America Lost the Mandate of Heaven

What does it mean if a country is winning?

I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation. Everything was outsourced, and now after whining about a $25/hr job not having health insurance, there’s just no more $25 an hour job and nobody to try and bargain with anymore. The chips are made in Taiwan, the clothes are made in Vietnam, the cars are made in Mexico, and you are on the phone with India.

This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor. Companies make money, GDP goes up, everyone wins. Except, well … American people. This line of “oh they get cheap stuff” is hardcore cope, I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming. That sounds like the mentality of Disney Adults.

Your value is in production, and your value is in providing a good society for your fellow countrymen.

I think people are finally starting to realize what happened. Tariffs could, in theory, fix this. It would be a painful transition, but done properly you could force companies back to the negotiation table with American labor.

If you (artificially) make the cost of outsourcing high enough, you could imagine there being businesses capable of self sustaining in America. However, you give up hope of being a global leader at this point and create an insular economy. It’s a loser mentality.

“You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.” – Jensen Huang

Even more ridiculous is the export controls on NVIDIA. Here we have an American made product the entire world wants, and what does America do? Oh yes, export controls. Sorry, we don’t want to win globally, please build an alternative.

But we have to export control it. Haven’t you heard about AGI? These nice folks at the “Center for Effective Altruism” told me about this blog they read called LessWrong. They said that the blog said AI is going to destroy the world, and if the world is going to be destroyed, I don’t want to live in a world where someone else destroys it better than Americans!

It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t. And I think the reason comes back to the view of people.

Take the Mythos vulnerability finding thing. They didn’t just point Mythos at the codebase and say go, they built a harness where they asked it about each piece of code and if it was vulnerable. They triaged and spent more time looking at things that were flagged more, until eventually they passed it up to “upper management” aka the Anthropic software engineers, who are quite a bit more talented than your average bug hunter.

You could imagine building this exact same thing but all with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns, put them in a management hierarchy. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?

And here is where you get to this American AGI is coming it’s over, AI will take all jobs worldview. Because it’s hard to conceive of doing things with people in America.

A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people. There is no magical “step change” for AGI. With 8 billion humans in the world, that’s still 13 doublings for machines to catch up. Yes, it will happen, but not next year.

When I was younger I used to think more negatively about jobs, I even called it the jobs problem in my 2019 agentic coding startup template. I have since come around, the point of a society is the flourishing of its inhabitants.

I know I know, I live in Hong Kong. Maybe the society here is brainwashing me or something. Or maybe, when I looked around on my walk yesterday, I saw a society that actually works for who lives here – not homeless everywhere, not isolation in cars, not blatant stagnation.

I know I know, that’s a socialist platitude or something, society that works. What they say right before they argue for a dumbass tax on billionaires or banning plastic straws. Don’t worry I still think most socialists are degrowth morons.

But what does it even mean to root for America anymore? Do these coming changes help the average American? Does Google getting ten million more TPUs help Americans? Or am I missing the point?

Ahh oh is it weapons? America will get AI weapons. Because it faces so many threats on its own isolated continent, good thing it has AI weapons to stay safe. Oh, wait, America faces no real threats. It wants to use the weapons offensively? Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack.

It’s just bullying. It’s stupid. How can anyone root for America to win AI? In its current incarnation, it means job loss for Americans and more bullying on the world stage.

I love America. I am American. And I wish it had the mandate of heaven. I wish America winning meant peace and prosperity. But when it’s for offensive military and the largest psychologically manipulative corporations in history, how can anyone root for this?