On February 28, 2020, as the Corona Government Hallucination was unfolding, I argued it is the beginning of a world war. I talked about the world war a little later, on March 24. On March 15, 2020, I estimated the Covid-19 mortality rate at 0.2%, well below malaria and in the range of common illnesses like a slightly more severe flu. The regular flu kills three times less, but happens all the time.
On March 21, 2020, I argued Donald Trump’s strategy to be a bet against the hallucination. Thus, he negated the virus, and pushed the US on a trajectory that maximized infections and minimized lockdown damage, time and economic losses. At the time, I thought the goal of this strategy was to immediate reelection. He lost by a small margin. In an unprecedented move, Twitter acted against Trump to the point of removing him from the platform. Given the very small margin responsible for Trump’s loss, Twitter may well be responsible for it. A simple change in the algorithm that rank Trump’s tweets could easily achieve that.
I spoke against the Twitter decision at the time. I argued that everyone, including the president of the United States has the right to free speech. Twitter is an avenue to exercise this right. If a man is good enough to be the President of the United States and be in charge of the world’s largest army and nuclear arsenal, I believe he is also good enough to be afforded the freedom to speak on Twitter. Sure, he may be judged by what he says, and he may be impeached, etc. But these decisions are not for Twitter to make.
Now, whether we like it or not, Donald Trump was not only good enough to be president at the time, but also good enough to be president again. Twitter paid dearly. It is now in the hands of Elon Musk, the most capable man in the Trump administration. Most Twitter employees lost their jobs and Twitter’s stock market value plummeted. Should it rise again, it will be a very different animal, known as Elon’s X.
On March 27, 2020, I weighted carefully the loss of life through death against the loss of life through the measures. It was clear to me that the measures are wrong and Trump’s way was right. Trump may look like a mad man, but governments worldwide were hallucinating very badly.
Since then 4 years have passed. As I correctly argued on March 24, 2020, the Coronavirus and associated government hallucination have pushed the world from peace to war and supported dictators against democracy. Xi and Putin are still in power, and are now without doubt the strongest dictators since Mao and Stalin. Putin is now fighting the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. Arguably, about one million citizens of former USSR lost their lives fighting on Putin’s side in Russia or on the side of the West in Ukraine. Unlike the million people who lost their lives to the Coronavirus and were close to their time of natural death, the million killed by war are mostly young people, many of them almost children. The life loss is vastly greater than the toll of the pandemic. Of course, wars and injustice go beyond Ukraine. I look at Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Urkraine and at the various civil wars out there (and at Russia and Israel since there are plenty of parents who lost their children, too) and shake with sorrow for the many years in lives lost. I look at the mothers out there raising children. I see first hand how hard it is to have healthy children, then to go past the early years and keep them sane and healthy is even harder, and I am sadened by how easy it is to destroy all that work.
Trump is also back in the White House, with fresh dictatorial powers. Trump looks like a mad man, but he is not. Mad men don’t live so long. He also has a very capable Elon Musk by his side and a family that will sell anything (particularly things they do not own yet like the White House) to have power. Elon comes with Gork, a capable AI system that can compete with OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Google’s Gemini, and is perhaps more obssesed than Trump with taking over the world. Elon has a lot of experience running large enterprises efficiently. He started from little to become world’s richest man, with a fortune to the tune of half a trillion dollars. That’s over $50 for every citizen on the Planet or $1500 for every American. Musk’s personal fortune exceeds the annual GDP of 80% countries.Thus, Musk is a very capable dictator who rules over a country sized empire. In the case of Tesla, Musk owns 13% of the company, but has dictatorial powers. Same is true for Space X, Twitter and Neuralink. If given dictatorial powers, Musk is thus probably quite able to deliver what he has promised. That is, cut government spending and increase efficiency. Most government spending is wages, and many employees are useless. We’ve seen that with Twitter. Let that sink in. Like in Twitter, a lot of these employees can and will now be replaced by AI — intelligent machines that do people’s work better and cheaper.
The problem is not only the US, but the rest of the world. The world copies America. Remember George Washington? When he became the first president of the United States of America, he was also the first president of any nation in the world! Now most of the world has presidents. Thus people who look like Trump will be elected for high office worldwide. They are the aspiring dictators, the far left and the far right. These people will not be as tame as Donald Trump and won’t have advisors as capable as Elon Musk. They will also not be able to draw on the intellectual power of Tesla and Gork. They may even be banned from the most advanced versions of these systems, unlike Musk and his engineers. But they will win elections. They may be called the AFD in Germany, Nigel Farage in the UK or Calin Georgescu in Romania. All are problematic choices. The world copies America.
Now, the US may be the first country to outsource government work to artificial intelligence, but it will not be the last one to do so. Many will follow. The world will emerge very different from this just like it has after the last wars. Wars have always led to tremendous progress. We entered the First World War on horseback and got out of the second world war riding rockets to the Moon and into the Atomic age. Four years ago, we entered World War III because of a virus (be it genetically engineered or not — the tools are there and easy to use) and we will emerge some years from now with a new world order, where, perhaps, AI will be to humans what the internal combustion engine was to horses.
Musk also promises to deliver in making humanity a multi-planetary species. We have the technology to live on Mars. The Moon is also near. The Asteroid belt has many tiny rocks with little gravity that may prove interesting as hubs for transportation and have available heavy metals near the surface, due to their low gravity. But will we make it without destroying human life on Earth first? At the end 2024, just like four years ago, I pray for peace! After all, there is still plenty of room to go forward before going back to a stage where we are powered by manual labor, and our former deeds live in stories without the science background.
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