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I was actually thinking about this subject recently while reading Wikipedia biographies of Soviet spies (this guy died in 2020, after spending 50 years in Moscow post-defection!) from decades ago.
It is telling that the volume of high-profile defection seems much, much lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War. The influence operations we have today are either low level things, like your $42,000 case, or stuff like Bob Menendez being comically and publicly bribed with literal gold bars by the Egyptians, which the intelligence community has obviously known about since it first happened. I think the motivation for high-volume elite defection just isn't there anymore.
When you read the biographies of famous Cold War defectors, almost all of them were motivated by a genuine belief in the Communist system. For every greedy Aldrich Ames there were a half dozen Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blakes and so on who truly believed in the Marxist message and revolution. And it's telling that the few major spies the West has seen since the 1991 have also been motivated either by extreme narcissism (Manning) or by genuine political conviction (Snowden's libertarianism).
Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.
China and Russia don't really have much to offer American double agents. They can flip the occasional low-level operative with the promise of money, but the scale of US surveillance over global banking is such that multi-million-dollar payoffs to poorly-paid intelligence agents are pretty much impossible to get away with permanently for now, even with crypto (it's not like trying to convert your Chinese monero into dollars to buy anything isn't going to tip anyone off, especially if every bank already has you flagged as intelligence, which they do). Your only options in the case of defection are living a shitty life in Moscow or Beijing as an eternal foreigner in a system that doesn't care about you and which is essentially just a poorer, more authoritarian and more corrupt version of what exists in the West. (And they know it too, which is why Snowden and others will be under permanent surveillance in case they attempt to defect back.)
And I think this is increasingly visible in the way that China and especially Russia conduct international espionage. China outright kidnaps random prominent Americans / Canadians / Brits etc and holds them hostage until its people are released (eg. the Huawei heiress). Russia does the same, but maintains order by assassinating double agents who defect to the West on foreign soil at an increasingly aggressive pace, presumably to keep its people in line and convince them that they'll never be safe if they leave. Foreign influence operations by both nations are increasingly short-termist, amateurish, or just chancers, like the largely abortive attempts via Manafort etc to influence Trump, which were mostly just an embarrassment for everyone involved.
Neither system really has anything to offer. If you become a true enemy of the West you better (a) hope you enjoy your miserable life in Russia or China, (b) hope neither nation tires of you enough to trade you for someone they care about, (c) accept that even many neutral nations (India, the UAE etc) will be 'no go zones' because the US can and will extrajudicially kidnap you and the local government won't care enough to stop you, or they'll just trade you for money/influence/weapons/some other foreign policy goal.
Cuba is arguably the only exception. If you have some cash, or are given some in exchange for defection, you can enjoy a nice, comfortable retirement on the beach. There are plenty of modern-enough international resorts catering to Canadians and Europeans, the weather is good, the food and alcohol are good, it's comfortable and you can live very well for a very small amount of money. And because Cuba isn't Russia or China, you're not a high priority enough threat that receiving visitors or conducting some limited business is impossible. In time, rapprochement of some kind will likely continue (unlike Russia or China where it seems ever less likely), your defection may well be washed under the bridge, and everything will turn out (possibly) fine. And unlike Venezuela or Bolivia, where a successful US-aligned coup led by people who will gladly ship anyone the CIA wants back to Washington is at least possible in the near term, Cuba's system is very unlikely to experience that kind of revolution.
So, interestingly, Cuban intelligence might well have an easier time than their peers in the anti-American axis.
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.
Sure. Just sucks for your kids.
You think that will matter in 30 years? Computers and robots will literally have 100% of the jobs.
No they will not.
source: the same as yours
I'll leave this very informative (and accurate) chart here for you.
It was put out about 25 years ago and we are right on track so far.
https://i.imgur.com/48wuJkO.jpeg
By 2050/60 one AI will have more compute than all human brains on earth.
Do you have a meaningful counterargument to Wolfram's computational irreducibility thesis, or have you not considered the issue at all?
Kurzweil style number-go-up arguments are fun Whig catnip, but they completely handwave away crucial details. There's a reason Malthus' predictions ended up being wrong despite being mathematically sound.
Considering that wolfram alpha is now 100% obsolete due to AI advancements maybe he isn't the best sword to bring to this gunfight.
Yes he has an idea about complex systems needing to be fully simulated and in that way becoming the very thing they simulate. But guess what! Computational reducibility is a thing too, and it works really really well! Human brains do it every day even!
Bringing Malthus into this is also an interesting choice, considering he was wrong precisely since he underestimated the pace of technological change.
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