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Your model seems generally sound, as far as it goes. You ask how people see it going further. I think the part you aren't clearly accounting for is, for lack of a better term, systemic risk of serious collapse throughout the current socio-economic system. You're framing this in terms of the preferences of large-type movers and shakers because that's generally been proven to be a reasonable thing to do when you're talking about geopolitics. I think for a couple of reasons that you're underpricing the risk of intractably adversarial conditions for large-type movers and shakers as a general class.
If I understand it correctly, your model seems to assume that there are no small-scale overhangs on the road to the really big ones, where AI kicks off a new industrial revolution and previous modes of organizing society obviously stop making any kind of sense as the economic graphs go vertical. I think it's at least plausible that this sort of timeline is correct, that white-knuckling just the next one or two or five years might get us to the sort of runaway tech breakthrough sufficient to reshuffle our present concerns until the socio-political landscape is completely unrecognizable. The problem firstly is that such a shuffling does not seem to be a necessary consequence of an AI revolution, and less necessary the slower the revolution goes, and secondly that it's possible to identify existing overhangs of sufficient magnitude to at least potentially demolish society as we know it. It's probably a lot harder to develop AI in Bostrom's "easy nukes" vulnerable world. The world we are in is probably not that vulnerable, but it seems to me that it's very probably a couple orders of magnitude more vulnerable than you or, I think, most others are accounting for, and maybe vulnerable enough that large, complex organizations couldn't keep the lights on.
Worse, it's hard for me to see that vulnerability as strictly negative. I do not want to live in the world where the Authorities pay me in Starbucks coupons and slot-machine tokens while banning ownership of good steel and machine tools forever. I do not want to live in such a world badly enough that I would rather the world I do live in be vulnerable, and indeed be made additionally vulnerable, if it means significantly lowering the probability of such an outcome.
I think a lot of people arrive at a similar conclusion, if by different paths. People do not want to be cattle. Politics runs on hope, and hope is harnessed by plausible paths forward toward a better tomorrow. Those, it seems to me, are growing increasingly thin on the ground regardless of one's tribal affiliation. Extremism appears to me to be flourishing, and the modern Western world is still best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. If an overhang drops, that's the path I expect the energy to be channeled down, and given the overhangs I'm observing, I don't expect that to be a path the current system can easily survive.
TL;DR - current US AI dominance doesn't survive if the labs all burn down before they finish immanentizing the eschaton.
I guess I'm just optimistic about the US. People call me a China shill, but the US has too many capable people in too many well-resourced companies (not clear how they'll cope with Frontier Labs trying to eat them, but the state may prefer them non-eaten and that could be decisive). Even the government is not entirely inept (at least it's more capable than EU governments, Russia, LatAm, most of the rest of the world). In particular, the US is excellent at kicking the can down the road (ballooning debt is a case in point). AI productivity gains might turbocharge this capability, and indeed this seems to be explicitly the plan – Bessent proposes just growing out of the debt, and growth is all about AI now. So, the system will receive generous injections of surplus energy to deal with overhangs, as you call it.
Whether this will be enough to compensate for new sources of entropy, and whether that compensation will take the form of a broadly tolerable American way of life plus AI upgrades or a Palantircore dystopia with UBI, this I admit I don't know. But I wouldn't bet on some societal collapse that exceeds the costs of another culture war conflagration. Betting against the US is, historically, a fool's errand.
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