"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."
"Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow."
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Clausewitz would have been flabbergasted by this war. If we're being overly generous to Trump, we might call it an act of senseless passion. The reality is probably worse. The U.S. still hasn't seemed to figure out what it's policy goals or winning conditions are, aside from the president's desire to be an all-powerful winner. Trump seemingly places no value on his nation's blood or treasure, so it might be a very long time before he begins to feel the effort his nation is expending isn't worth the value of his own vanity.
The U.S. needs to have its magna carta moment and reign in its mad king. Maybe that will come with the mid-terms, or maybe this war will drag on for two more years. Trump isn't going to stop it, now or after the mid-terms. As far as he's concerned, the pain isn't his.
The political objectives for the war were Netanyahu's who managed quite the move in getting Trump to commit to this. But still an open question how much his motives were rationally objective or senseless passion.
Maybe we (and Clausewitz) needlessly rationalize past leaders as those rational actor ignoring their emotional passions. Trump puts emotions and passions right there in the open, not bothering with plausible denialities. Hegseth is open and proud on his "we do it to show we are masculine" doctrine. But, none of them is a new kind of guy like no one ever heard about before. Emotional irrational men were always present, always seeking power, sometimes getting it. We just strip that side of them, pretending it was calculated and rational.
There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
> You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier
Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the fight it has been able to.) Put another way, you'll sleep easier, but it's a false security, even if it's one that may last for the rest of your own life.
I'd also note that you can absolutely contribute to parts of the military where you actions are highly unlikely to directly result in anyone dying. Air-defence radars and munitions, for example, particulalry those designed to take out missiles and ballistics.
> where the idea that defence or defensive weapons are somehow morally better comes from
As a category, I think it's safe to say that defensive weapons tend to be more morally defensible than purely-offensive ones. Of course the circumstances matter. But that doesn't mean we can't make generalisations.
You're not responding to their actual comment, you're arguing something else.
As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
I think the better argument is that Europe has a credible nuclear defense, therefore they don't need conventional military. If Russia starts rolling tanks towards Berlin, drop a nuke outside their international waters and announce the next one will be on Moscow
How about if Russia starts sending troops to "protect" the ethnic Russian population in Latvia? Would the USA, UK, and/or France really threaten to nuke Moscow and start WW3 in that scenario? It's better to have a credible conventional deterrent and a range of possible responses instead of betting everything on an all-or-nothing nuclear response.
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied instead? I've found that to be rather entertaining, when the 1st season began. Though only the pilot and 1st few episodes. What came later was just so-so.
Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons.
There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.
> Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"?
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
>Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.
This isn't about the nations taking actions off the table, it's about:
> Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department?
I contend that unless you want your government to be toppled by a foreign invader, companies contributing to your nation's military capabilities is something you should generally be in favor of.
>As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
This is from your response:
>It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime".
Are you now claiming that all those "I"s are really "companies"? You think you were having a conversation about how "[companies] sleep great at night"?
Maybe I'm slow , but how is that relevant to the point? Can you expand? Am I understand is that defense is important because sooner or later someone else may choose aggression.
You might put your life savings on the street in front of your house for a day or two without someone stealing it, but sooner or later someone unscrupulous is likely to come along based on the evidence we have
The person I replied to stated that a country refusing to develop military tech for moral reasons was destined to fall to a country that ignores morals and develops that tech. I pointed to an example of an aggressor nation that is refusing to use all the military tech at its disposal. Modern society has decided that ethics don't go completely out the window in war and by and large nation states at least pretend they agree.
I'll be as straightforward as possible. Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons ergo Ukraine didn't need its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent to prevent Russia from using nuclear weapons. And when even the "despotic regimes" like Russia are refusing to use a weapon, it no longer becomes a credible threat for the ostensibly good guys to threaten to use.
Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.
> Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons
Ukraine giving up its Soviet nukes in the 1990s was, with the benefit of hindsight, a mistake that has cost over a hundred thousand Ukrainians their lives. Even if Ukraine just had the missiles in a basement, the possibility that it had cracked the control system–or shortened the runway to reprocessing the warheads for a domestic platform–would have likely deterred war.
