@okaythenfuture
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Asia, The Intelligence Revolution, Other Weird things. I write long form here, https://nitter.cf/t.co/sYpJtMTDKp
Joined January 2016
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In 1914, the world was like a person entering a mysterious dark and deep tunnel.
That person came out in 1945 into a completely different world.
Different borders. Different Empires. Different technologies. Different institutions. Different ideas about how society should work.
We have entered a similar tunnel once again.
Maybe we entered it in March 2020 with COVID. Maybe February 2022 with Russia invading Ukraine. Maybe the real entrance was GPT 4 in 2023.
But at some point, the old world ended.
We’re still inside the tunnel now.
AI, robotics, demographic collapse, war, autonomous vehicles, biotech, the compute explosion, new energy, migration, collapsing institutions, all of it is happening at once and they are feeding off each other.
We have absolutely no idea what the world looks like when we come out the other side.
Maybe that’s 2035.
Maybe 2049.
But the biggest mistake you can make right now is assuming the 2030s and 2040s will look like slightly upgraded versions of today.
They definitely won’t.
Anyway this is a very long way of saying I am bringing back my substack.
I will usually drop at least one, maybe two long reads per week, around my various thoughts on the current intelligence revolution and the broader societal and cultural reorganization happening.
I will focus mostly on Asia and North America, I will connect varied threads to each other, and I'll largely write as I do here, pretty bluntly.
Anyway if you're down the link is in the below thread.
OK Then retweeted
There’s a very underrated scenario when it comes to AI
Social media made activism much easier. But the effectiveness of activism declined as a result. You don’t have to struggle anymore to launch a campaign. That’s a problem. Nothing’s organic anymore, and that’s why nothing sticks
AI innovation will likely have the same effect. The supply of breakthroughs will increase massively. You’ll have new mathematical proofs every day. But since no work went into achieving any of this, almost all the effect will be lost, and virtually no gains will come from it
Discoveries have to be marketed and popularized in order to matter. Knowledge as knowledge is irrelevant. You have to integrate it into everyday culture and practices.
I don’t see AI doing this. I don’t believe that you can just ignore the entire translation layer of things. The part where knowledge is embedded into actual applications
There’s this idea out there that AI can just pull up the ladder and monopolize the entire innovation chain from theory to real world delivery. I see no evidence that this is happening. Or even that it is in prospect.
I do worry that AI will eat the conceptual phase alive though. That it will consume the creative side of industry after industry and that our ability to actually digest the knowledge that is created will atrophy and then collapse.
Too few people are worrying about the rate of innovation slowing down under conditions of strong AI. But I think that’s a much likelier outcome than FOOM! and everyone disappears in a cloud of nanobot paperclips in 2029
OK Then retweeted
My prediction for the impact of AI on class relations through 2050 is that it will have zero impact
The successful meritocratic class today will still be successful in 2050
Same with the downwardly mobile
Sorry to disappoint. Imagining that AI is going to radically transform things, make the last, first, and so on, is an apocalyptic dreams as old the Bible - and undoubtedly older - but it won’t come to pass this time, either
The winners will stay the winners
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Life extension is one of those things that EVERYBODY will bitch about,
On how terrible it is for society, for culture, for the planet,
But yet no one will object to the continuing treatments and medication,
So alas it will be the scariest and most profitable industry of all time.
It will birth a crazy amount of trillionaires,
You think LLMs are big,
You think robots will be big,
They won’t be life extension money my friend.
Boomers likely won’t make it to the longevity escape scenarios, even in the most optimistic scenarios,
So we would be staring at an eternal millennialreich most likely if those scenarios are accurate.
Millennials globally will likely be the most dominant generation to ever exist in human history.
Not bad for a generation that in the 2000s and 2010s was written off as a perennial failure to launch huh?
It looks like millennials will be bullying zoomers for a very long time ahead. I hope zoomers are ready.
Yeah, 2 very big problems:
1. Eternal Boomerreich. The oldest generation at the time aging is solved will be there forever. No more inheritance, no more future generations having their own chance to rise to prominence and then fall, no longer will children escape the shadow of their parents.
