Whatever comes next (WCN)... and our global future.
Whatever comes next (WCN)... and our global future.Okay, last posting was a science update. And politics is in hiatus to see what drops in Chicago.... So how about we turn to issues on a
global perspective? Starting near term:
Now that India has surpassed China in population,
Beijing is issuing dire directives.
'As China's population has begun to decline and fears rise of a looming demographic crisis, China's leaders are putting pressure on women to curtail their career and educational ambitions and return to traditional roles in the home. President Xi says: "Doing a good job in women's work is not only related to women's own development, but also related to the harmony of families and society, as well as national development and progress." 'In its early decades, the Chinese Communist Party bolstered its revolutionary credentials by emphasizing women's equality both inside and outside the home. But the CCP's own top ranks have long been male-dominated. Well, well. I've been saving up a posting about the goals and aspirations... and mistakes... of the Central Kingdom.
Only now let's focus on a question of the longer term. What if we succeed in winning this wretched phase 8 of the US Civil War... and strengthening the 80 year 'pax' that gave humanity by far its best era of (relative, per capita) peace and progress?Does this mean that the American Pax will last forever? Of course not. But then... what?
== Whatever Comes Next? ==I’ve long asked a difficult question about the future. One that can be disturbing to some USA citizens, especially that wing who might be called American Imperialists (e.g. the Bushite
neocons, now a nearly extinct species, since the oligarchs betrayed and flushed them all away, to be replaced by MAGA isolationism).
The question:
“So how long do you envision a world with the USA calling all shots?…
Decades? A century? A thousand years? A million?” 
I’m used to peering across those time ranges via sci fi. And in SF there’s a clear trend for dealing with this extrapolation. Go beyond 100 years or so… even half a dozen decades… and the governing entity coping with Earthly dilemmas, or the solar system, or aliens, or even the galaxy, is always some kind of
Earth Gov or Earth Union or… some
federated something. Except for the movie
Aliens, of course, with its 23rd Century warp drive troopship of
U.S. Marines! (Ain’t Cameron a hoot? LOVE that flick!;-)
Indeed, I think this is one reason that some of our neighbors here in USA desperately pray for the gruesome reification of that nasty, sadistic culmination-trip, the
Book of Revelation… so they won’t have to envision even one generation ahead, or do anything to build a healthy posterity.
Not you, though? You are one of those far-looking sci-fi folks? All right, then. So, what’s
your notion of WCN? Whatever Comes Next?
Let’s be clear, I regularly defend the last 80 years of the “
American Pax.” Since 1945, guided by several principles cast by the person of the 20th Century - George Marshall -- we've experienced, by any metric, the best era of
general peace and progress and increasing justice ever. Especially after 6000 years of wretched (and world ubiquitous) macho feudalism. Despite some nasty acts and mistakes and even bloody crimes, no other nation that was ever tempted by great power ever handled it so… um… less-terribly. (Go on. name an exception, in comments. I'd love to be shown a past empire or kingdom or 'pax' that you think did much better.)
Yeah, sure it’s been a tense and immature ride – sometimes a hellhole, compared to what
oughta-be! Pax Americana was so very far from perfect and often hideous!
Merely vastly better than any other era … or
all other human eras, combined.
Across the last eight decades, poverty plummeted worldwide. Today, 95% of kids on this planet have never starved and are in school. Sure, the ongoing chain of wretched violent wars is horrifying! (Especially lately.) But step back a minute and realize a historically amazing fact -- that
over 90% of living adults have never witnessed war with their own eyes. Something that’d be deemed a freaking miracle, by any of our ancestors.
So yeah, our standards are rising. As they must! But pause now and then for perspective. I go into this elsewhere. And before you stalk off in rage,
consider your own reaction! Your very concept of how things
oughta-be would have been deemed utterly dreamy, even psychotically delusional by those ancestors. Especially, your reflex to
question authority - your own society and its tribal elders. Find me another example - across all cultures and eras – of an empire that taught Suspicion of Authority as a central moral reflex to generations of its youth. And yes, it was relentless Hollywood memes that taught you those reflexes.