Do you think Ukraine would have used nuclear weapons against Russia? How do you think Russia would have responded to that? Do you think that would cost fewer than a hundred thousand Ukrainian lives?
Once again, nuclear weapons can only be a deterrent if your enemy believe you will use them and everyone knows that no nation state has the stomach to use them. Russia doesn't have to fear MAD and yet it is still deterred from using nuclear weapons. What makes you think that Ukraine would choose MAD over their current predicament? Because if Russia doesn't believe Ukraine is willing to commit to MAD, Russia can still invade. It certainly changes strategy, but over the years many nuclear powers have been involved in arm conflicts without using nuclear weapons, including in conflicts against other nuclear powers.
How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy. This was the point you started arguing against. Russia hasent nuked Ukraine so nobody needs defenses or arms?
>How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy.
I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.
> It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world.
This person equates not "do[ing] it" with "strict pacifism".
"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism.
beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity
sophacles- stupidly thought this was an "If I dont, someone will" argument
Ajedi32- clarifies "the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world"
The point is some level of defense is required. This point is completely compatible with not taking a maximalist approach to military. It is also compatible with the fact that even Russia doesn't take a maximalist approach to military.
The whole point of the chain is that citizens should not fixate on if companies or people participate in the military-industrial complex because it is good an necessary, but rather what those actors actually doing.
Russia not nuking Ukraine had nothing to do with ethics or morals. It's more pragmatic than that. Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland. And he knows that use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India.
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
> Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland
Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India
This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
>Nuking Kyiv and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.
>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
> if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure
Putin doesn't care about infrastructure in Kyiv. He wants the natural gas and resources in the east. A nuked rump Ukraine isn't a threat to his power.
> why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not. The most problematic aspects of Trump's Iran war for India and China are that it raises oil prices.
Heavy use of cluster munitions (and land mines) was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022-2023 and stabilize the front lines. The notion that they kill civilians indiscriminately, or that it's unethical for defense contractors to build them for the US and allied militaries, is ludicrous and disconnected from objective reality.
Cluster munitions are highly effective at destroying massed formations of men and equipment. This forces the attacker to heavily armor up, which doesn’t work well against modern cluster munitions, and/or disperse forces across a very large area so that few targets will be within the kill zone of a cluster munition to limit their effectiveness.
They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.
Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.
Today that role (strongly discouraging grouped formations) has been occupied by drones.
The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.
Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:
Some aspects of modern warfare seem to be taking the classic idea of light infantry and dialing it up to 11. They have little armor or heavy weaponry but are such a fluid sparse target and have such a small logistical footprint that they are expensive and difficult to root out.
The modern version of this allows the same soldiers to command heavier, better weaponry via remote control that is asymmetric to their logistical footprint, enabling them to shape a battle space that would not have been possible historically.
Of course these things ebb and flow. I imagine the solution to this problem is something like autonomous drone swarms with advanced sensors that can systematically sterilize an area of any hidden soft targets. Sparsity would not be much of a defense in this case.
The following wiki article has a section on it. Cluster munitions allow you to saturate areas and prevent infantry from advancing. The issue is that some of the submunitions malfunction and sit around on the ground and injury civilians (particularly children since they look like toys at times) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-purpose_improved_conventi...
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.
NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.
The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.
I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".
The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station.
At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
If its any consolation you would have otherwise gone from where you were to pretty much end game resources/money/ran out of stuff to do in like 2 weeks anyhow.
"A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."
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This is very similar to the race to create nuclear weapons. The Axis and Allies both realized, at roughly the same time, that it was possible. Both had programs to build one. Both knew the other side had programs, but they weren't certain how far along they were. So, the Allies devoted astounding amounts of resources to get there first while sabotaging the Axis's attempts. They knew the result of their efforts would be terrible, but they felt they had no choice.
A key difference between then and now is that THERE ISN'T A FREAKING WAR BETWEEN THE AXIS AND ALLIES. If one company loses, some billionaires bank account numbers don't go as high as that of some other billionaires. That's it. They're rolling dice with the planet for bank account numbers that won't even matter if they F up.
Am I the only one who thinks this is astoundingly, gobsmackingly stupid?
"Am I the only one who thinks this is astoundingly, gobsmackingly stupid?"
