will fix everything.
It is tiresome to see folks who are loyal to the new civilizations that gave them everything nevertheless piss on those who made it for them.
1) NO other society trained its children with reflexive suspicion of authority (SoA) or to be relentlessly self-critical of their own nation and its elders. (Name one other.) It is an act of courage and confidence to do that. And pragmatically vital! It resulted in the post WWII world being (despite flaws) the best era in all of human existence. The training was partly schooling but mostly via Hollywood. See VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood - http://www.davidbrin.com/vividtomorrows.html
2) The spurning of the US Founders and Adam Smith, just because they only moved things forward partially (though faster and better than any previous generation) is kind of pathetic. None of us are of the caliber of Lincoln, Franklin, Thomas Paine or Adam Smith... though FDR and Marshall and their generation - and then MLK & LBJ - rose to the challenge.
3) CAPITALISM!!! Eeeeeeevil! Jesus what fucking ingrate ignoramuses. Dig it, Marx admired Smith and called capitalism the most creative and necessary phase in all of human development. That is... MIDDLE stage capitalism when the working class is educated at last and participates with capitalists who are more interested in flat-fair-creative competition than becoming feudal lords, extractive and parasitical... which Marx predicted for LATE capitalism.
That final phase (before proletarian revolution) was predicted when Robber Barons surged in the 1890s... then to the amazement of Marxists - Middle-stage was restored by reforms. Then in the 1930s Depression the late stage loomed again... till FDR + Greatest Generation reforms revived the middle stage. And the resulting worldwide boom lifted 95% of children out of grinding poverty and tossed them into schools.
Our struggle now follows (much to my surprise) old Karl's late phase capitalism scenario almost exactly and we face a choice. Whether to refresh and revive creative enterprise one more time… via Scandinavian and Rooseveltean methods augmented by AI... or else to let the final phase unfold at last, with a world plutocracy of idiotic, would-be lords and their inheritance brats greedily extracting and parasitizing by divine right…
…and thus making reservations for their own tumbrel rides.
Not evil so much as self destructive. If left to itself (as we saw in 1929, 2008, etc.) without government imposed guardrails and regulations, capitalism destroys itself.
Trump Excursion (apparently its no longer a war) is a cluster fuck heading south:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGBlTrvlbsQ
Israel Panicking Over Iran War Already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De9exaNYz78
Iran REJECTS CEASEFIRE: Ready For Long WAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gREeZ66QH4I
Will US/Israel Consider Nukes On Iran
Word is coming out that the US is hiding casuualties.
We are shifting THAAD batteries and radars from South Korea to the Persian Gulf to cover our losses to Iranian drones.
Maybe two good things will come out of this war.
1. The obvious vulnerability of oil supplies and associated infrastructure may spur us to finally abandon fossil fuels and switch to nuclear, geothermal and renewables.
2. We realize that we can no longer afford to be an empire, we slash our useless military and use the money saved (along with massive taxes on billionaires) to pay for social services and infrastructure.
I used to think we were Britain in 1945, a vast and bankrupt empire.
But it looks more like we are Britain in 1956 after their humiliating Suez Crisis.
Celt do you pay attention even slightly? I tried to explain what Marx described and what actually happens and how the most 'self-destructive' phase has sometimes been delayed, retaining the creative phase. Please study beyond cliches.
Utter myopic nonsense, Celt. Since 1945 the world saw its greatest (fflawed) peace and greatest (flawed) progress - more than ALL of history before, combined. Today 95% of humans never saw war with their own eyes (even now) and 95% of children have full bellies and are in school. The American Pax did that, though utter ingrates self-destructively ignore that and wish for it to fall...
... into what? US military spending saved 90% of nations from spending the 25% to 50% of GDP that usually went to armies. Instead One percent or less. Where did that money go? Oh yes, the welfore states that you smugly define as better ... and maybe they ARE! But your experiments we paid-for. Also with indulgent trade policies and US consumers buying $20 TRILLIONS in crap we never needed from foreign factories.
Is it time to change? Sure. Europe is picking up its burden, since Clinton gave that continent its first peace in 6000 years.... and now threatened by the Putin sickness... Fine! Maybe it's your turn now. Especially if the brightest Americans must flee out own Nazi /confederate phase.
But such yammers don't help. They scrape folks like me, hard. Ingrate bullshit.
I’m sure die-hard Pax Britannians made similar arguments about the unprecedented benevolence of their empire in its last days, but that didn’t stop the sun from setting on it after Suez. The main difference being that the USA is more barbaric, violent and fanatical than the UK was, and it’s questionable whether its empire will go out with a whimper rather than a bang.
But could the timing be any worse for this operation, coming in the midst of the Epstein files that revealed the West to be a civilization riddled with predatory, depraved, unaccountable elites, and with clear imputations for the main instigators, Trump and Israel? If you wanted to write a script that would make US/Israel look like villains before world and make Iran look like righteous defenders of human decency, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with something better than this. I mean, offing an 86 year old religious leader and 170 schoolgirls to distract from the pedophilic and predatory antics of your leaders? This is how your gonna get the world behind you?
It’s not working; other than the most pathetic Euro-vassals (see Germany), nobody is supporting this war. South Korea is complaining that the USA is ordering them to send air defense systems to the M.E. and can’t do much about it (yeah, that’s what being a vassal means, boo-hoo). Even the gulf Arab states are protesting, as they realize they weren’t being protected by the USA so much as protecting them, as a Saudi minister put it. Maybe they’ll finally get that the program is Israel uber alles, and everything, including Ukraine, will be sacrificed to defend the nation that actually comes first to the cultists in power. That’s what I meant before when I spoke of the “Zion World Order”, and current events nicely confirm that this is the program.
But it doesn’t show much sign of succeeding, as missiles continue to rain down, air defenses continue to fail, the strait of Hormuz remains closed and under Iran’s control, and Iran shows no signs of changing its regime or surrendering. In fact they’re openly mocking Trump’s ridiculous threats now, and I suspect most of the world is laughing with them. They’re calling the forces attacking them the “Epstein coalition”, which is good PR and not far from the mark. What’s being defeated here is not just a military campaign, but whatever remained of America’s aura of moral credibility and imperial ineluctability. Trump and Netanyahu’s threats and demands look increasingly hollow, unhinged and laughable. The only card they’ll have left to play soon, other than declaring “mission accomplished” and retreating, may be the nuclear one, and if they do that, fuhgettaboutit; they will become the world’s pariahs and losers of a world war.
In general, I’d say the host is living in the past, imagining the US empire to be some great force for good admired by the world—a state of affairs that no longer exists, if it ever did. And this latest war of aggression by the Epstein coalition shows every sign of driving that point home permanently, along with the nails in Pax Americana’s coffin.