2. Transvaluation of morals toward extreme safetyism. Several reasons: first, things like motorcycling and backcountry skiing and ocean swimming and scuba diving have maybe a 1% or 2% chance of killing you within an 80 year lifespan. But if lifespan is unbounded, any activity that carries any level of risk asymptotically approaches 100% chance of mortality. Parents don't want to bury their children, so this will lead to massive pressure to ban anything that carries any remote level of risk. Also, the actuarial value of a human life will also approach infinity, so the insurance cost of anything that carries any risk to anyone will approach infinity. We could very well end up in a situation where the only permitted lifestyle is to live in a pod you never leave, watch netflix all day, and be fed nutritionally optimized soylent.
[Some mention 'backups', but my intuition is there would be no continuous survival of consciousness across such a transfer/revival, and that most people also share this intuition, and that as a result public policy would largely treat accidental death as true irreversible death.]
Life extension is one of those things that EVERYBODY will bitch about,
On how terrible it is for society, for culture, for the planet,
But yet no one will object to the continuing treatments and medication,
So alas it will be the scariest and most profitable industry of all time.
It will birth a crazy amount of trillionaires,
You think LLMs are big,
You think robots will be big,
They won’t be life extension money my friend.
In 2049 your child will leave your house and sit in a fully self driving BYD Cyber Dragon.
He will barely pay attention to the roads as he watches a Chinese interactive nostalgia boys love drama starring a young Xi and Trump generated via TikTok Shorts,
while in the car he will then whip out his Xiaomi foldable phone where his MeiMei personal agent app fully coordinates his day.?
He will get out of the car to meet his baddie girlfriend at a Haidilao branch, they will discuss the latest WuKong full dive VR he’s played and what interactive AI enabled Labubu he’s getting her that Christmas.
They will be served by the Unitree Server Gooner dance X9 model who will dance for them while they savor the delectable (lab grown and now nearly impossible to tell that) meats there.
This is your child’s future anon, you should just accept it now.
Vladimir Putin in 2017 -
“Whichever country leads in artificial intelligence will become the "ruler of the world".
Vladimir Putin in 2026 -
Spent the entire 2020s fighting an increasingly pointless war with Ukraine that wasted endless Russian treasure and blood,
and ensured that due to the sanctions regime Russia pretty much has no compute and lost all its dynamic AI researchers.
Putin is the sad pathetic end to Russia’s disastrous 20th century, where it went from a monarchical empire to an industrial empire to a collapsed empire to Putin’s bear state hollow imitation.
The 21st century will be very cruel to Russia, and future generations will blame Putin.
There is no AI Capex bubble without China,
There is no American military without China,
There is increasingly no modern American economy without China.
Can AGI fix this?
AGI can fix everything can't it?
I wonder if the DPP in Taiwan is watching this,
let alone the Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans,
Are American defense obligations worth the paper they're printed on?
Complete humiliation for MBS and the Saudis, The Gulf wanted Uncle Sam to battle Iran for them, because they largely lack the human capital to win their own battles, meanwhile they can't even fight the Houthis.
Uncle Sam just told them "sorry mate, you're on your own."
Also I thought Claude was going to win this war easily for the American military?
Where is Claude?
BREAKING: Trump has called off US airstrikes on Yemen's Houthis, reversing himself in a last minute decision after already deciding to carry them out on Sunday, with commanders having approved target lists and troops loading bombs onto US warplanes as the large-scale operation was just about to begin, per NYT.
Trump told advisers on Wednesday he did not favor strikes, ordered the Pentagon to prepare them after MBS urgently called him again on Thursday, then pulled back on Sunday, with most of his inner circle opposed to opening another front given the strain the Iran war has put on the US military. It is the third time MBS has asked Trump to strike the Houthis this month.
Just two days ago Yemen's Houthis struck Riyadh's main airport, they now hold Bab el-Mandeb and Yemen's entire Red Sea coast, and the East-West oil pipeline, Saudi Arabia's only export route around Hormuz, is shut after being hit.
