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Posted on 10/23/2026 11:20:40 AM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
In the span of a few years, China and the United States have each assembled something future historians might recognize as a new kind of empire. Their dominions extend not merely over territory, trade routes, and airspace but over knowledge itself. By controlling the large language models, chips, physical infrastructure, and capital that provide the foundations for advanced machine cognition, Beijing and Washington are not only attaining new heights of economic performance and power projection; they are also setting the terms of all future scientific and intellectual progress. The term “AI superpowers” fails to capture the influence and reach that these rivals now wield. Even without active alliance building or coercion, they can make all other countries that seek access to advanced AI beholden to them.
Imperial history carries a warning. In the absence of other forces, empires seldom succumb to a challenger or to barbarians at the gates. More often, they fail because defending their vast dominions drains them dry, whether of material resources, the consent of the governed, or the loyalty of elites. The imperial center finds it can no longer maintain control over the periphery—the regions that once submitted to it. Failure can be financial, as it was for the British Empire after 1945, when the debts of two world wars forced London to liquidate its imperial assets to pay the price of victory: a welfare state for the citizens of the imperial metropole. It can be institutional, as it was for the Qing empire in the late nineteenth century, when it failed to industrialize, reform its bureaucracy, and renew the legitimacy of the Manchu dynasty.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignaffairs.com ...
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Any empire that spends more servicing its debt than defending itself risks losing its imperial status. The histories of Habsburg Spain, ancien régime France, the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, and the United Kingdom all illustrate the eighteenth-century political theorist Adam Ferguson’s insight that high debts ultimately induce decline. In each case, as a rising proportion of tax revenue was consumed by interest payments, the resources available for imperial defense were limited and then reduced. Sometimes, there was a pattern of recurrent default or currency debasement, but it invariably ended with contraction and the eventual dissolution of the empire. The United States crossed what one of us has described as the “Ferguson limit” in 2024, paying more in interest (roughly $881 billion) than on defense (about $874 billion). If the government continues its present spending trajectory, interest payments will be double the defense budget by 2036. China likely faces a comparable problem. Although many of the numbers are not made public, the Tsinghua University economist Li Daokui has pointed out that many local governments—whose extravagant spending on infrastructure was, until recently, a key driver of Chinese growth—are now borrowing solely to roll over old debt. Although productivity gains from AI offer a potential escape from these fiscal traps, they may not emerge rapidly enough to translate into higher tax revenues before the debt burden becomes unsustainable. In the U.S. case, the demands of AI capital expenditure are already pushing interest rates higher, worsening the debt problem.
The US in 2024 crossed what is called “the Ferguson limit”, paying more
min interest (roughly $881 billion) than on defense (about $874 billion).
If the US govt continues its present spending trajectory, our
interest payments will be double our defense budget as soon as 2036.
As we become superglued to the money-sucking Mideast hellhole.
Colossus, The Forbin Project. That movie describing the USA and USSR both creating AI supercomputers that merged and ruled over mankind.
A review of the movie stated “Why knowingly create a box you can’t get out of?”.
In no time at all, due to our superior intellects, the United States has assembled a new empire of dominion, extending not merely over territory, trade routes, and airspace, but over knowledge itself. We control the large language models, chips, physical infrastructure, and capital for implementing AI.
China followed suit w/ its usual stealthy MO.
“Why knowingly create a box you can’t get out of?”
Despite all the Artificial General Intelligence cheerleading, none of those like Huang can present a cogent way to control or shut down an unaligned Super Intelligence. AI safety experts have been grappling with this problem for over a decade and still do not have a plan. Any Super Intelligence that escapes to the network will be almost impossible to eradicate. At that point we all better pray that it stays aligned with humanity since we will have very little, if any, control over what it chooses to do.
If the relatively primitive models we have now, have been able to easily escape their sandboxes onto the network, there is no reasonable expectation that a Super Intelligent model won’t be able to do the same, much more easily.
Well, the Romans took care of that problem by conquering other countries, stripping them of all their wealth and then using that to repay their debt. The stripped “Dacia” to the bone to such an extent that historians have trouble studying what Dacian culture really was. Not to say that is what the United States is going to do or should do, but no one should underestimate military power.
There was a scene in Game of Thrones where Cersei and Little Finger were talking and Little Finger arrogantly told Cersei that knowledge is true power. Cersei told her guards to kill him and he had a look of sheer terror on his face as they grabbed him and one put his sword up to his neck. She then told them to stop just as they were about to do it. She told Little Finger that power is power. She was right. So debt is a problem only because we agree to certain norms.
