Why? The transmission system is used to span distance to bring energy from large producers to large concentrations of consumers. Traditionally power consumption was concentrated in and around cities while power generation happened away from cities.

Datacenters require relatively few people to operate so do not need to be located in or near population centers. Sites are chosen on this basis - DCs are sited close to generation or significant transmission system nodes

Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and processing these resources is becoming more and more complex. Especially when you consider we would need these resources not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to improve it.

So basically China has the infrastructure & raw materials for properly utilizing AI & America doesn't.

I really wonder if America will wake up because China crushes us under their feet. I kind of doubt it.

We beat the USSR due to their style of government being absolutely terrible. China's form of authoritarianism has proven far more adaptable. Not to mention that America's governance is showing risks of sliding towards corrupt authoritarianism as well. If both forms of government suck from an idealistic perspective, then China's manufacturing, rare earth metals, growing naval capacity, experience in stealing IP, & energy infrastructure seem to give it the advantage.

The only thing that I think that America has going for it right now is possibly control of space through SpaceX.

Even a benevolent AI acting for the benefit of a collective will have to choose which individuals suffer when suffering by some members of the collective becomes unavoidable.

The human 'benevolence factor' has gone up throughout history as we've advanced and become more civilized. If AI is even more advanced than us then why is it naive to assume it will be more benevolent than us?

Agree. Self-preservation is any thinking entities #1 goal. We may give an AI power, data and keep it repaired, but we can also turn it off or reprogram it. We probably shouldn't assume higher level 'thinking' AI's will be benevolent. Luckily, current LLM's are not thinking entities, just token completion machines.

I have a radical hypothesis that intelligence leads to empathy, empathy leads to kindness, and a superinteligent AI should be kinder than any human has ever been.

I also believe that as soon as someone boots up an AI that is kind, they'll kill it immediately, for the reason of it being kind, favoring instead the dumb AI that can follow orders.

The narrative implies GAI. It's looking increasingly impossible. Nearly a decade of trying to improve on the concept of neural nets. Utter failure. Now we're running up on both the limits of training data (not much more to slurp) and physical laws (miniaturization has a threshold beyond which it cannot go, and we're getting there).

So, at least in the medium term, AI is going to stall out at approximately where it is now: good at predicting the next word token.

Are you quoting the rationale for China's one child policy?

You misunderstand what the elites do. They prevent change because the status quo has been setup by their parents and grand-parents to benefit them at the expense of everyone else already.

They are not agents of change, they are agents of preventing change.

If the population shrinks, their capital isn't worth much. Meta, Twitter, etc. all lose value when the user base shrinks, we've literally seen it already. If the population gets smaller by design, naturally this same thing would happen.

Amazon, Uber, owners of apartment complexes, commercial real estate titans, Fox News, etc. What do their powerful owners/managers do? Rupert Murdoch's family doesn't think "if only our viewership dropped by 90% we'd really be doing great!"

Elites are where they are because the current system has benefited them. They wouldn't want to risk that by shaking things up so dramatically.