by ben_w | 2026-02-27 08:08:11+00:00
> You're projecting your garden-variety European degrowth ideology onto what I wrote.

Don't believe all the memes you read on the internet.

Europe isn't degrowth, "degrowth" is a mix of a meme and environmental scientists; Europe is in fact still growing, thanks to US shenanigans even with tech stuff that we'd prefer to outsource due to the well known economic point of "comparative advantage", and thanks to Russia's invasion we also sped up energy transition and defence sector.

> Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.

Prefer? No. Simply look at the back of most electronics, "Designed by … in California, assembled [by Foxconn] in China" at best, at worst the entire business is unpronounceable in English. Even when you may think you've got yourself an American factory, so many of the bits arr usually made in China, or in Taiwan which is unfortunately very insecure right now. You may have a stated goal of on-shoring, but even with the most competent leadership this would be a very hard multi-decade project.

That doesn't make China good in any objective sense, it's not like China's above doing to us what was done to them in their "century of humiliation". Just, powerful.

Their power is aside from any question of should we prefer the authoritarian in charge of a democracy who threatened to invade, or the authoritarian in charge of a one-party state that's doing some genocide who wants to sell us stuff, because two things can both be bad.

> It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.

AI is already a sci-fi technology relative to what I had as a kid. Or indeed relative to just after the first ChatGPT was released, given what people were saying back then that LLMs would "never" do.

The idea you could talk to your computer and it would write a computer program for you that could solve a problem that you had? Sci-fi.

The idea of computer could generate, not simply find but generate, an image according to some prompt of yours? Compose a song? Win awards for its out when people didn't realise computers doing it was an option? Sci-fi so hard it's become a meme of a robot saying "can you?", as disbelief of that was expressed as a line from the film "I, Robot", 2004.

People are still arguing if these things have or have not passed the Turing test, someone has even made a game about this for Hacker News comments, I game in which I score 0, or even scored negative given I only identified false positives. Sci-fi.

And it's not just LLMs, Even just solving chess was sci-fi when I was a kid. Then it was Go. Now protein folding is solved, and thousands of novel toxins have been found by AI. And yet, when I have told AI-Laissez-faire-accelerationists stuff like this latter example, they still doubt AI is capable of doing anything dangerous.

But the worst part of it? The AI which called itself Mecha Hitler, that AI is in use by the Pentagon, the DoD is trying to bully a different AI company that doesn't want to be used for military stuff.

We're in a sci-fi future.

And remember too that making a "robot army" that can replace all human labour is a stated goal of one of the people running an AI company. Don't get me wrong, I hope he's talking out of his rear on this, but failing to plan is planning to fail.