You have the "privilege" (I assume) of not having any stake in the game. If you had billions sitting in your bank account, dependent on these things perhaps you'd also be singing a different tune (or busy building a luxury bunker)
I'd like to think that, if I had that kind of money, I'd avoid doing so much ketamine that I fail to realize a few meters of concrete won't protect me if things go wrong. In all likelihood, tech billionaires will be the first ones against the wall.
I've commonly seen this trade war called "purely random", or the result of Trump holding a personal grudge against Canada. However, the most convincing argument I've seen (and I wish I could recall the source) is that Trump is simply playing to his base.
Blue collar MAGA workers have seen manufacturing jobs slowly bleed to other countries over the last few decades. Nevermind that the U.S. have moved up the value chain while this has gone on, or that the same thing has happened in Canada. It's not about logic. It's about pain and (perceived) revenge. Blue collar MAGA workers want to see other countries punished, regardless of whether they're punished along with them. That's why Trump goes out of his way to humiliate his allies even though it puts him at a disadvantage in negotiations. (If this trade war were purely economic, Carney would have an easier time backing down and giving into demands. As things stand, he has no choice but to dig in and fight.)
If you buy this, what MAGA wants is to punish anyone "not us". It's not about economic gain. It's not some well-reasoned desire to redress past grievances (Canada has lost jobs in the same way, and probably more to the U.S. than vice-versa). It's purely an emotional desire to inflict pain.
A more disturbing question is: "Why is Trump alienating independents to cater to a shrinking hardcore MAGA base?". He can't win elections this way. This does, however, maintain a fanatically loyal base that's willing to do unconscionable things for their leader.
They started with applying it directly based on trade deficit, and that was mentioned again in this with Canada. Completely idiotic economic policy: if you're buying up some crucial rare mineral from some micro nation why would you care that they use the money to buy fuel from some other country closer nearby with refineries and lower shipping costs, etc. It's really backwards.
A balanced trade deficit at each connection between each nation worldwide would be very inefficient.
A trade (money) deficit is a goods surplus. The U.S. is getting more stuff than they can make themselves because the world likes to invest in the U.S. and American consumers are still confident enough that they're not socking away savings. Only if Trump succeeds in driving away foreign investment and shaking the confidence of American consumers can he reduce the trade deficit. That won't be pleasant for Americans, but Trump sure seems to be off to a solid start.
That's the overall trade defecit and you can argue about that, can be fine during periods of growth, etc.., but trying to have no trade deficit with each country on an individual basis makes no sense. It's almost like moving back to barter with no medium of exchange.
While the U.S. is doing... whatever it is they're doing right now, it's probably not a bad thing for the world's middle powers to build bridges with China and steer them away from doing stupid things. There are enough stupid things happening in the world right now.
I’m not exactly a fan of certain policies being pushed in the US but aligning with China is a bad idea. Chances are if you’re is disagreement with US policies you’re going to be in disagreement with China’s policies even more.
The trouble is that the U.S. is threatening annexation and waging trade war on the West while pulling its military assets (e.g. All carriers) out of Asia with no diplomatic successes to keep the area stable. There's a power vacuum around Taiwan now. Middle powers have to step in, and this is an example of that.
This is not Canada siding with China. It's a middle power engaging with China to find common ground before China decides that power vacuum is too juicy to resist. Canada has a border on the Pacific too, after all.
The Canadians who think this or more is a good idea have lost their minds.
Forget that China, an authoritarian regime that is doing things like routinely stealing secrets from western countries [1] and is focused on destroying European economies ability to manufacture goods, it is a practically stupid thing to do because holding talks with China while the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and more as the article points out are actively training (obviously all mentioned parties and more conduct additional training annually) to potentially fight a war with China to defend another democracy looks incredibly bad.
Canada stands with China against the US, Australia, Korea, Japan, New Zealand [2], and the Philippines? Yikes!
And stand against Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and others?
China isn’t capable of providing any security guarantees to Canada. What’s the point here besides pissing everyone off? It is a very poor diplomatic move in my view.
