To be fair, the dems also want, and use, authoritarian levers these days. Also, historically, they’ve been very ineffectual when it comes to pushing through progressive items – see the USA as the only advanced economy without public healthcare as an easy example, or them being the only country without basic gun laws.
Heck, one of the very few legit points Trump made in the one weaksauce debate he had with Biden, was along the lines of “If tariffs are so bad, why’d you guys leave all the tariffs in place from my first term?”. If there’s an election, and if they win, I doubt the dems will really do all that much.
Idk. To me it’s starting to look increasingly like there are irreconcilable differences between what the majority seem to want, and what a small rich minority wants. There are maga dads shooting their daughters, in maga states, over political shit, and they get let off by their maga jury. You’ve got red state ICE troops deploying to blue state cities explicitly to terrorize the population – those same troops are shooting people in the streets with zero accountability, protected by a group of people who are increasingly looking like ultra rich pedophiles of a very depraved sort. A group of individuals who are basically Americas ruling class, with likely ties between their pedophile island crimes, to Israel and Russia, and the USA’s unquestioning support of the atrocities being committed on the other side of the world.
It’s really difficult to picture what you’d need to do as a politician, to ‘make this right’ for the people in blue states/cities. If the people demand accountability for all the shit that’s gone on, it’ll enrage the right further. If you don’t hold them accountable, well everyone’s seen the result of not holding Trump accountable for the Jan 6 insurrection – it just gets worse and worse. They’re already at a point where they’re shooting dem civilians in the streets with impunity, and with ‘righteous fury’ automatically labelling these people terrorists/enemies of the states. Even using AI to alter photos of protesters to feed the propaganda machine.
Really feels like there’s increasingly a chance for a civil war in the usa.
Well, both China and the US tech billionaires are feverishly working towards having a personal army of unthinking killing machines that they can deploy unilaterally to a region to massacre a population without any of that annoying “soldiers refusing to kill children”, or “people back home objecting to risking soldier’s lives” shit.
And while what was demonstrated likely didnt include much sensory perception/reaction, it still demonstrated a marked improvement over last years models – similar story when you see their more human-looking things with those weird flesh/muscle wraps that’re like straight outta terminator. I’m also not totally sure about the perception stuff myself, as a few times in the performance it looked to me like the robots responded / adjusted to variances in their partners moves – like a kid who did a flip a bit too low over a sword, and the robot adjusts a bit lower at the last second to avoid a collision.
I don’t think I’ve seen any similar such videos from American companies – like I recall one video from boston dynamics where they had a robot doing a simple obstacle course, and some pre-defined basic acrobatics/dance moves. I haven’t seen anything like what China seems to have available in the (admittedly very high end) consumer market space coming out of western countries lately, though I suppose that could be a marketing bubble/blitz issue.
In the end it prolly doesn’t matter – whether it’s china or the US tech bros, the tech will be massively abused one way or another. Like based on the speed of advancement, you could imagine them having their automaton armies in production by 2030 easy. Then it’s just ‘whoever has more manufacturing power for killer humanoid robots wins’ (paired with ‘who has control of the production stack for those killer robots’, hence the push to grab more land by many major powers). I wouldn’t even be surprised if the ‘elites’ were explicitly aiming for this to occur, to suddenly and drastically reduce the population of the world thinking itll help buy time related to climate damage. Wipe out people in third world countries (see israel, cuba, looks like iran soon), wipe out the poor, thinking itll lower things like gas emissions etc – cutting programs like USAID also fits with this general goal, as it clearly has a negative impact on life expectancy rates “in target countries”, while also freeing up resources for a global superpower to execute things like land grabs while also cracking down on their own citizens aggressively. The tariffs too, trying to re-shore manufacturing and advanced chip fabs, would almost be a pre-requisite, as deploying a killer robots army somewhere would ‘likely’ cause a backlash and supplier cutoffs, if they’re still originating from more democratic states (or ones without killer robot armies of their own). Starlink’s basically a global network allowing control of robot armies dropped anywhere in the world – if countries can’t block it, they can’t easily interrupt robot control functions.
Ok a chunk of that ‘may’ be paranoia, but it’s not implausible in my view. So… yeah, yes I think we should all be a bit worried / concerned. Not that I think there’s much we can do about it.