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birb_cromble  3d ago (text post)   423 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread 2026-06-06

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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I think AI makes a lot of ‘traditional’ prepper collapse scenarios much less likely in an all-or-nothing way.

You have to measure against the base rate for a traditional prepper collapse scenario. I think AI makes precisely the prepper collapse scenario more likely because it may increase the power and competency of evil actors to generate a temporary period of unrest or insecurity, precisely the sort of scenario the rural homestead best insulates against (as opposed to things like "global warming," "nuclear winter," "systematic famine," "bad political developments," all of which a rural homestead is better-than-nothing for, but ultimately still potentially insufficient.) The actual best prepping plan is probably not the rural homestead so much as it is the small community (rural homestead being not incompatible with this).

Confusing this scenario (plausible using existing AI demonstrated capabilities) with Terminator is exactly the sort of unhelpful conflation that I am talking about - the more I learn about AI and its capabilities, the less confident I am that a Terminator scenario is in the cards, and the more likely I think a human-directed threat or limited malfunction is.

But of course in this scenario your investment strategies can go beyond prepping - for instance if you think that AI is going to tank tech stocks, you can invest in real estate; if you think AI is going to make hostile foreign actors more effective you can invest in defense stocks, etc. etc.

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