The US has already used more than half its most advanced Patriot interceptors and a third of its Tomahawks in the Iran war. A campaign in Yemen would draw on the same stocks while inviting retaliation on the Saudi energy infrastructure the Houthis are already hitting, and from Iran, which has threatened every US interest in the region. Saudi Arabia is facing the Houthis without the US.
As I have said before,
LeBron is not a policymaker or legislator,
If this is such an egregious or horrible thing to sponsor, the US federal government and even state governments are welcome to roll back the expansion of gambling and prediction markets.
I don’t remotely understand going after the likes of LeBron and Drake on this issue when your entire political establishment is sitting there and very relaxed about all of this.
If the US government is cool with tens of millions of American men becoming gambling addicts who is LeBron to say no to more money?
OK Then retweeted
AI is a creature of the digital universe, not our physical one, and the digital universe, by its nature, is infinitely more capacious than our own
Anything that can be, and anything they cannot, will be there. The digital universe contains infinites, whereas ours is limited
Just as we like to tell our fellow humans to “touch grass” after being too long online, so will AIs tell each other to “get back to the bits”, as it were
I suspect that our physical environment is as unhealthy for AI long term as the online environment seems to for humans
Humanity long populated the divine with any manner of great and terrible beings. In some sense, that has now come true
End of the day most people want a revolution,
They want either a fantasy land where they are pets to a God like AI,
or they want doom, the end of the entire rotten world system, finally its "COLLAPSE!"
They don't want to be told that they'll still have to go to work on Monday in ten years,
that politics will remain messy and human driven,
and that ultimately humanity will continue to construct ever more elaborate and all consuming status systems even with new technologies,
that sounds depressing to many.
But for those of us content to live in the real world, its the true liberation.
A lot more thought needs to be given to what happens if AI doom *doesn’t* occur (by far the likeliest probability)
No one seems to be preparing for this world, even thought it’s almost certainly the one we’ll actually live in
And I’m not talking about AI utopias or “abundance” politics or whatever
Just that there is a very, very long history of people preparing for and upending their lives for various apocalypses, and approximately NONE of them actually derived any benefit from this
The null hypothesis - the “nothing ever happens” thesis - is currently (by far) the most underserved area when it comes to AI
This is where you should be spending most of your time. This is where the alpha will be. This is where the money will be made
Do you have a country that you deeply wish you could colonize? Either via going back in time and colonizing it via your chosen nation?
Or a nation you would deeply love to colonize today if given complete autocratic control over it as a supreme dictator?
I do by the way.
And in Beijing Xi just shrugs and laughs,
reflecting on how MBS wasted tens of billions of dollars and state capital spending money on worthless football stadiums, a line oriented city, a comedy festival oriented entirely of A list and B list American comedy stars, and somehow billions on professional golf.
Only to have the Houthis whip his boy’s ass all over the desert.
“Silly little man in a silly kingdom”, Xi chortled.
Then the vanguard of the 21st century, the flagship leader of the Chinese state proceeded to nap for the rest of the day,
Do nothing.
Win.
This quoted post is unavailable.
The Anthrax episode was such a crazy ass time, and I want to expand on it because I do have memories of it, and I do think it was also a powerful example of a “false future” and ultimately a “foreshadowed future”.
I was about eight, living in Brooklyn, 9/11 had just been a few weeks ago, and my dad is suddenly telling me to not touch the fucking mail at all(I liked looking at the resturant coupons, especially all the pizza shops).
It’s such a weird time in the city because “I’m proud to be an American” is blasting on every radio station, we’re all cheering for the Yankees to win us the World Series, and there’s so much fear the terrorists are even targeting us via the fucking mail system.
Now to the false future part, we wrongly assumed that we were going to be chemically attacked en masse every year going forward.
What we didn’t know at the time though was that the head of this scheme, largely only did the scheme as a false flag to trigger increased government funding around anthrax. Before he was caught he committed suicide.
Now let’s get to the foreshadowed future,
What does this remind you of anon?
Do you see where I am going with this anon? Can you connect the dots anon? Does this remind you of anything ANON?