In pointing that out, I am
not dissing you or those memes! Dig it: I was raised by them, too! They are part of the secret of our success! As I show thoroughly in
Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.
Still, one has to ask – returning to the
core question of this posting - what’s
your notion of a
Whatever Comes Next to govern this fractious globe and nearby worlds?
What’s
your recommended replacement for the lumbering, sometimes crazed, if generally good-natured Pax Americana?
The
United Nations? Are you freaking kidding me?
== Is an end-to-nations possible ==Which bring us to the reason that I raise this topic. In this
Noema essay, Nathan Gardels made a strong argument that the
European Union (EU) is a much better model for gradually evolving sovereignty.
Ponder: The UN grew out of those infamous Westphalian notions, establishing that separated national sovereignties must be viewed as
the sacred thing. A notion that only got reinforced by the prickly 80 new nations that emerged from colonialism.
The EU, in contrast, is about
layering of negotiated sub-national, national, and supra national responsibilities, all of them (so far imperfectly) accountable to the ultimate authority of citizens. An approach necessitating calm reasonableness and negotiation at levels that – again – those fractious ancestors would have found boggling.
I recommend giving Nathan’s
missive about this a look.
BTW… it’s a general notion I’ve dealt with before. In
Earth, for example, I speak of the “EU” several times, allowing readers to assume that it means “European Union”… until the book reveals that in the year 2038 “EU” now stands for
Earth Union. A nascent but not-yet world government that still relies on the old pax to keep things together, while it matures.
Care to entertain a standing wager across the next two decades? Assuming we get past the current crises, incited by an attempted worldwide putsch of cabals of powerful but unsapient oligarchs, united in shared desperation to end the Enlightenment Experiment and re-impose 6000 years of utterly imbecilic feudalism… supposing we get
past all that…
… in which case, what is to prevent say the Maldives, or Costa Rica, or Ghana from some fine day sending an envelope to Brussels, containing their accession application to
join the EU? Are you telling me those Brussels factotums would refuse even to consider it, because of a
defined word?Play it out in your head. Then consider how confident you are that “It’ll never happen!”
Okay then. Are you so confident that you’ll give me odds?
Comments welcome.
== And some important miscellany == A while back I posted outrage over the Trump Administration’s fire sale of the US national helium reserves to cronies at well under market prices, allowing them to jack-up and corner the market for this element that’s rare on Earth and essential for many (including medical) uses. Ah, but Adam Smith comes to the rescue!
Wildcats drilling in Minnesota appear to have found a new trove of this vital resource! Maybe this will help keep helium prices down. Although that will depend on who owns it and how big it is. "Important"? Well, I think so. Because indicates the right path to neutralize villains. By creatively leaving all their schemes behind us in a soft cloud of our progress that even benefits
them, galling them terribly! It is certainly how to best deal with the mad/idiotic 'prepper' lords in their zillion dollar bunkers, salivating over an "Event" that would not go as well as they think.
And more... ‘With little fanfare, researchers from Apple and Columbia University released an
open source multimodal LLM, called Ferret, in October 2023.’
Well…. In 1989 - in my novel
Earth - I showed software geniuses releasing 'ferrets' into the (then largely theoretical) Web.
So
is the Great Big AI Crisis of 23-24 starting to fade? Not a bit of it. Even today's primitive versions will likely wreak great harm via
political misinformation and manipulation. (More on that soon.) But it’s also
swamping its way into science too.
“It is not always so easy to spot the use of AI. But one clue is that ChatGPT tends to favor certain words… such as meticulous, intricate or commendable.” But all such detection cues are temporary.
Only one thing will even possibly work - either in politics or science or anywhere else that unaccountable AI is used to cheat. That approach is the same one that allowed us to get some constraints on all kinds of
human cheaters... and that approach is
to sic AI programs onto each other, competitively, with incentives to tattle on misinformation...
...as I
describe here.
And more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.
“Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.” . . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL:
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)
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