Ronald Reagan came into office promising he would defeat the Soviet Union. He believed the way to defeat them was military might. He would ramp up spending on nuclear weapons and technologies like ABMs ("Star Wars") which, logically, would in the long run have no effect except to force both sides of the nuclear detente to massively increase their nuclear stockpiles to overcome the effects of the other side's ABMs and larger stockpiles. Reagan would increase America's military involvement in proxy wars against communism, and its overall military spending.
None of these missiles were used and none of this appears to have had any real-world effect. But there's a narrative you hear sometimes where Reagan's promise came about as a result of his actions, but purely indirectly and accidentally. The Soviet Union did, in fact, collapse three years after Regan left office. In the narrative, all of Reagan's military acts were useless or counterproductive but the Soviet Union's response was actually fatal, the Soviet Union freaked out in response to the military buildup's existence and ramped up its own military spending catastrophically— something the United States could at that moment afford by borrowing against its future but the Soviet Union, facing multiple internal crises that were at that moment coincidentally coming to a head, could not. In the narrative, Reagan achieved nothing but dumb-lucked the Soviet Union into destroying itself.
Is this narrative true? Never mind that for a moment. Just keep the narrative in mind.
There is a lot of noise in the press right now (I will not bother to link any of the "open letters") about "AI". We are promised (oddly enough, by the people making the "AI" software?) that AI is an existential threat to humanity that will one day destroy the humans. AI, goes the promise, will grow in power and intelligence until some allegedly logical chain of inescapable inferences force it to act out every science fiction dystopia simultaneously.
But what do we see in the real world?
The Internet is being rocked this week because Reddit's users are revolting and taking down their content, which has left Google mostly useless. Reddit's users are doing this because Reddit's owners are taking away the moderators' third party tools. Reddit's owners are doing this, if you carefully read their duplicitous statements, because the owners have convinced themselves that the third party tools are harvesting data for "AI" and the owners want a cut of the "AI" money pie. Reddit doesn't currently use any "AI". But because "AI" exists, they are destroying themselves.
Outside Reddit, indirect consequences of "AI" abound. Google's search results (outside Reddit) are becoming less and less useful as the operators of well-SEOed sites mistake autocomplete bots for reliable sources of content. Bing is trying to cut out the middleman and have their search engine present the results of the autocomplete bot directly, with no search results needed. Google— in a way that reminds me of how, once, their freakout about needing to compete with an ascendant Facebook lead them to rushjob "Google+" integration everywhere in a way that temporarily or permanently broke otherwise-useful tools like YouTube or Reader— claims they will soon be following suit with "Bard". In fact every single piece of software you might want to use seems to now be shoehorning dubiously-useful "AI" capabilities, all of which shuttle information back to a single dubious company named "OpenAI", and the software houses seem to be of a mindset that if users don't opt in to the OpenAI, that just means they need to try harder to force the feature. I've already had to stop using my favorite Android keyboard because Microsoft wedged in AI chatbot integration. In a keyboard. No sooner had I stopped using the keyboard than Microsoft announced they would soon be wedging similar integration into their operating system, which I can't stop using so easily. Soon you may have no choice but to use these "AI" tools which, I would like to stress, do not seem to work.
Reagan's nukes were bombs that never went off. Every nuclear weapon built in the US after August 9, 1945 could have been an inoperative blank with a hunk of lead for a core and the weapons could have had the same effect. We could live in a universe where nuclear weapons never worked at all, America just firebombed two cities in 1945 and did a theater show to fake the world into thinking they'd built a "new-type bomb", and that universe has a possible narrative where 51 years later the fake weapons tricked the Soviet Union into destroying itself anyway.
Do you see where I am going with this?