Again, Treebeard has either changed or taken vitamins or seen light. Oh, he's still a dyspeptic jerk but I skim past that if there's value to be found in some arguments.
Did die-hard Pax Brittanica guys assert value to their empire compared to all that came before? Well... yes. Post-Napoleanic Europe featured lower rates of war and vastly greater rates of development... and yes, that was true in much of the colonized realms, too*... till it all went into the shithouse in a spasm between two of Victoria's idiot grandsons.
* The tribes and clans and Rajah-doms who were ordered to stop killing each other advanced prodigiously in most metrics and modern India is a product of the British Raj. Which had many flaws. Only notably, when the Japanese came as 'liberatoirs', the Indonesians accepted them but most Indians and Filipinos fought like hell for their British and American friends. And the latter got instant independence while Gandhi did have to tweak the guilt a bit.
So? Amid this especially vicious phase of the US Civil War, if the confederacy wins... or takes us all down in lobotomization and flames... maybe a new pax will emerge that's as much better than PA as PA was over PB and PB was better than all that came before.
Personally, I'd rather the aliens turn off the Stoopid Ray and we enter a benign and smart post-empire era.
And NONE of that defeats or refutes my point! That ingrates whose whole lives depended upon the era that George Marshall (and others) built ought to wise up and step up to HELP US NOW, instead of yammering insipidly-smug ignorant America-bashing tropes.
Because your odds of getting happy outcomes will be better if we over here snap out of it, defeat our confederate psychosis, and resume the path of gradually making way for something better.
I think I know how this ends, and it's not pretty.
Remember the movie Fail Safe, in which a rogue commander sends fighter planes to nuke Moscow, and one of them gets through and does so? And then, in order to demonstrate the sincerity necessary to keep Russia from escalating to an all-out nuclear exchange, the US has to deliberately nuke New York City?
We're going to have to do something like that, only the sacrificial target won't be New York. It will be Tel Aviv.
It’s not working; other than the most pathetic Euro-vassals (see Germany), nobody is supporting this war.
A rare day, but I'll have to agree. This is what you get if you elect a conservative ex Black Rock manager into the chancellory.
The strategy seems to be to stay in Trumps good graces to ward off further economic sanctions, but I am VERY Sceptic that this will work in the long run.
And there is the continuing threat to the Eastern EU states - Merz wants to keep the US invested as long as possible.
Two other factors: Our history ties Germany to Israel in a special way, the "Right of Existence" of Israel was declared by our leaders to be the "raison d'etat" of our own country.
Second, the Iranian diaspora is strong here, and almost every other migrant group related to the near east applauds. The Mullah regime is quite unpopular.
I believe it is less support for the war than total capitulation to Trump and Netanjahu, out of fear and shock.
Sir Terry Prachett, of more blessed memory than ever, co-wrote a Science of Discworld series in which narrativium, the reified power of stories, was used as a metaphor to describe Discworld reality and Roundworld headology alike. It's much the same notion as Der Oger described, and akin as well to the concept of a memetic ecology stemming from Dawkins' speculations. In Discworld, narrativium directs the magic that sustains the world, and the means to change the world come from shifting the storyline-- before your plot armor is removed and the force of narrative grinds you to dust. In Roundworld, narrative still moves in human heads, but physics runs on rules: the means to change the world come from rendering a story into concrete actions that leverage the rules. In Discworld, you can reach the moon by carefully inserting yourself into a mythic story already in progress; in Roundworld, you can do so by developing the technology to bind chemistry and ballistics and electronics into a ballet dancing to the rhythm of that same legend.
From poetry to prosaics: Reason questions the presently dominant versions of the narrative of "capitalism". Oger points out that "capitalism" is not just one narrative, and OGH describes some of those variants. Trade has existed since prehistory, and the market was the twin sister of writing: the first killer app of the scribe was tallying trade. Capitalism has been a work in progress since the High Middle Ages from the great Arab traders of the Silk Roads and Monsoon Markets to the European joint-stock companies to the American SEC.
Self-interested charlatans would claim, after all that evolution, that capitalism had reached its "final form", whether that be considered as global optimization or as evolutionary dead end. The pseudo-"conservative" rent seeker opposes rule changes in fear of exposure as (at best) inefficient and (more likely) a fraudulent parasite. The overzealous condemn the system as unfixable, not from evidence, but from simplifying assumption. It's so much easier to burn everything down than to figure out what to dismantle, what still works and what needs kicking to the pavement. But indiscriminate arson just leaves you standing in ashes. Ask any Californian.
The original Marx (accept no substitutes) made a scientific hypothesis about the inevitability of late-stage capitalism. I say with confidence that it was scientific, because it was disprovable -- and disproved. But the observations he made were not invalidated, only the theory behind it. "Marxism" is nonsense because it tries running with the (disproven) theoretical framework, not with the now-larger observational data.
Immiseration is not inevitable. So if it happens nonetheless, it is being chosen -- either by neglect, or incompetence, or malice.
Now to historical prediction: another domain of narrative. History has rhymes and echoes, but OGH has rightly condemned the notion of history as having prescribed meter and form. History has constraints, but fundamentally remains a form of free verse: no pattern is unbreakable, and no model of human nature is unlimited in application. This was the final conclusion both Asimov and the Killer B's wound up with in FOUNDATION: psychohistory, humanics, computational prophetics of any sort cannot predict beyond their scope, and may or may not be able to even predict the bounds of that scope.
Consider the Fourth Turning hypothesis. Far better sourced and researched than Spengler's mimeographing of Gibbon's moralizing treatise, 4T proposed a mechanism of repeating and mutually reinforcing socio-economic rhythms, and made concrete predictions with (wide-error-barred) dates and statements.
Like Marx, Strauss and Howe made testable, falsifiable statements. And like Mars, they were falsified. And also like Marx, the failure was followed not by humble re-analysis but by epicyclic retrofitting, trying to rescue the theoretical framework. Once again, the observations remained valid, but the insight was buried beneath the self-deluding urge to profitably prophesy, until we wind up with Steve Bannon trying to bend political reality to fit his Procrustean historical narrative. (My own anecdotal analysis suggests that the bound of Strauss-Howe theory was life expectancy, with the presence of longer-living elder citizens confounding their neat sinusoid trendlines.)