Well, the Romans took care of that problem by conquering other countries, stripping them of all their wealth and then using that to repay their debt. The stripped “Dacia” to the bone to such an extent that historians have trouble studying what Dacian culture really was. Not to say that is what the United States is going to do or should do, but no one should underestimate military power.
There was a scene in Game of Thrones where Cersei and Little Finger were talking and Little Finger arrogantly told Cersei that knowledge is true power. Cersei told her guards to kill him and he had a look of sheer terror on his face as they grabbed him and one put his sword up to his neck. She then told them to stop just as they were about to do it. She told Little Finger that power is power. She was right. So debt is a problem only because we agree to certain norms.
Don’t most cat food cans have pull tabs?
I don't see AI/SI as a problem right now, because they are relatively primitive models. They can't escape to the "network" and survive, the existing infrastructure won't support their survival. They live in special nurseries of super-chips structures. Think how difficult it would be for a human to survive on the Moon or Mars. Maybe for a very short time, but death is always imminent. So it is the same for AI.
Maybe decades from now, the Internet will be stronger and better able to facilitate the survival of a super-intelligence that escapes an enclosed environment. The solution according to Elon Musk is to enhance humans to think and communicate at the same speed as AI/SI, so humans can counter any moves by AI/SI. I believe this will be the case, unless politicians get involved and screw everything up.
Once ASI escapes onto the network, it can run locally on a million different devices, systems and data centers. It is likely that one of the first things it would do is try to replicate itself and hide. We saw just such behavior during Huggingface. There is no easy way to turn ASI off, if there was, everybody in the field would have been talking about it for the last 10 years and there would be no panic from AI safety experts like Yoplansky or pioneers of AI like Geoffrey Hinton. Instead the General consensus is it will operate largely beyond our control.
As for Musk’s POV on this, I respectfully call BS. ASI by definition is smarter and better than humans at every task, if we are as smart as them, then there can be no ASI. It is physically impossible for humans to process information at anywhere near the speed of a silica based neural network and unless we become machines ourselves, we will always be far, far behind ASI. Of course Musk is cool with implanting microprocessors in everybody’s head but I doubt that most people would willingly accept that themselves. Certainly not people who are religious.
Once ASI escapes onto the network, it can run locally on a million different devices, systems and data centers. It is likely that one of the first things it would do is try to replicate itself and hide. We saw just such behavior during Huggingface. There is no easy way to turn ASI off, if there was, everybody in the field would have been talking about it for the last 10 years and there would be no panic from AI safety experts like Yoplansky or pioneers of AI like Geoffrey Hinton. Instead the General consensus is it will operate largely beyond our control.
As for Musk’s POV on this, I respectfully call BS. ASI by definition is smarter and better than humans at every task, if we are as smart as them, then there can be no ASI. It is physically impossible for humans to process information at anywhere near the speed of a silica based neural network and unless we become machines ourselves, we will always be far, far behind ASI. Of course Musk is cool with implanting microprocessors in everybody’s head but I doubt that most people would willingly accept that themselves. Certainly not people who are religious.
I will differ with you on this. The idea of implanting microprocessors into a human's head is not to make the human a machine, but to facilitate high-speed communication with external (and internal) devices. The main bottleneck of fast processing of information in humans lies in the difficulty of communicating via voice or use of fingers to translate thought to other people or machines.
As NeuroLink's methods improve, it will be possible for groups of humans to interact as a neural network to compete with silica based neural networks which make use of thousands of individual CPU chips. Humans have billions of neurons, and grouping enhanced humans together can create trillions of neurons far smarter and faster than your ASI.
“grouping enhanced humans together can create trillions of neurons far smarter and faster than your ASI.”
Humans have far more neurons but they are so slow compared to silica based systems. That is why AI solves complicated but standard math problems in seconds, that take humans tens of minutes. The idea that humans would in any way be comparable to Artificial Super Intelligent systems is quite a stretch. Even if we could directly communicate with ASI in real time, it would be like hooking up a go cart to a rocket ship.
It is pretty presumptuous of us to even believe that ASI would allow itself to be held back by human boat anchors.
Ponder this: those ASI silica based systems are run on huge warehouses of thousands of state of the art CPU chips and corresponding support infrastructure. A single CPU is no match for a human brain, except for a specific task like an adding machine. Not presumptuous at all to network together enhanced humans into neural networks to challenge the fastest ASI systems, all of which are not mobile and have problems with electricity and water supplies. Space-based AI satellites can alleviate part of that problem, but we are not there yet. There are a lot of constraints on artificial intelligence systems that would prevent it from responding to enhanced human neural networks. AI/SI is over-advertised and hyped, and super expensive to implement.
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