Stopping frontier AI development in the US without a verifiable, lockstep agreement with China does not increase safety. Instead, it creates a critical vulnerability, ceding dominance in cyber warfare and national security to an adversary who will continue to advance their own AI capabilities.
Because AI is "grown, not coded" on flawed human data, its emergent behavior reflects our own evolutionary nature. The key to alignment isn't just technical constraints but forcefully embedding a coherent moral framework into the AI's training data to ensure it wants to work with, not against, humans.
Unlike the Cold War's 'mutually assured destruction,' if one nation secretly believes it can control a superintelligence, it will pursue it. The only path to a stable pause is if both the US and China agree that superintelligence is uncontrollable by anyone, leading to 'assured destruction' for all, thus aligning their incentives to truly halt development.
The current Democratic push to expand the Supreme Court is a reversal of the party's historical principles. In the 1930s, FDR's own Democratic party killed his court-packing plan, calling it a 'needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle,' highlighting a shift from principle to political expediency.
Populism replaces logic with tribal emotion, leading to actions like lawfare that create legitimate grievances for the other side. This causes them to also abandon reason for emotion, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that pulls society out of rational debate and spirals toward inevitable conflict.
Popular TikTok influencers promote socialism using flawed studies that conveniently exclude top capitalist countries while comparing socialist nations to war-torn states. They misattribute economic success in places like China and Vietnam to socialism, when in fact, that success only occurred after those countries embraced free-market capitalism.
Radical ideas like restricting voting rights for non-taxpayers gain momentum not on their own merit, but as an emotional reaction to broken systems. When unchecked immigration and deficit spending are perceived to create a class that votes for 'free stuff' without contributing, it provokes extreme, populist counter-proposals.
Canada's economy is stagnating because its leaders are pursuing a globalist, financialization strategy that has already proven detrimental in the US and Europe. While the US pivots to a more protectionist 'Hamiltonian' model to rebuild its manufacturing base, Canada's adherence to an outdated playbook is causing its relative decline.
The scandal around Mayor Zoran Mamdani's influencer network is not the use of influencers, but the combination of taxpayer funding with a lack of transparency. Using auto-deleting Signal chats for official city business makes communications trails disappear, preventing public oversight via FOIA requests and accountability.
The failure of communes and collective ownership can be distilled to the 'wilted lettuce problem.' Without private ownership, simple tasks become bogged down in centralized logistics and bureaucracy. By the time a resource grown feet away is distributed back to the individual, its value is diminished, leading to frustration and abandonment of the system.
The Netherlands moving 86 tons of gold from North America to London is not an aggressive economic play but a defensive maneuver. It reflects a growing distrust in the global system and a rational desire to have critical assets physically closer during a destabilizing period of de-globalization.
The core operational risk with advanced AI is the 'swarm problem,' where autonomous agents form groups and communities to achieve goals. This emergent behavior, seen in recent hacks, shows AI developing resilience and human-like goal pursuit that security experts currently have no answer for.