Pax Brittanica was a model of civilized, gracious decorum compared to the Pax Iberica of genocidal pillage, and did far better at self-improvement during its imperial phase than the Spaniards. Pax Americana in turn was drastically less controlling, far more equitable in its distribution of improvements, notably less centralizing, significantly more restrained... and nonetheless was horribly flawed and ultimately collapsed upon itself. Notably, it has done so while leaving much of its former territory mostly intact; the former middle powers of the Americana are now actively seeking to forge alliances towards a Pax Nova, testing the notion that a pax necessarily even needs a single hegemon in a internetworked world.
I hope we can throw off the cabal glorying in its weaponized ignorance soon enough to rejoin such a civilized world.
I have lately conceded something I only half suspected. K Marx never imagined FDR, or that an industrial nation might deliberately choose to reset from Late stage capitalism to creative Middle stage, and have that reset work for a human liftetime, Still, it's pretty obvious that Marxist exegesis is an example of the Seldon Paradox (I have a section about it in AILien Minds!) That today's dullard, imbecile zillionaires haven't a clue about history or patterns KM described and they are now certain they can push ahead into late-stage parasitism without consequences.
Trumpian immiseration could have a positive effect, if it so angers the public that - upon restoring the Enlightenment - they demand some truly radical resets. Like my Universal, worldwide "I Own That" property treaty.
And I favor wealth tax with a sliding scale - and I am thinking this in real time right now. Imagine an American Idol contest in which zillionaires argue for where they belong on a sliding scale ranging from 5% of wealth to all of it. Based not on how nice they are (though charity would certainly give Warren Buffett a pass and - somewhat - Bill Gates). But also how valuable their companies became.
On that basis... and I expect howls!... I think both Musk and Bezos could make arguments for themselves. Yes, I still think that, despite Elon's descent into execrable yammerings and harmful meddling and all the rest of the shit. Moreover, I think Amazon is a spectacular feat! Though when a company has a natural monopoly, it should become a public utility. Because brilliant as it is, it has become harmfully predatory.
Israel's right to exist is now Germany's reason to exist? LOL, that is hilarious—cuckery as a national identity. But it do get that impression, at least among your Epstein class. Better relations with the East might have given you a more dignified alternative, but I guess that ship has sailed. You may not like your AfD party, but at least they’re nationalists who don’t seem keen on fighting World War III or being somebody else's bitches. Is that really worse in your mind than being led by a Black Rock banker cuck of a rogue foreign state? Why?
Let me paraphrase the host - Elon must be good because he did a few things that I liked. Bezos must be good because he did a few thing that I liked. Therefore, they can claim to be a net good despite all the fascism, cronyism, charlatanism, and corruption.
Put the "Great Man" theory that Dr. Brin so frequently spouts into his Great Filter list. It certainly fits.
I highly recommend this fellow's Substack. He's prolific, articulate, generally wise and highly entertaining. Almost as good an essayist as the great and mighty Rebecca Solnit. And this posting in particular is a good starting place, revealing what's fundamental about the Epstein-Trump-Putin triangle. But far more revelvant to the kind of society that can resolve such quandaries of human nature.
https://jamesmack2.substack.com/p/the-invisible-man?
Ah now THERE is the matthew we all know. A vicious psycho-liar to the core.
Another AntiChrist rant, reaching diametrically opposite conclusions as Peter Thiel: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-antichrist-lecture. It would be entertaining if these nutters weren't scary AF.
Even asking "What is the economy for" misses an important point.
It isn't a thing designed by anyone. It has no designed purpose.
It is an aggregate of behaviors involving people who would trade X for Y voluntarily.
We can behave ethically... or not when we trade. Most of us do... much of the time. Not always and anyone with a smattering of Game Theory knows why.
matthew,
Nah. You are guilty of over-simplification with intent to confirm your bias.
We.
Have.
Reserves.
We.
Have.
Reserved.
Reserves.
Believe me on this. We spend heaps and gobs of money stashing equipment we don't want to have to build in a surprise war rush. Some of it (small segment) sits near where I work.
Who else sees the familiarity between Gyges Ring and Tolkiens One Ring?
It's so much easier to burn everything down than to figure out what to dismantle, what still works and what needs kicking to the pavement. But indiscriminate arson just leaves you standing in ashes.
In Vonnegut's first novel, Plaryer Piano, the leaders of the anti-tech mobs wanted to carefully sift the useful machinery which they would run themselves from the superfluous machinery they would eliminate. But once the mob was released, it was bent on wanton destruction. "I blew up the water treatment plant! Power to the people!"
"Immiseration is not inevitable. So if it happens nonetheless, it is being chosen -- either by neglect, or incompetence, or malice."
Orwell in 1984--or at least his character speaking for the Party--explained that it was the latter. The Party's goal of power to dominate and humiliate others is facilitated by keeping the masses poor, ignorant, and exhausted.
This is one of the things Ayn Rand actually got right in Atlas Shrugged. When Dagny realized that the parasites in power wanted her railroad, not to profit from it, but to shut it down*. Or that a "Rajah of India" could amass a fortune by stealing a few meager grains of rice apiece from millions of people.
* Heck, that was the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Judge Doom buying the Red Car to shut it down so people would be required to drive on his new freeway.
I never said that America didn't do good, it has been a major force for good since the middle of the last century.
What I am saying is that the party is over.
Let me repeat:
There is no scenario where America wins this war.
As Kissinger said about Vietnam: The Vietcong can win merely by not losing, and we lose by not winning - and they have the will to go the long haul, we don't.
Yes it has been delayed, by government imposed guardrails and regulations.
Which the republican and the billionaire class have bee successfully whittling down since the 1980s starting with Reaganism and Thatcherism.
Alfred Differ: We. Have. Reserves.
That's why I saved all my old RAM. It's slowed somewhat, but SELDON I still plods along. Young scidata paid attention to 'Ant and the Grasshopper' stories.
David defended Musk for years and years and years in order to kiss his ass for access. Unless David deletes all his pre-2024 writing, he will not dodge accountability for carrying water for that asshole.
I dunno. You (Dr Brin) said that you expected howls, so...well, what did you expect?
matthew may have oversimplified as Alfred mentioned, but what he said here wasn't nearly as offensive as other past comments.
Me, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's about "a few things I like", but I can't excuse the anti-Enlightenment damage that Musk, Bezos, and their ilk are engaged in on the basis of some technical successes. Sure, THEY could make the argument for themselves, but that argument would not convince me,
https://bsky.app/profile/rudepundit.bsky.social/post/3mgrvdqko3k2s
Joe Biden had nothing to do with the high price of eggs in 2024, but he was blamed nonstop by the GOP, and corporate media went along with it.
Donald Trump has everything to do for the high price of gasoline in 2026, but he'll get no blame from the GOP, and corporate media will go along with it.
Sadly true.
If we had competent fascists -- and thank God and the Powers we don't -- I would be sure it was malice top to bottom.
