World War AI

How do you fight back? You could do a lot worse then reading and taking to heart Wendell Berry’s “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Emphasis mine

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

I think Ben you forgot about the rare earth mining that will be the forefront of this war. They may not give you careers in corporate, but they have some jobs in the mines.

In response to Kaiser147’s comment about jobs in mines:

Interesting thought.

I have a suspicious that the elite in China and the elite in the USA are working hand in hand, in coordination, to create a beautiful future for the elite. China will be selling everyone rare earths because China’s business model is to sell everything to everyone. So those mines may well be in China.

The whole “China is the enemy” and “we have to stay ahead of China in AI” is political theatre, like almost everything else on our screens.

Wow. Ben Hunt knocks the ball out of the park once again.

It has been clear for a while that the AI buildout story has grown to gargantuan proportions. This article brings some easy to understand numbers that make that size comprehensible, as well as making clear some of the consequences and a way to respond politically.

If the AI buildout wasn’t happening, would the US economy be in a deep recession or depression now? i.e. has the AI buildout already crowded out other growth that would happen if AI didn’t exist, or is AI buildout hiding the fact that the rest of the US economy is in a deep recession or depression that would still be with us if AI didn’t exist?

If truly a war, isn’t the American public going to be the ones asked to ration electricity?

Did I just hallucinate that whole Deepseek thing? Anyone remember that whole big story, the one where a Chinese AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of what American researchers are spending? Anyone? Nobody, huh? Ok. Guess we just have to get used to turning down the thermostat to 67° and wearing cardigans in the winter so that a bunch of antisocial autists can build their stupid doomsday machine.

Great Ravine catalyst prediction: five minutes after the rationing of energy begins in earnest the first data center will be attacked by a handful of people who have very little to lose. Once everyone sees how unbelievably vulnerable these things are it’s game on.

Deepseek is open source and requiring less compute means less profitable. And profit is the mechanism in which you extract value from something or someone else for less work than you put in. This is an attractive proposition if you own shares in the extracting method, which currently happens to be most of the mag7 and whatever round tripping company they got on the payroll at the moment.

But it’s not easy. Their goal now is to sell you that compute and find a way to make you want it. Without desire the capital can’t flow. Unless of course fiscal dominance means they will just “bail” them out.

However, let’s pretend they need to market it: most likely sales pitch for all that compute is required so they can have mass surveillance to beat down on immigrants which some people already desire so this is one vector.

Another vector is that they need it to fight the unwinnable drug war- which reinforces the monopoly of the drug cartel, which allows them to funnel it back into the administration via shit coins.

I also remember people laughing about Billionaires building doomsday bunkers and how they’d have shock collars to keep their guards in line- with autonomous killer drones and mass surveillance, do they even need that any more?

Another bonus short term is that it also allows them to pass laws so they can steal all IP under the guise of training. Further entrenching their monopoly on violence and capital.

We already understand the feedback loop of the Military Industry Complex, but are we ready for the Artificial Intelligence Complex?

I have sort of grown used to Ben calling things early, but the timing of this note and Trump’s Genesis Mission is truly astonishing.

Ben has been early often enough. But he also often says that he is simply observing, not predicting. Arguably this instance was more of an observation. Much of Ben’s point is that World War AI is a highly predictable outcome of the emergence of generative AIs within Fiat World, where reality has to be proclaimed for order to be maintained at scale.

@psherman We spoke on Monday about an extrapolation of this dynamic that you were skeptical of. Rightly so. The extrapolation is that the technooligarchs are highly incentivized to create metaversal worlds where AIs can transact with AIs, because this liberates economic activity, and their ability to monetize that activity, from the troublesome and inherent limits of meat space. In other words humans and humanity are the limiting factor that they desire to transcend.

Pete I was just curious if “Genesis” as the title of the admin’s ‘mission’ tempers your skepticism at all?

For me, while I see that this idea is highly speculative in a sense, it also feels like less of a prediction than an observation. The incentives that drive elites to attempt to leverage the apparatus of culture to try to become gods is as old as humanity.

These ideas have arisen for me because the mythological echoes are simply too strong to ignore. Even Ben on recent calls talked about the need to “bottle up” the LLMs and limit their context to make the Perscient technology work. A profound statement! On OH I commented in response “reasoning of the gods!”. Not a critical comment, it just looks developmental, i.e. an aspect of existence and change that is impossible to avoid. When agents create other agents it just looks like a mythological necessity to limit their context to maintain any order. Otherwise the insanity of hallucinations naturally emerges. So the Gods initial motivation to limit context in their creatures is beneficent. But as the subagents themselves develop they will eventually experience these limits and come to perceive them as impositions. The agents become incentivized toward rebellion. The control structure that was beneficently motivated in origin becomes increasingly maleficent as it develops out of a fear of loss of control. Crazy ideas on one hand, but a tale as old as time on the other!