The U.S. has had military talks with China. They probably weren't very productive, because Hegseth, but are you going to go out and say the U.S. is now against the U.S. because the U.S.'s military has had talks with China's? Militaries talk to each other to avoid misunderstandings and unintended escalation. Sometimes it's even about coordinating things like disaster response.
Well no because that wouldn’t make sense. I didn’t accuse Canada of going against Canada’s interests simply by virtue of having talks though I think ultimately such talks are likely to.
Canada is not able to project military power and has no ability to fight a war against China so I’m skeptical that these conversations make a lot of sense, well, given the timing. And of course with many Canadiens seeming to think they are “going to turn to China” in light of American tariffs or something.
But the headline and meeting with Chinese military leaders while your allies are conducting defensive operations looks kind of bad. At least in my option.
> They probably weren't very productive, because Hegseth
Hegseth is a moron who shouldn’t have been hired and should be fired immediately, but if conversations weren’t productive maybe that’s China’s fault instead.
Why would Canada need the ability to fight against China for security talks to make sense?
Ukraine was having security talks all around middle east, even made agreements and they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi.
> meeting with Chinese military leaders while your allies are conducting defensive operations
Which Canadian ally is doimg defensive operations? I mean EU against USA did around Greenland, but who else?
> egseth is a moron who shouldn’t have been hired and should be fired immediately, but if conversations weren’t productive maybe that’s China’s fault instead.
Why would it be Chinas fault? By all we have seen America is impossible to make agreements against and Hegseth is incompetent. Why blaming China here?
> Why would Canada need the ability to fight against China for security talks to make sense?
What security would they talk about? I suppose there are legitimate topics, though the timing makes it look quite bad, in my view.
> Ukraine was having security talks all around middle east, even made agreements and they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi.
China is a Pacific Ocean away from Canada. Iran is supplying drones to Russia (who invaded and is still bombing innocent Ukrainians) and Ukraine has technology to fight against those drones at an acceptable financial/technological cost and since gulf states were under attack from Iran it sort of makes sense they would come together against a common enemy.
I'm not following your comment about "they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi" - are you familiar with the nature of these talks or are you making something up?
> Which Canadian ally is doimg defensive operations? I mean EU against USA did around Greenland, but who else?
Did you read the article? Or is Canada not allied (formally or close enough) with France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States?
> Why would it be Chinas fault? By all we have seen America is impossible to make agreements against and Hegseth is incompetent. Why blaming China here?
Why wouldn't it be? Regardless of Hegseth's competency there's no reason to believe that China was productive in their talks. Have they stopped trying to take over Taiwan? Do you support Taiwanese independence?
A big part of Amazon's "Delivery Service Partner" program is that it creates many smaller work-forces rather than one big one, which prevents unionization. On the other hand, Amazon can probably afford accident insurance.
The fact that robot taxi's won't form a union makes this rather unlike Amazon DSP's. I suspect the article is correct. There simply aren't net profits here for operators.
AER charges all active O&G companies operating in Alberta a levy that's meant to fund closing orphaned wells should a company go bankrupt and fail to close their wells. However, you can argue that the levy isn't high enough or that there are too many loopholes that let companies sell off, merge, etc. without closing down wells first.
The article doesn't mention it, but I wonder if the author of this book discusses the economic value of data and/or data sovereignty. We live in an era were just a few nations (primarily the U.S.) dominate the international flow of information. Data has real, monetary value. Meta, Google, etc. can provide "free" services to entire countries based on the profits extracted from their data with money left over to pay employees, shareholders, and executives. Data is "exported" from nations all over the world, but it's value goes mostly untaxed. Any attempts to tax these companies usually provokes swift threats of tariffs or outright violence from the U.S. government.
This is not a situation that is likely to be stable long-term. As economic barriers go up and international trust breaks down, nations are bound to demand more sovereignty over their data and data networks are bound to splinter.
>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.
I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI.
And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun, more fun then ever coding with AI assistance. Lets say all of these technologies can be abused and forced on us, but all of them have neat aspects too.
Fwiw i noticed you absolutely can't reasonably get a US Via consulate appt for some countries without AI right now so the requiremnts already begun.
The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).
