Once you strip out all of the PR about democracy, freedoms, etc, the US really does fit pretty well as the single biggest threat to continued existence on earth: massive nuclear stockpile on a hair trigger, massive globe spanning network of carbon emitting and resource extracting enterprises, attempting to develop ai with minimal safeguards and autonomous weapons, etc.
There are other countries that do some or all of these things, but in aggregate, the US is, for now, gotta be the single largest threat. Possibly another country will take up this mantle in the future.
All that said, I’m not convinced at this point that it can be avoided. It may just be what happens one way or another with humans at these kinds of scales, or a natural progression of technology snuffing itself out. Doesn’t make it any nicer to contemplate though.
For the past 100 years it has been this way, too. Post WW2 the US went way down hill. I mean pre WW2 it was already extremely shitty, but somehow they managed to make a shithole country even worse.
Once you strip out all of the PR about democracy, freedoms, etc, the US really does fit pretty well as the single biggest threat to continued existence on earth: massive nuclear stockpile on a hair trigger, massive globe spanning network of carbon emitting and resource extracting enterprises, attempting to develop ai with minimal safeguards and autonomous weapons, etc.
There are other countries that do some or all of these things, but in aggregate, the US is, for now, gotta be the single largest threat. Possibly another country will take up this mantle in the future.
All that said, I’m not convinced at this point that it can be avoided. It may just be what happens one way or another with humans at these kinds of scales, or a natural progression of technology snuffing itself out. Doesn’t make it any nicer to contemplate though.
For the past 100 years it has been this way, too. Post WW2 the US went way down hill. I mean pre WW2 it was already extremely shitty, but somehow they managed to make a shithole country even worse.