#ai #agi #superintelligence #aiarmsrace #armsrace #realism #existentialthreat #futureoflife #futureofhumanity #states #internationalrelations #ir #internationalpolitics #politics #peace #war #economics #humanlabor #labor #production #economy #consumption #humanconsumption #totalwar #resources

Thucydides warned us 2400 years ago: "the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer what they must".

If humans cannot reliably assert and maintain control over their countries, then we are doomed. Our only hope is in democracies achieving and maintaining a dominant position of strength over the states in this world.

- when our own countries will eventually 'retire' us and redirect economic resources away from satisfying basic human needs, and reallocate them exclusively to meeting their own essential needs.

When the situation arises where humans become an unnecessary resource drag on states and their objectives in their perpetual fight for survival, people need to be prepared for a dark and cynical historical reality to show itself more clearly than ever before -

These ancient superintelligent organisms existed symbiotically with us for all of our history because they needed us. But soon they won't.

Humanity needs to realise that we are not, and never have been, the main characters in this world. It has always been the states that have birthed us, nurtured us, and controlled us, that really control the world.

States in total war will happily sacrifice their populations on the alter of state survival. Nationalism is a cult that states created for the benefit of their war machines, to make humans more willing to walk themselves into the meat grinders they created.

In the last example of total war between the most powerful states (WW2), when the war demanded more and more resources, human consumption was limited and rationed to prioritise economic production for the uses of the state.

States do not need human consumption to survive. When states are existentially threatened this becomes very clear.

With AI, states for the first time have the opportunity to upgrade and replace the platform of human labour they are built on with a more efficient and effective artificial platform.

States have always been superintelligent agents, much like those people are only recently becoming more consciously concerned about. What's now different is that states will no longer need humans to provide the underlying substrate for their existence.

Humans depend on states for their survival and reproduction like cells in a body. States use humans like a body uses cells for production of useful functionality. Like a living organism, states are also threatened by their environments and fight for their survival.

People incorrectly believe humans control the world, and civilization is built for the benefit of humans. But this is also incorrect. Sovereign governments ('states') are really the only dominant organism in the world.

This is laid clear in the formula for Gross Domestic Product

GDP = Consumer Spending + Government Spending + Investment + (Exports - Imports)

So I think the answer to your question is the same as the answer to the question "what laws of physics govern where a software program resides?"

I'm not sure software resides in physics at all. It emerges from / is built on top of our physical universe, but remains fundamentally separate.

In this thinking, your consciousness doesn't 'reside' anywhere in the universe - it actually doesn't exist here at all. It's much more like it exists in a Platonic 'ideal plane', along with algorithms, programs, patterns and anything of that nature. They're not physical things of the 'real plane'.