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obvious crank shit but it is something I was kicking around in my head. if these ghouls knew they had a 100% guaranteed safe zone to go to they really have nothing to lose from nuclear war.
they already have a death drive and are bored of the modern world and it's hedonistic splendors.
many fantasize about recolonizing some empty, last-of-us abandoned world and carving homesteads and kingdoms from it (but with genetically "pure" settlers! and robots! and modern tech!)
obviously this would not be the world that awaits them but i doubt they care.
so some (and likely more as time goes by) may think doing a full MAD apocolypse is just a simple "reset" button. flip the tables, start fresh. even better if they know a few hours ahead of time.
That's my thinking as well. We also know billionaires are building these kinds of bunkers, so wouldn't exactly surprise me if the political class was doing the same.
obviously as we both know, one and the same. Although in our developing neo-feudal system, I suppose the less wealthy political class is basically the equivalent of sniveling courtiers these days.
begging and pleading to be chosen not to be locked out of the keep (billionaire lux bunker)
indeed
I think that's part of the reason they're salivating so much at the idea of having AGI and self replicating machines. Because it means they could just get rid of 99% of humanity and replace them with slave robots.
Yeah it terrifies me. More than climate change I feel if they get to the point that they have competent AI that's been refined for energy efficiency and effective robotics including humanoid-like ones that the bourgeoisie know that this situation isn't sustainable and will choose to just create a new economic mode where they rule as aristocracy over what they imagine to be a glorious new age of expansion and rebuilding via their vast armies of machines and AI and some slave workers and so on and this conveniently solves climate change for them as well. I feel like the clock is ticking, I really hope the empire expires before 2030.
yeah I feel like the adage of "communism will win" sort of has a time limit. it will come down to us seizing the AI and automation as well. luckily China is rapidly accelerating ahead of the rest of the world.
the U.S. has to collapse in just the right way. not spectacularly violently as many hope, but with "something" to catch it and prevent the elite from smashing the big button. What that is, I don't know yet.
Yeah the problem is the brainworms too. If the bourgeoisie were dispassionately self-interested China could just offer them all the rights to live safe on some island in palatial estates under their protection but because of the white supremacy and fail-son/daughter effect it's not so simple.
It's not the most rational or materialist of me but I often find myself hoping that space communists with incredible levels of technology just show up and disable all the US nukes, render them inoperative or destroy them and after a big long tantrum the US finally gives up. Because it almost seems to require magical intervention of that sort to imagine a future where the white supremacist west doesn't blow up the world rather than accepting loss of hegemony. And I think China is deeply aware of this and it's why they're trying their best not to go too hard on the west and trying to find some sort of win-win situation that just drags it out into the distant future where China has more chances of developing some breakthrough technology that might help them negate that.
yeah hopefully it's just darkest before the dawn.
my own sci-fi prediction is that China cracks commercial fusion using thorium reactors as a springboard and sells modular reactors to anyone who will buy them and manufactures cheap fusion fuel.
that would basically be it. that kind of energy and thermal power available would mean generating fuel from carbon dioxide, cracking water, massive desalination, true automation, and actual AI development without wrecking the environment. once a fusion economy is actually spun up and working, it can get exponential in capability. i think this is what the U.S. fears more then anything else, but only at a background level.
they are closer and more driven then anyone else.