Zeihan is a case of believing the message because the messenger is so articulate and charming. He's a tremendously interesting narrative builder (in the vein of Taleb's narrative fallacy). I've been tracking his predictions for a few years now. I want him to be right. Unfortunately, he's seldom right.
He also seems to be veering into fabulism. He's recently said in multiple interviews that there's a clothing factory in North Carolina that is so automated that only 2 "guys" are needed to run it. Raw cotton comes in at one end, and finished clothing comes out at the other (hence Chinese labor is not needed to stitch clothes, hence China is going to collapse any day now).
Why do I believe this is fabulism? He never names this company. And the story has evolved. In earlier interviews he used to say that cloth comes out at the other end. But in a couple of recent interviews he's said finished clothing comes out at the other end.
> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.
Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it.
Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.
On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything.
At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!
> AI may make it possible to build a virtually perfect missile defense against ICBMS
Massed ICBM defense is a matter of sheer volume - with the current GMD system the US can throw enough exoatmospheric kill vehicles (and THAAD to handle the leftovers) to counter a handful of re-entry vehicles from a smaller nuclear power like North Korea or Iran. Not hundreds (vs China) or thousands (vs Russia) that you would see in a peer-level nuclear exchange where everyone has multi-megaton MIRVs, decoys, and SLBMs with much shorter flight times.
Some fantasy future AI with the right sensors may perfectly track all of that sub-orbital mayhem. Without an enormous fleet of thousands of kill vehicles to actually defend against that threat, and the logistics to keep that fleet operational, it can do nothing about it. Building and supporting that sort of strategic defense is obscenely expensive, and as such it remains a Reagan-era fever dream.
Things have changes since the Raegan era. There are a couple of elements to ICMB defense:
1) If you can strike the the ICBM's before the MIRV's separate, you only need a fraction of the number. To do this, you need to already have the interceptors (or whatever else used to shot them down) in orbit before the ICBM's launch.
Independently of AI, Starship is making it much cheaper to place objects in orbit, and can help with this. (Though it could trigger a first strike if detected, it might be possible to hide interceptors within Starlink satellites, for instance.)
2) Coordination and precision. This is what wasn't in place at all in the 80s. I'm old enough to remember when this was going on, and labelled impossible. I still remember thinking, back then: "This is impossible now, but will not remain impossible forever".
Whether it applies to interceptors already placed in orbit, novel weapons such as lasers, typically also placed in orbit or interceptors intended to stop reentry vehicles one faces a coordination problem with time restrictions that makes it very hard for humans or even traditional computer algorithms to solve properly.
This, more than the volume, was the fundamental showstopper in the 80s (the willingness to pay was pretty significant).
Now, with AI tech, plenty of known options open up, and an unknown number of things we didn't think of yet, could also open up.
Accuracy and coordination is the most fundamental one. Here AI may help distribute the compute load into satellites and even independent interceptor vehicles. (Both by making them more autonomous and by improving algorithms or control systems for the dumber ones.)
But beyond that, AI may (if one side achievs a significant lead) also a path to making manufacturing large numbers much cheaper, meaning one could much more easily scale up enough volume to match whatever volume the enemy can deploy. Also, with more advanced tech (allowed by ASI), interceptors can potentially be made much smaller. Even a pebble sized chunk of metal can stop most rockets, given the velocities in space. The hard part is to make them hit the target.
Basically, what I'm saying is that whoever has ASI first may at minimum get a time window of technological superiority where the opponent's ICBM's may be rendered more or less obsolete.
In fact, I think the development of the Poseidon by Russia was a response to realizing decades ago that ICBM's would eventually be counterable.
However, AI tech will possibly even more suitable for detecting and countering this kind of stealthy threats. Just like it is currently revolutionizing radiology, it will be able to find patterns in data from sonars, radars, satellites etc that humans and traditional algorithms have little chance to detect in time.
I was a controls engineer and frequently on the floor, usually directing the technicians and sometimes adjusting brackets myself. Industrial vision systems can be quite fussy.
Agreed on the pay, it would have been good if it wasn't in California.
Learn ladder logic and PLC programming, go into factory automation and controls engineering.
I used to work at a packaging machine OEM. Lots of robotics, bespoke designs, and every day was like an episode of How It's Made. Very fun, but eventually I left to chase the SV startup circuit. All of my old co-workers still work there.
Keep in mind that a kernel module != driver. It's just doing initialization and passing data to/from the driver, which is closed source and in user space.
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