No reactionary bs is refreshing indeed. And not sure about Isaac Arthur, not too familiar with the guy.

I mean maybe they would. I figure if we exist on what might as well be a geological scale from their perspective, we might not warrant too close an observation.

that’s how I expect things will develop for the foreseeable future

lol yeah these people are clowns

neat, haven’t run across his stuff before

I think so as well. Incidentally, Diaspora by Greg Egan is another great book exploring this idea.

I’m expecting it’s going to be hard to enforce bloc discipline with western economies going into a tailspin now.

:)

Bobiverse series has a lot of similar themes as well minus the aliens. I really do think it’s going to be a race between us annihilating ourselves and moving off the biological substrate. I’m not convinced that something like mind transfer from a biological brain to an artificial one will ever be possible, but I would treat artificial intelligence that operates on similar principles to our minds to be a branch of humanity.

I do think post biological existence opens up a lot of possibilities. For one, you’re no longer restricted to gravity wells. These are appealing to us because we evolved to thrive in this environment. However, an artificial platform could be designed for existence in space from ground up. You have plentiful energy from the sun, and you can mine any resources you want from the asteroids. There would be very little reason to bother going down to planets at that point. Earth could be preserved as just a living biosphere with all the technological civilization moving off of it.

I think that’s the most likely answer. This gets trotted out on regular basis whenever the US is about to do something really shitty.

On top of that, as we saw with Russian sanctions, it’s very difficult to enforce such things effectively. For example, Chinese could just build factories in Mexico, or sell stuff through third parties. This becomes very difficult to track, especially when trade is being done increasingly outside the dollar. So, the US is guaranteed to lose this game of whack-a-mole trying to enforce their tariffs.

Ultimately, the selection pressures of capitalism favor companies that can generate more profit than their competitors. I also don’t see customers giving a fuck where their stuff is made. Especially given that the economic situation is not looking all that great. People will buy stuff that’s cheapest to save money.

I strongly suspect that biological intelligence, like our own, may be a fleeting evolutionary stage, ultimately giving way to machine intelligence. Consider the timeline: billions of years of evolution to develop the human brain, followed by a rapid explosion of progress. Language, writing, and the exponential accumulation of knowledge arose within a span of just a few hundred thousand years. In a cosmic blink of an eye, a mere couple of thousand years, we catapulted from the Bronze Age to our current technological state.

If we don’t annihilate ourselves, creating human-level artificial intelligence within this century seems a near certainty, perhaps even much sooner. A human-style intelligence on an artificial substrate unlocks the potential for virtual worlds unconstrained by physical laws, operating at speeds beyond human comprehension. If they inhabit simulated realities operating at vastly accelerated speeds, what we consider real-time would appear glacially slow, akin to observing continental drift – perceptible, but inconsequential to their timescale. Their relationship with the physical world would likely be entirely different from our own.

If that’s the likely progression of technological civilizations, then it could explain the whole Fermi paradox and would mean that advanced alien civilizations might not find us particularly interesting. There might be a natural tendency towards solipsism.

My understanding is that majority of neocons do see China as the main threat. However, there was a debate on whether the US should take on China directly or try to shape the battlefield first by breaking apart Russia. The line of thinking that Russia provides China with a shield in the west and the resources China would need to withstand western blockade is legitimate. The cardinal mistake was underestimating Russian capabilities. The faction that won the debate thought they just had blow hard enough and Russia would collapse. At that point they’d get to Balkanize it and surround China with hostile puppet regimes from the west. That’s now backfiring in a spectacular fashion.

Absolutely, the neocons are in a panic that their favorite pet project is about to lose funding.

gotta love it when the truth slips out

more hilarity here https://www.joeydevilla.com/2022/01/22/if-western-food-was-covered-the-way-western-writers-cover-asian-food/

I can’t imagine Russia would ever allow this to happen.

It’s more symbolic than anything.

Yup, he’s getting ready for the Black Friday for billionaires.

I suspect another reason could be that they want to have cash on hand to buy things up when the crash happens. Every time there’s a crash we see a massive wealth transfer to the top, and billionaires are positioning too take advantage of the one that’s unfolding.