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If unemployment rises to 70%, then AI can also be used for combat power and war economy work.
Imagine a swarm of AI-equipped drones, faster and more coordinated than anything in Ukraine today. Imagine the ground-based robots they're trying out but with a machinegun on top: https://x.com/XHNews/status/1921201829066797357
Automated trucks for logistics, all coming from automated factories. That's all eminently possible with 70% unemployment, plus more exotic stuff like satellite swarms spying on everybody in real time, decapitation strikes with novel nerve agents we can't even detect.
How is a human military going to fight that, especially when AI is going to be deeply embedded in their communications? Perhaps a government or sections from a government will merge with a leading AI company or nationalize them earlier in the game but I can't see how they'd successfully shut them down without rendering themselves globally irrelevant. If they wait until 70% of people are unemployed, they might just get crushed.
What do you do if 70% of people are made obsolete? Shut down AI and send them to do useless work? Put tariffs on AI-made products overseas? Seems like delaying the inevitable.
Neither superpower wants to slow down, Trump's America explicitly wants to win the AI race with Stargate while China has allocated considerable effort to developing AI. It's bipartisan in America, Biden was also keen to restrict GPUs leaving the US. I don't think there's any anti-AI faction in China at all, I'm not aware of a single evil AI in the entire Chinese cultural corpus. We haven't even stopped the 'randomly develop gain of function megadeath viruses for no good reason' arms race after a megadeath virus leaked, so what are the chances of stopping the 'immense power and wealth' race after it gives out immense power and wealth?
There's AI and there's AI. People detection is a simple matter which you can do on-chip. Anything like
in the next 5-10 years, like automated coding or automated logistics, is going to be heavily relying on a handful of APIs (approx 4 now) provided by a handful of companies. China could shut down LLMs in China tomorrow if it wanted to - firewall OAI and Anthropic, close down Deepseek. Boom, done. America would have a slightly harder time but it's basically straightforward.
Neither wants to, yet. But if the societal disruption starts to become uncomfortable, they can and they may well. I'm not talking about evil AI, I'm talking about obvious and destabilising social disruption. More than immense wealth and power, governments like stability. China and America are quite capable of running private military AI research on things like YOLO whilst mutually deciding that giving public/corporate society access to AGI is too disruptive to tolerate.
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