Futurology

The US change in sides to ally with Russia has left Europe scrambling. Suddenly the continent's decades-long intertwining dependence on American military tech has become a vast liability, and one that needs to be urgently corrected.

Former Airbus CEO Tom Enders says the way to do this is to ditch American military tech, and quickly rearm having learned lessons from the conflict in Ukraine. He says a key insight from that war is that cheap drones can consistently destroy Russian systems that are orders of magnitude more expensive.

Coordinated by OneWeb, the euro version of Starlink, the continent's military should place tens of thousands of intelligent robotic drones along its border, and do this in a matter of months, not years.

The German government passed its €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) rearmament budget yesterday, which also allows for unlimited future borrowing to fund further German military buildup. It seems vast robotic drone army battalions may be a thing of the future, and arriving soon.

Interview - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In German, use Google translate to read.

Article with overview.

OpenAI & Anthropic have both made calls for Chinese AI models to be banned in the US on national security grounds. While it is true countries have reason to distrust other countries' tech, I doubt this is the real reason they are upset.

Their big problem is that Open-Source AI annihilates their chances of succeeding as businesses. Silicon Valley's model of VC funding is to bet on many small start-ups, hoping one becomes a 'unicorn' - a multi-billion dollar company (like Google, Meta, etc) able to dominate an industry and rake in hundreds of billions of dollars.

Even if they succeed in banning Chinese Open-Source - does this mean they'll become unicorns? I doubt it. The Chinese Open-Source AI models are superior to theirs. Most of the rest of the world will use them, and the real AI innovation will happen in the rest of the world. Meanwhile Americans will make do with the second-best AI, that can only survive when it gets the best banned.

China has long favored this strategy. It realises how vulnerable its fossil fuel supply is to US naval blockade should it decide to invade Taiwan. Now it seems you don't have to invade anyone for the 'blockade' of tariffs. Hence, this report argues that more nations will follow China's strategy.

Although I'm sure it will have an effect, I'd guess the biggest drivers are still the cheapness of renewables and countries' net zero goals. In particular home solar/microgrids and cheap Chinese vehicles which I imagine will blanket every corner of the world in the 2030s.

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