The future is unwritten.

If the other front-age article on the Science publication about how human population will have overwhelmed the earth by now isn't enough warning, then I'm old enough to remember how the "Japanese economic miracle" was going to inevitably overwhelm the US.

There is a serious lack of wisdom in lots of these statements.

I like to remind people that multiple mainstream "AI Safety" campaigners have called for first strikes on Chinese data centers:

In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)

https://futurism.com/science-energy/obama-admin-official-sto...

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/superpowers-and-ag...

> I'm old enough to remember how the "Japanese economic miracle" was going to inevitably overwhelm the US

I'm also old enough to remember that in the 1980s Japan had become the world's second-largest economy and there were serious concerns in Washington that Japan might eventually surpass the United States economically. The Reagan administration began putting considerable economic leverage and measures to create pressures intended to destabilize Japan's economy. There's historical agreement on this intent. See 1985 Plaza Accord to inflate the Japanese yen. See 1986 US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement to restrict Japan's dominance in DRAM chips.

[dead]

> In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

War Hawks gotta war hawk.

Ever since the fall of the USSR, there has been a faction of people in the USA desperately trying to invent a new "enemy" to scare everyone and drive foreign policy.

Yikes. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That's not great when your hammer is a war machine.