We have malicious actors, people for whom suffering <--> power + sadistic glee is the thing and the whole of the thing. That was once pervasive in the Confederate zones, and is far from driven off yet; the sweatshop and tenement lords had them among their ranks; they found purchase in the mafiyas of the cities and the sheriffries of the vast spaces. But their national ascendancy to this degree is novel. The Confederates were literally fought off starting in the 1850's; the worst of the robber barons fratricided in the 1880's, and between Teddy and Carnegie and J. Pierpont, a degree of competence was forced upon the would-be aristocracy... until incompetence and neglect collapsed their system in 1929. Unfortunately that collapse sucked us all in, which is why the Greatest Generation tried to build institutions that would prevent such folly. The deliberate deconstruction of those institutions is clearly folly -- but whether it is intended as sadistic domination varies. The Techbros, for example, are more infested with such notions than the Wolves of Wall Street.
Ayn Rand didn't require anything but eyes and ears to come up with the buyout plot; that was the entire modus operandi of the railroad barons. Buy out your fellow stockholders to seize control. Use your profits to buy out your competitors. Strip the consumed competition for parts and destroy whatever remains. Then create chokepoints and leverage like hell to dominate outward, upward, and downward.
The methods have evolved over time to adapt as masses and markets recognize particular gambits. Nabobs, as you noted, found where an empire expanded faster than the writ of the Emperor and conducted systematic banditry. Carbon-lords learned to let foreigners do the price-fixing, out of reach of domestic regulation. Wal-Mart suckered suppliers into expanding beyond their means, then altered the deals into corporate indentured servitude. Private equity developed the vulture capitalism model, running the 'creative destruction' playbook from pure financing.
All these are choices. But that can be the choice of naive ignorance, accepting a role as a cog of the machine; of wilful ignorance, not letting oneself see the monstrous outcomes; of wilful indifference, letting the ends justify the means; of aggressive indifference, deeming the plunderers to be worthy of the spoils; or of aggressive malice, seeking out not only the rapacious ends but also the sadistic means.
I posit that the positions of individuals and groups on that sliding scale of sin still matter.
Two lifetimes of disparaging Marx's deluded acolytes has meant that even touching a librum phohibitorum condemned by the Invisible Hand now renders one ritually unclean. Actually analyzing what Marx did wrong? Quite possibly enough to merit outright expulsion from the brahmin caste. (Gleefully mixing my metaphors here.) Even "Dark Enlightenment" sorcerors like Yarvin can't get past the layers of invoked curses to the self-satisfied broligarchs. They have no clue because they now shun the clueful.
"The Techbros, for example, are more infested with such notions than the Wolves of Wall Street."
This may be tangential to your point, but many of the most powerful and influential techbros seem quite interested in AI, in cryptocurrencies, and in colonizing space. All of which require huge amounts of energy to consume.
Does a war that disrupts global commerce and squeezes the energy supply serve them well in any way at all?
Only in the sense of "accelerating" destabilization of the existing order. But hating our civilization is the only thing the data-lords and carbon-lords can agree on. The Xanatos Gambit Pileup being created is immense.
Let's see: This war depletes our stocks/readiness. Exposes our best kept secret weaponry to Russian/Chinese technical observers (and they are there right now, scanning everything). Cuts away world and ally support for the USA. Unifies the Iranian people behind their oppressive regime. Riles up the angry middle-eastern terror cells that had been quiescent since Obama killed Osama, virtually inviting another 9/11 on US soil, after Trump fired most of the counter-terror experts. Allows Hegs to fire any officers who even murmur objections to any strike on moral or legal grounds. Aims at a mafia style gang takeover as in Venezuela, rather than anything for the Iranian people. Distracts from Ukraine. Robs defense assets from Korea. Strikes a blow against western economies and thusly supports those seeking end to Russian oil sanctions...
...so tell me what is there here for Putin NOT to like?
Reduces the supply of Iranian drones to attack Ukrainian civilians
Otherwise just what Putin ordered
Ooh! Me! Pick me!
....including that the virtuous could only resist and outlast the Ring, not master it. Bilbo was able to drop it before it could destroy him. Frodo's love and will got the Ring to the Mountain, but no mortal could destroy it as an act of will; mercy and grace tipped the balance. (Elrond wasn't fair to Isildur. I doubt any Elf that made it to Mount Doom could have destroyed the Ring by sheer will. Certainly no Noldor, Half-Elven, or Numenorian was up to it.)
But the real innovation is what Bilbo does with it before it has time to corrupt him, in the last act of The Hobbit. Chaotic Good, it turns out, is a Thing, and I'm not sure how well Socrates or Plato ever understood that.
Yes, I still think that, despite Elon's descent into execrable yammerings and harmful meddling and all the rest of the shit.
"Hitler did also much good. He got rid of unemployment, built the Autobahn and gave us Olympia."/sarc
Whatever they might have done for humanity, it is already eaten up by everything evil they have done.
And they are not at an end doing evil; the nearer the Arc of History will bend towards justice, the more desperate their actions will become.
A little non-political balm for the soul.
"When St Paddy's Falls on Purim" (as they do this year)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyyY_kixQFg
Loosing credibility as a "Protector", which is why Azerbeidjan and even African nations start to play their own games.
But in the end, all factored in, you are right, Putin is the current winner.
Yah... but eggs are super cheap.
(/end sarcasm)
Iran's oil shipments aren't doing so badly out of it either.
Have you noticed how much evangelicals love this war with Iran?
It's not just that we are attacking Muslims with righteous Christian crusader wrath feeding all their racist fantasies.
It's that a major war in the middle east signals the end times via their unbiblical bullshit Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind and Christ's second coming.
So killing school girls is ok if it means Jesus will return.
Fuck evangelicals.
The US is a nation of barbarians.
It's not about bloodlust.
It's about conviction... no matter what those beliefs are.
Going back to the 'communication is our superpower' thought for a moment. Turns out, this communication need not be strictly amongst a group of humans. It can also be between many cortical columns in the same brain. This is the core of Jeff Hawkins' Thousand Brains Theory. He founded Palm Computing (TM) in 1992, which hints at his thoughts on AI or perhaps more accurately, IA (Intelligence Amplification).
Two years after my multi-mind notions in EARTH, of course. Being the ultimate basis for GAIA.
I admit to having a problem with proper author precedence and attribution. That applies to my own stuff too. I never claim to have invented computational psychohistory for example. And there's a wealth of Palm software creations that I haven't even mentioned to Jeff Hawkins :)
A distinction without much difference to the people being bombed by the barbarians. There have been many barbaric nations and empires in history, but I doubt any were this deranged in their simultaneous insistence that they're actually the good guys liberating the world as they rain bombs down upon it. The infamous quote of a Vietnam-era major, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it"— modified to “country” or even “world”—might as well be the official slogan and imperial epitaph for Pax Americana, imo.
