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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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So if Trump is keen for an AI race and so is China, then it looks pretty much over for Safety?

Not over. There are a number of obvious paths.

  1. Trump changes his mind. This happens fairly-frequently.
  2. Trump has a heart attack or the next assassin succeeds*, Vance (who is much smarter) reverses course.
  3. The Chinese pull the trigger on Taiwan (possibly motivated by the TSMC factories and chip sanctions), China destroyed, Trump plausibly dead and "beat China" rhetoric disembowelled, regulations ensue (also US power grid probably destroyed).

*To be clear: I am not asking for Trump to be assassinated over AI. Assassinating him over this specifically would make it politically much harder for Vance to reverse course. But if your standard "oh noes the Nazi" social justice warrior were to do it, the "don't let the murderer win" response wouldn't particularly affect AI.

I have some bad news for you- the ven diagram of ‘might try to kill Trump’ and not a complete screwup is basically weird rationalist cults and foreign powers.

Are you leaving domestic agencies off the list because you think they wouldn't do it, or because you think they're screwups?

I mean, Crooks came within a pretty literal hair's-breadth.

The Chinese pull the trigger on Taiwan (possibly motivated by the TSMC factories and chip sanctions), China destroyed, Trump plausibly dead and "beat China" rhetoric disembowelled, regulations ensue (also US power grid probably destroyed).

What?

Do you imagine the US goes to total war with China (and even wins it, even at the cost of Washington DC, so I guess we go nuclear here) over Taiwan?

You'd just wreck the fabs with some graphite bombs and call it a day.

I wonder if Taiwan could threaten this as a form of self-defense. If China starts making hostile overtures against them they plant a bunch of bombs in their own factories with deadman switches so that if they lose control then all the stuff China might want self-destructs.

I cannot imagine that they have not in fact prepared to do exactly that.

I'm out and about so I can't really dig for a source, but I'm pretty sure they already have charges set on at least some.ofntje factories.

Chinese interest in Taiwan goes back to the Chinese Civil War and is completely unrelated to hopes of taking the semiconductor industry intact. In fact at this rate they might do it themselves to slow down American AGI scaling. They'd prefer no war at all, though.

In any case I'm pretty sure the fabs and even individual tools are already booby trapped.

They've had that for at least a decade, haven't they?

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