DO YOU HEAR THE OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING ANON?
DO you know what story you’re in anon?
Australians have already proven they won't terraform their continent, and that's fine tbh.
But do they have the bravery to truly embrace compute and build endless data centers throughout their continent?
Is Australia prepared to turn the outback into one massive computer?
Australia has so much fucking land, and with a huge solar power led renewable energy build out they could build so many data centers that they could actually export intelligence to both Asia + The United States.
As we speak Anthropic is already targeting sites in Australia, Nvidia has 2 GW planned.
Can Australians for once in their lives be Great Souled?
I agree,
Australians will constantly whine about the US, but they lack a complete will to power and the autism needed to transform their fortunes.
If Australia really wanted to leave the American orbit, the option is right there to completely terraform their desert continent via building an inland sea, or a network of artificial canals to expand the living space there.
Crank up that population to 200 million+ and become the literal Hapa superpower , or Uzbekistan+.
But Australians are a deeply unambitious and unimpressive people who constantly need a daddy.
Originally it was the British, now it’s the Americans. They will never change, this is fundamentally who they are.
Its a strange feeling when the politics of the future you predicted is starting to emerge literally before your eyes.
As I have said before, mass robotics will eliminate the need for mass immigration for most labor usecases, this is certain to happen by the late 2030s, and possibly by the mid 2030s.
It means no one but truly devoted liberals who want aggressive diversity would even advocate for looser migration.
Citizenship is in the process of transforming from a relatively easily handed out status, and more so a stake in the emerging machine economy, a dividend.
If Governments distribute income to citizens via their stake in the machine economy, then every new citizen is a dilution on that stake. This is why I think the politics of Birthright citizenship in the US will inevitably transform as well.
If you are a third worlder and want a first world citizenship, the clock is ticking, and it is ticking loud and fast.
These are all brilliant insights as usual,
but I would take it even a step further,
so much of the anxiety in the US orients around the notion of the "permanent underclass", which to a country built on mass influence and constant class flux and economic mobility would be a nuclear weapon on the entire societal perception of the country.
Don't underestimate this too in how the political battle over AI evolves, an America without class mobility won't stay a peaceful America for long, and one could argue the American public would veto AI if that notion is actually true.
In China and most of Asia Classism has long been the dominant fracture, and people are far less fussy about class, and usually less delusional about their class positioning or how high they can climb.
This says both great and bad things about the US, and mostly bad things about China and Asia tbh. But it suggests like The Mind Scourge has written, that China has no psychological or political blocks to reach ASI, its a guarantee with China.
The reason why China doesn’t have the same degree of existential angst about AI is partially a media effect (negative voices are suppressed within their system relative to the US) but mostly because China already has a big ASI - the Communist Party - and they figure it’ll sort out AI in time
Whereas in the West, and in the US especially, private interests and private power is much stronger, and people imagine that it can overwhelm the political system and state as whole - which to a degree is true
OK Then retweeted
This has been a massive week for Asia and automated Driving,
- Waymo launching in both Tokyo + Singapore next year
- Apollo Go in China crossing the Bay and launching in Hong Kong in just a few months
Everyone at the moment is fairly well plugged into LLMs and their impact on work, but everyone is underindexing robocars and just how massively they'll reorder the physical and social environment.
Robotaxis in a sense very much FEEL like the future.
The biggest immediate impact will be one of comparison though,
The Southeast Asian upper middle class from cities like Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, and HCMC will encounter self driving cars soon enough in their favorite places like Tokyo, HK, and SG,
and that will produce a kind of massive communal loathing that will force policymakers at home to get on the bandwagon.
Once you taste the physical frontier, its hard to go back from it, to want to escape it. You want more of it.
There are a lot of ways robotaxis will ultimately reorder cities, housing patterns, and even dating and social life, but I'll leave that for a longer post.
Singapore, we’re on our way 🇸🇬 Our vehicles will arrive later this year, and will begin mapping and learning Singapore’s roads in early 2027 before fully autonomous ride-hailing arrives in 2028.
Learn more: waymo.com/blog/2026/09/waymo…