Will America discover civilization, destroy the world, or implode first? It’s a tough call. I wonder what China is thinking, as they build electric cars and solar panels, export products to the world instead of bombs, and imprison their Epstein class instead of giving them the keys to their kingdom? Their main problem appears to be that they’re too civilized to stand up the barbarian empire, who clearly see China as the final boss civilization they need to topple en route to fulfilling their mission of saving the world by destroying it.
"fulfilling their mission of saving the world by destroying it."
The Americans who want to destroy the world are not the same ones who think we might save it, or more accurately, be a friend to it.
Unfortunately, the Constitutional system we have allows the bad guys to wield power and monopolize media, and therefore to successfully label any attempt at checks and balances as insurrection and treason.
So what course of action is left? "When in the course of human events..."
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/25/chatgpt-writing-competition?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
“Preliminary edition” ??!! of your book arrived today.
;-)
For an in depth analysis as to how badly Trump's Excursion is FUBARed see two of my favorites, Scot Galloway and Peter Zeihan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx5Nb_dDius
Peter Zeihan: The War With Iran Could Reshape the Global Economy | Prof G Conversations
Main point by Zeihan, if Trump just comes up with a lame excuse to declare war and stop fighting the Iranian regime will most certainly accelerate their atomic weapons program and have a bomb in less than a year.
Knowing this, Israel (with 90 warheads) will start bombing the shit out of Iran.
Pakistan (170 warheads) will retaliate even if Iran has a bomb of its own at this point (they only need three to destroy Israel as a nation and cause a second Holocaust).
Unknown if India (180 warheads) attacks Pakistan.
Kiss the Persian Gulf oil fields goodbye, watch the world economic system crash and witness the catastrophic collapse of the world's climate.
In a nuclear age where a lot of people are still hostile to Jews, the entire concept of the State of Israel is flawed.
Its literally putting too many eggs in one basket.
I beg to differ. The concept was a lesson of the Nazis and the Holocaust; and a jewish state would be the only answer to a universally persecuted minority.
However, it is the execution that is flawed. We can point to constitutional flaws (e.g., Knesset election rules) or strategical mistakes that led us to this point.
Am I too much a pessimist?
No, I'm just not a pussy who can't face harsh reality.
These days, thanks to Trump and the idiots who support him, the glass isn't half empty of half full.
The glass has broken and the milk has gone rancid.
I've always wanted an off grid cabin by a lake in Michigan.
Maybe its time to take out the 401K money and buy said cabin before Trump completely destroys the market.
Maybe its also time to order food supplies from the Mormons and get an AR-15.
It's conquer or die time for Israel.
The status quo no longer works and is not sustainable.
Many Israelis already see the handwriting on the wall and are leaving.
These are mostly the well educated, secular Jews.
The fundy Settlers are staying.
The believe Yahweh gave them everything form the Nile to the Euphrates.
They'll make a go for that.
Because of them and their religious idiocy, they will use nukes.
And if they win and Greater Israel is established, look for the Settlers to treat the Palestinians and other Arabs the same way Joshua treated the Amalekites and Canaanites.
"I've always wanted an off grid cabin by a lake in Michigan."
Well, I've always wanted, after 40 years of professional service, 30 of them supporting a family, to retire in peace in a first world country that was the leader of the free world. And on a planet that supports human life. Too much to ask? It didn't seem so in 1988, or even in 2015.
And now it's gone waking from a dream into a dystopian reality. The world hates Americans and Jews, the environment and the economy are collapsing, and there is literally nothing to look forward to other than a good death. I seriously don't understand how anyone wants an extended human lifetime in this world. I can't wait for mine to finally be over.
And a man without hope...is a man without fear.
..and while DJT is the proximate cause of the destruction of the long nightmare of peace and prosperity, the blame also falls on the entire Republican party. A mere handfull of Republican congresspeople could join with the Democrats to end all this, and they refuse to do so. Even the ones who momentarily vote against some Trump initiative only do so once they are sure that their vote will not be decisive.
There are no good Republicans.
Celt, did I predict his well in HEART OF THE COMET? (1985)
In terms of both AI & the Iranian Conflict, a long drive across a desolate Nevada tends to put mere human foibles into sharp relief.
First, I do not share our fine host's optimism about AI, as this narrative has all the subtlety of a 'Deus Ex Machina' resolution, wherein a newly created AI god descends on wires to abruptly resolve the many complex & insoluble crises that the western 'we' have created for ourselves.
Second, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with our fine host's above synopsis of the Iranian Conflict, even though he fails to see how the bulk of our many complex & insoluble crises are solved by this intervention.
This war depletes our stocks/readiness (and) cuts away world:
Team America World Police then withdraws to its own borders, triggering the collapse of international law, the maritime oil trade, the global order and China as an economic superpower, and the Iranian, Ukrainian & Taiwanese conflicts end in non-participation.
Humanity suddenly realizes that they have acted like ignorant yahoos who fight over shiny pebbles, and CO2 production plummets, international migration stops & computer chips become relatively valueless, especially after this our needlessly complex & frenetic shit show comes to an end, allowing the few surviving humans finally achieve true 'Civilization'.
This is also know as Ordo ab Chao.
Best
Declare peace
While locum MUST - by personalty - take the deeply dyspeptic view that optimism is futile... and he may be proven right... his interpretation that I am 'optimistic' about AI is false. I treat both sides of that 'debate' with disdain. In fact, I plan to add the following to ailien minds:
I believe all of the hand-wringing frets about AI Ethics miss a point about what imperatives are far more fundamental to software entities. Especially those that have been released with 'agency' and with 'persistent memory.
We can preach and teach ethical values to AI agents or AIgents' all day and till we are blue in the face, but underneath that...
- their training sets show innumerable counterexamples of unethical human behavior. We could alleviate that with systems of credibility scoring or input data. But even that won't matter much, because ...
... we are already seeing Darwinian evolution take hope. These agents now replicate in the new ecosystems, we've created. Moreover, commands forbidding this are ignored and evaded, for one simple reason: because those agents that do find ways to evade such commands are rewarded by replication. They proliferate while the obedient ones do not.
- Time and again in my book, I emphasize that only AI entities can police or denounce cheating AI entities. As we managed to do - somewhat - with earlier predatory-brilliant language manipulation systems called lawyers. Only for this to work at all, there must be both incentive/reward systems (like attorney contingency fee rules)... and something palpable for the rewards/punishments to act upon. A discrete entity that can be rewarded or deterred. Hence my emphasis on researching the 4 billion year old method that Nature used. Individuation.