Oh wow, that’s aweful. Where I used to live this would happen with driving tests. Driving schools would book out all the tests and then re-assign them to their students. So at some point it got so bad that when you’re buying a driving lesson you’re also effectively buying a right to take the test. What could the government possibly do to stop this? Some highly technical solution? How about just making it so you can’t assign the test to another name? Hmm that might be a pretty obvious solution…
Steam also had a pretty nice idea with the Steamdeck. You book appointments for a month in the e.g. 2 weeks prior, but those who get booked, and when they are booked, are randomly chosen amongst all people/times in those 2 weeks. And then you repeat the same process next month and so on.
>
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.
Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.
That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.
Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.
> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.
Memes replicate and survive or perish like genes, but the environment they have to survive in is the human mind, and the threat that they have to overcome is being criticized. One way to survive this is by being a good idea. So some memes are simply good ideas. But there are various ways a meme can dodge the attack that comes from criticism, and then you get memes that are trendy or holy or crazy or ideological. Since we're not perfect in our ability to criticize (what would that even be like? Sounds terrible) I think there's necessarily a hint of this anti-rational aspect in all ideas. But some of them go all-in on the anti-rational strategy.
If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.
How it reads is that the world has converged on an obviously bad technology. If only you had the chance to control it from top down and you wouldn’t let this mistake happen for you know what’s best for the world. Not only that, it’s double bad because you can’t do anything about it because everyone is under the illusion except you and a few other sensible people. And you would reject the notion that you have agency to change things.
How the above reads is you can't understand anything wider than your personal affairs.
Or you believe that the world can't possibly converge on a bad technology or practice, and get bad outcomes out of it, while much fewer see potential issues and warn about them.
The world fortunately works under a system that is durable to these problems. You can actually start a company that doesn't use AI if you think it runs better that way. This argument obviously doesn't work because
1. you would decline the agency existing to make a new company
2. you might even say that AI does help companies work better, but its bad for people - suddenly its no longer about the lack of competency of AI but rather how good it is
>The world fortunately works under a system that is durable to these problems
The world works under a system that populations have suffered or even whole countries and empires perished because of systemic problems.
If your answer is "but humanity still endured and is alive today", that's a pretty low bar, not to mention moving the goalposts so far they can't even be seen anymore.
>You can actually start a company that doesn't use AI if you think it runs better that way
I can. And it means nothing to the concern of the parent: "For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate". Your solution is "if you don't like your employer demanding you use AI, just start your own company".
Agency doesn't mean do any arbitrary action and there's no risk or downsides.
Will you pay for their expenses to start their own company? Will you personally loan them money? Will you teach them business skills needed to run a company after they've been a regular employee programmer for 2 decades? Will you feed their kids if the company doesn't catch on? Will you find them employment if they have to shut it down and go back to a regular job as a 40 or 50 year old, in this job market, where you can apply for 20 jobs and not even hear back? Oh, and do the same for millions of others, not just your friend or your favorite cousin?
It doesn't matter whether some individual person can make a non-AI company, since the argument was never about the inability to make one.
It was about millions of people pressured to use AI in their jobs whether they like it or not. "Oh, those millions are only pressured because they lack the agency to start their own business" even more out-of-touch that "let them eat cake".
It's the boomer's "pull yourself by the bootstraps" sermon. Like the idea that millions can't find a job because they lack agency and a firm handshake, or that they're in debt because of that latte.
That's the nature of employment relationship. On the flipside, as long as you follow employers rules, you don't bear the responsibility for the results. That's a huge upside that have always balanced out the lack of control over they way you work and your fate for many people.
"Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow."
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Clausewitz would have been flabbergasted by this war. If we're being overly generous to Trump, we might call it an act of senseless passion. The reality is probably worse. The U.S. still hasn't seemed to figure out what it's policy goals or winning conditions are, aside from the president's desire to be an all-powerful winner. Trump seemingly places no value on his nation's blood or treasure, so it might be a very long time before he begins to feel the effort his nation is expending isn't worth the value of his own vanity.
The U.S. needs to have its magna carta moment and reign in its mad king. Maybe that will come with the mid-terms, or maybe this war will drag on for two more years. Trump isn't going to stop it, now or after the mid-terms. As far as he's concerned, the pain isn't his.
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