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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Two problems:

1). Unless you can do this enforced at a global level, it doesn’t matter (the same is true of the safety stuff btw) because if it’s illegal to use AI to do say translation work in the USA, then the cheap solution is to simply use AI to translate things in Canada. The humans are still going to lose those jobs, you just get the added bonus of not only losing the human paychecks, but the taxes paid by the company as well. Or if we’re talking safety, we slow down and limit our technology for safety. China is under no such obligation and will happily lap the safety conscious American companies and dominate AI.

Second problem being that effectively, there is no way to enforce such a treaty even if we make it. The UN is a glorified debate society. To the degree it allows wars or issues arrest warrants, it’s basically dependent on member countries to go along. It doesn’t have a military or police force, it doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have the legal right to put boots on the ground to arrest war criminals and instead must depend on the countries to volunteer to abide by the treaty or resolution. If Trump were accused of war crimes and was supposed to stand trial in The Hague, so what? The USA is not going to agree to let a sitting president be tried in an international criminal court, no military is going to volunteer for the suicide mission of trying to defeat the USA military to arrest him. And other treaties are on the same honor system. We have the Paris Treaty on Climate Change, right. But countries face no actual penalties for not keeping to their carbon limits. That’s the same international body that’s supposed to police the AI treaties when countries have trillions on the line if they win the race. The first to create a human level AGI has enormous power and influence and can basically print money. It’s worth trillions, conservatively in GDP. It means military superiority. No one is going to even pretend to follow the treaty if it even exists. The only use of that treaty is to try to trick other countries into slowing down so you can catch up or pull ahead.