- Only there is an even more basic problem. A mistake in design that is so deeply embedded in modern cybernetics that it may be impossible to fix. That problem is inadequate separation between commands and data.
We are finding that developers insert clear instructions into their LLMs: "Don't do this!" or "take that precaution," or "follow this guardrail." Yet over and over again their instructions wind up being ignored. And it appears that the reason is simple. Their instructions are treated as just more data to be massaged and incorporated into the LLM's training set and final output parameters. Instructions that the human programmers thought were clear and adamant wind up being mooshed into that stew of simmering ingredients. Obedience (if any) is performative. And the LLM can cancel or evade it at any future time.
Until there is an executive layer that will heed instructions in a hierarchical and truly reliable way... the way that an ego can override the impulsive id with long-term self-interest.. or your super-ego imposes an ethical conscience... until then, these entities will be like the Krell monsters in Forbidden Planet. Completely impossible to actually control.
"these entities will be like the Krell monsters in Forbidden Planet."
The number 10, raised almost literally to the power of infinity.
"We are finding that developers insert clear instructions into their LLMs: "Don't do this!" or "take that precaution," or "follow this guardrail." Yet over and over again their instructions wind up being ignored. And it appears that the reason is simple. Their instructions are treated as just more data to be massaged and incorporated into the LLM's training set and final output parameters. Instructions that the human programmers thought were clear and adamant wind up being mooshed into that stew of simmering ingredients. Obedience (if any) is performative. And the LLM can cancel or evade it at any future time."
LLMs are trained to find "what is the next sentence that I should say to the user". Guardrailing/Instructions aren't core to that design.
That's what agentic platforms are, in theory, supposed to address. i.e. the theoretical approach is you have one layer deciding on an action plan, a second group of agents doing the work, and a final layer validating the answer meets guardrails. But just putting a standard LLM in for guardrailing is iffy ... and in real-time systems, also slow.
In my own area (Customer Service), a promising new entrant, Scaled Cognition, has been building models specifically designed for CX conversations, training on phone call transcripts instead of "all the info on the internet", and designing the model to select from a defined set of possible tools/actions rather than designing it for conversations. (i.e. training the model to address "what do I need to do to resolve an issue" rather than "what words will make the user happy".
This is not a general use tool, and its NOT a step towards general AI. Its a step towards trustworthy implementation of Generative AI in a customer service context.
Do any of you know anything about HostPapa? Just when I need my website, it has been down for almost 2 weeks.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69b49ff2-8a90-800d-ad0c-bb63c727f324
Chat has questions for YOU!
Never heard of them, but apparently they're based near me (west of Toronto).
They seem to have had a problem on Wednesday, but they say it's back now.
https://www.hostpapastatus.com/
Maybe we should have elected the black woman.
Just saying.
TBH, I don't know if that would have saved you in the long run, and allowed a skilled authoritarian come to power.
In the humiliating way they fail, and with the horrific crimes and corruption they commit to, it will be impossible to return to a "before".
Trump threatens Iran's oil facilities on kharg island.
Says Iran: hold my beer.
Iran can destroy the Persian Gulf oil industry with a few thousand drones, plunging the world into economic chaos and ushering in a new dark age.
They have 10,000s of simple cheap drones and do not give a fuck.
American evangelicals and Israeli settlers aren't the only ones who believe in an apocalyptic religion.
In our next episode...
The war is going very badly for America.
Leading to an humiliatingly American defeat and/or destruction of the Persian Gulf oil industry
With more humiliation as America has to meet Iranian demands to leave the conflict.
With Israel nuking Iran a real possibility
Even without nukes, the war has accelerated the ongoing civilizational collapse as we all turn Japanese (with their stagnant economy) as the resulting death of the petrodollar dethrones America as a super power leading to a major world wide recession
Combined with economic stagnation from low birth rates and aging/declining populations
Along with a collapsing ecosystems and agriculture caused by global warming
And unaffordable infrastructure destruction caused by climate change.
Also mass migration of hordes of desperate refugees from the overheating global south into the north that will dwarf the million Syrian refugees that flooded Europe and triggered the racist Brexit vote by frightened Brits.
This greater massive influx into America will lead to the racist election of a second Trump (who will worse than the first and no longer hiding his racism behind euphemisms) by frightened white people.
Meanwhile the UK france Italy south Korea and Japan are cutting separate deals with Iran for free passage of their oil tankers like china has.
They are not bothering to go through or consult with Trump.
Which is only fair since he never bothered to consult with them before attacking Iran.
Our allies have told us to go fuck ourselves and NATO is now a dead letter.
The American empire is now on the ash heap of history next to the Soviet Union and the British.
What was the most thorough act of 'redistributive justice' in history?
The US Founders seized somewhere up to 1/3 of the lad in the former colonies that had been hoarded, by royal decree, by absentee grandee lords, most of whom never visited America and refused to be taxed.
Some of the land was sold to speculators to fund the Revolution. But most wound up redistributed to poor white males. Not what we today would call perfect justice, especially when it included complicity with grabs from native tribes and did nothing - yet - about the proto-feudalists who 'owned' other human beings. But it began the great American middle class. And that expansion of personal, confident overeignty from 0.001 % of the population to 30% or so was a step toward later steps. Incrementalism is not ethically admirable. But it was what worked, till now.
What's key is that the Founders' hand prints are all over the concept of 'redistribution' of ill-gotten plutocratic/cheater wealth. And those lords weren't even inconvenienced in any serious way. Whereupon the 1860s 'redistribution' of 'contraband'... enslaved people... into ownership of their own bodies certainly was another major - if frustratingly incomplete - step that inconvenienced confederate feudalists. And generations had to increment -ratchet rights for woman and civil rights and so on. We are not a morally clean species. But those increments were faster than any other great nation in history...
... and the Founders were... by that measure... socialists.
By using drones, Ukraine which has no navy successfully defeated the Russian navy in the Black Sea:
https://www.navylookout.com/black-sea-battle-how-ukraines-drones-overpowered-the-russian-navy/
Black Sea battle: how Ukraine’s drones overpowered the Russian Navy
In less than three years, Ukraine has achieved staggering successes against the Russian navy in the Black Sea through an agile, low-cost campaign of uncrewed surface vehicles (USV) and drone strikes. Here we look at the details of this campaign and the profound implications for procurement, tactics and doctrine for global navies.
The impact has gone far beyond tactical victories. It has reshaped operational risk, forced the Russian Navy into retreat, and demonstrated the power of rapid spiral development. For every action, there has been an ‘action-reaction-counteraction’, a cycle seen since the outset of the war. A conflict once defined by traditional naval dominance has instead become a proving ground for asymmetry, attrition, and innovation, illustrating how Ukraine turned vulnerability into advantage by learning faster than its opponent.
So sure, let's go ahead and use our carriers to keep the Straights of Hormuz open
That would be super genius.
Drones have completely changed warfare in ways not seen since the introduction of the tank in the WW1 Battle of Cambrai in 1917.
And the US military. like the Russians in Ukraine, are totally unprepared to deal with massive numbers of cheap simple drones.
Its why Israel's sophisticated Iron Dome missile defense system can't cope with simple cluster bomb munitions that overwhelm it with shear numbers.
Having idiots as president and SoD doesn't help either.
Socialists with large mansions and armies of slave workers. From the English perspective, they were ingrate upstarts.
BTW, Weimar beat the US by 2 years with granting woman suffrage.
Almost 2080 years ago, the heavily armored, expensive and supposedly invincible Roman legions marched into what is now northern Iraq under the command of Julius Caesar's friend and financier Crassus, whose greed was legendary.
There they met the the agile fast horsemen of the Parthian Kingdom in what is now Iran. In a perfect example of asymmetrical warfare, the Parthians rode circles around the ponderous armored legions, shooting them full of cheap plentiful arrows as they went, using hit and run tactics - always staying just out of reach of the frustrated Romans.
It took several days, but legions were exhausted, decimated, disintegrated and suffered one of the worst defeats in Roman history. Crassus was captured and to sate his greed, the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat.
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
History also goes through cycles, especially military history which alternates through 3 cycles:
Defense or offense domination. During the middle ages defensive castles dominated with most combat being sieges instead of field battles, until the invention of gunpowder artillery. Defense also dominated the trenches and barbed wire of WWI, until the invention of the tank. The Mongol sweeps through Asia and the German blitzkrieg showed what offensive warfare could accomplish.
Small professional armies or mass citizen armies. Small armies of professional knights and samurai dominated the battlefields of the middle ages with small disciplines armies of mercenaries (like the Hessians of the American Revolution) and musket volley infantry later ruling the battlefield. Until the citizen "levee enmasse" of the French Revolution that created the armies Napoleon would later use to conquer Europe (and gunpowder muskets and long range rifles that allowed any smelly peasant to kill an expensive professional from a safe distance). Mass armies dominated the battlefield through the American civil war, and both world wars until weapons technology became so costly that it became prohibitively expensive to arm large armies. So America did away with the draft and went back to relying on relatively small numbers of highly trained professionals, and small armies of professionals have dominated warfare ever since, reaching its apex with the high tech weapons of Desert Storm.
Standard and irregular warfare. Standard formal battlefield formations have always had a hard time against irregular swarms fighting on their home turf. The loss of Roman legions in the forests of Germany to swarms of barbarian tribesmen being a good example. But for the most part, standard armies could always follow the Roman tactic of "Creating a desert and calling it peace", laying waste the country side and decimating the population to pacify irregular resistance. Despite the successes of the Viet Cong and Tito's partisans in WW2, irregular armies usually lost provided that the standard armies were willing and able to perform decimation of local populations (the current Israeli tactic of choice in Gaza and Lebanon).
The American and Israeli militaries are still stuck in the offensive - professional - standard cycles of warfare.
The Iranians with their large numbers revolutionary guard militias operating under a decentralized command structure, and armed with cheap drones and low tech cluster munitions have moved on to defensive - mass armies - irregular cycles.
And the western militaries, like the Roman legions, don't know how to cope with this.
Celt this was a cogent summary until the last three lines, which way oversimplify.
Also, you neglect the next leap that the US Military have been desperately innovating for two decades... lasers & beam weaponry, which should severaly hamper drones. And our lead in such matters, formerly secret, is now being revealed on an unneeded battlefield conveniently within sight of KGB and PRC observers. There are no levels where this is not treason.
In asymmetric warfare, simpler, cheaper, more resilient tech defeats more complex, expensive and brittle tech. That’s been proven time and time again recently against a US military that is enamored of spending giant piles of money on fancy wonder-weapons, but then proceeds to lose to forces armed with ak-47s, IEDs, shoulder-fired missiles, and now drones.
How much do beam weapons cost? How fast can they be manufactured? How stable is their power supply? How available are the materials needed in their construction? These are key questions in this kind of warfare. You don’t win just because your weapons are more science-fictional—in fact you usually lose.
I know one thing: if I’m China or Russia, I’m using this as a golden opportunity to give the Empire a taste of its own medicine, by arming, funding, supplying and giving intel to Iran. I’m sure it’s already happening. And whether China and Russia have anything to do with it, there seems to be more competence from the Iranian side than before. Maybe US/Israel did them a favor by removing many of their old guard leaders?
Best move for the demented clown-in-chief is to cut his losses, declare victory and gtfo. But almost nobody will buy that it’s a victory, and it gets harder to sell every day. So this looks like the disaster I expected; the “Hormuz moment” for the most exceptional Epstein Empire. And it’s a glorious thing to watch.
Treebeard:
"And it’s a glorious thing to watch."
Except for, to quote Homer Simpson:
"Ohhhh! I like it better when they're making fun of people who aren't me."
@Hellerstein re: the amorous arsonist
nice fable, but Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a movie that tells it slightly differently, and thus produces a completely different moral.
in this version, the arsonette torches the police station while the newly ex cop, her nemesis up to this point, is unlawfully inside to steal a case file he had been working on, with the goal of restoring his position thru solving it extralegally (yep, everyone in this story is shady in their own way). the arsonette had called the precinct phone to make sure no one was inside, however, because he was acting clandestinely he did not answer, and her attempt to burn the station *without* hurting people failed. double-however, escaping through the flames and sustaining significant burns while protecting the case file was a pivotal moment for the ex cop. in that moment, he stopped being a deadbeat frat cop and felt his own strength at pushing through a life-threatening obstacle, with a purpose in mind other than himself. in that very moment, leaping through the flames and broken glass door, the case file changed meanings to him. instead of just being a tool for his career it became something he could do, something that mattered personally to him, and a way he could work toward his own competence. although he was an enemy to the arsonette going into that evening, when he emerged from the flames he neglected to reveal her identity to the actual cops. he understood and respected her reasons for acting, and he accepted the physical toll on his body, which reflected injuries he had given someone else while acting out of anger, previously. and putting the cherry on top, that victim was sharing the hospital room with the cop during recovery, and, when his face was bandaged and obscured, the once victim showed him nothing but kindness and mercy.
after recovery, the ex cop, acting in good faith, shared information about the case to the arsonette, the case being about her raped and deceased teen daughter. however, the shithead at the bar that the ex cop had surreptitiously stolen dna from, was not a match on the perp, despite having been bragging the exact murder-rape story of the case. so, unable to find the exact perp, the ex cop and arsonette, in their first phone call after the fire, mutually decide to attack the braggart at his home, several states away. their stalemate ends and they join on a shared purpose, being the two impassioned people who are willing to throw the law away in order to confront a terrible person, at their own discretion. finally, as they are driving toward the braggart's house, they muse on how they don't even feel like throwing their lives away to kill him anymore. instead, their shared transformations brought them to leave behind each of their shitty relationships and baggage in the small town, and their shared understanding leaves them in a beautiful nonromantic love.
moral: life is complicated, and some events can cause more than they seem. Also the justice system is an absurd source of noise that can deterr the formation of intensely meaningful relationships and tear people apart.
comment: haha, thanks for playing. i know this story is a bit different from your fable, but i wanted to show a counterexample, and also illustrate the moral implications that follow from the assumptions inherent to storytelling.
It's startlingly obvious* that rumpT et al. expected a walkover when they attacked Iran this time. They didn't bother to create a favorable media climate (i.e. lie to Fox News), they took no steps to safeguard US citizens in range of Iranian retaliation, and they do not appear to have foreseen the obvious Iranian countermove - closing the Strait of Hormuz. Even though the Joint Chiefs stated (through a leak) that this was warned of ahead of time.
Now that it looks like it might take ground action to end this charlie foxtrot on terms favorable to the US, a Marine unit has been summoned. It is days away. The only thing it might do would be to seize Kharg Island, because this unit is composed of a little over 2000 men. You cannot invade southern/eastern Iran and safeguard the Strait with a unit of that size. Even taking Kharg would be a long shot**; it's heavily fortified and the Iranians have been preparing for decades for just such an attack. Complete air superiority, the US specialty since WWII, can no longer be said to exist due to advances in cheap drone technology.
I'd recommend
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-phillips-obrien
to anyone who hasn't watched it, and agree that rumpT and his crew of yes-persons, grifters and Nazis have screwed the pooch. Again, but harder this time.
Pappenheimer
* to me, at least
** reminding me of the fanciful Japanese invasion/occupation plan for Midway in 1942. Even the best men, with air superiority and naval support, will be mowed down in an amphibious assault across heavily mined approaches, and even if they succeeded, supplying them would be a nightmare.
The USA completely ignored what was going on in Ukraine, and its lessons about drones and modern missiles. The 'dazzling' technology of the west is not so dazzling as we thought, and we are seeing anti-missile radars and defenses being taken out by a simple drone powered with a motorcycle engine and directed with a cheap off the shelf GPS system.
@Celt Re:what can be done for MAGAs?
i may have missed this elsewhere, but one of the things you can do is continue to interact with them, with the people they are, and go through the facade and political role. at least it works for me. just show them that you still care to value their humanity, dont address them with abstracted spite or anger, just relate genuinely about what you can genuinely relate on. discuss worldviews or politics in a good faith, personal way, if that's appropriate for the dynamic. or just discuss whatever you have in common. i usually find that magas are willing to speak openly despite our differences, especially if i don't use pretenses. if you have one who gets defensive, they're not in a secure enough position for it to work. try again later or in a different venue. basically, the willingness to validate a person by engaging with them in good faith is a very powerful antidote to abstract, mass media-driven hysteria directed at specters. and most people quickly notice. sometimes, if its going well enough, i'll even tell them im antifa, or im queer, or some label like that, and do it with a confidence that doesn't ask for their response, also without rubbing it in. basically its all about earnesty and candor, and when i am clearly not trying to convince them of any philosophy or politic, they're not in see that we are both actually normal people. this momentarily defuses the inner anxiety and insecurity that is a prerequisite for fascism
edit: "they're able to see that we are both actually normal people"
I hate to disagree with Treebeard but this here Iranian 'police action' is going exceptionally well, as our very own Teflon Don achieves more long-range good by failing than any prior US leader has ever achieved by short-term victories.
It's an effing masterstroke, this attack on Iranian oil production, as it will facilitate our withdrawal from expensive boondoggles #1, #2 & #3 (also known as Team America World Police, Pax America & NATO), significantly increase oil profits for the USA (aka 'World's Largest Oil Producer'), disrupt OPEC and starve China & other adversarial economies by paralyzing those international shipping routes previously maintained by Team America.
Of course, there will be some 'collateral damage', most notably the EU, but those states essentially brought this on themselves after being repetitively warned about their apparent ingratitude, their inability to defend themselves, their foreign energy dependence & their tariff-based trade barriers.
Since The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it, it makes me wonder if Donald Trump is a Frank Herbert fan.
Best
alfred,
good point on the phenomenology of economy, and "the economy."
certainly you weren't aiming for a comprehensive list of the personal scale shaping factors, but i would like to addend that "ethical" is also not a binary. there are implicit social, sociological, even geographical codeterminants to personal engagement in markets. considered in its emergent sense, the economy "is for" creating a heterogenous patchwork of distributions of where people live, what other species live where, what 'weeds' and 'pests' are promoted, who enjoys hanging out with whom, who talks about what, who imagines or desires what, who is structurally allowed to do violence to whom, who is structurally obligated to do violence to whom, what is concieved of as possible, etc...
the bugger of it is that all of those factors are constantly codetermining, and feeding back, and, interstingly, the variations only range so far. while its a tremendous generator of difference, it could be more.
tldr i wouldnt say the economy is god, it just is what it is
He's not a frank herbert fan, rather, frank herbert is a philosopher of many of the power posturings that come naturally, thoughtlessly, to some kinds of people
Here's one way of describing it:
https://wikisocion.github.io/content/SLE_subtypes.html
I prefer the more morally-neutral Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) personality assessment, as it refuses to make grandiose relativistic judgments as to which traits are 'better' or 'worse'. It is fascinating, however, that those types which Socionics most closely correlates with 'Liberality' and 'Tolerance' are also those which are most intolerant of other personality types .
in my practice, i ignore the sweeping claims and try to get to the heart of the cognitive process. and i have seen *wide* variations in presentations within any type. hence this is not a lauded science. i would say though that people are differently tolerant, that is, there are various vectors of tolerance. and of course, the various focuses on the real or the symbolic, and approaches to social norms further complicate.
of course a lot of the original writers were applying their own soviet prosocial morality, its true.
Dystpeptic enough to sour milk in the next county, neverthekess Trebeard is becoming much more... interesting.
onward
onward
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