Daily Balajisms - Robotics over demographics

Great resignation will lead to great automation. AI can boost egalitarian Kibbutzes and elite sovereign collectives.

Great resignation will lead to great automation. AI can boost egalitarian Kibbutzes in size, and shrink high-performing sovereign collectives.

In year 2100 the population of Nigeria may surpass the population of China. This year India’s population is set to surpass the Chinese population.

But the demographic challenge can be solved by robotics and cheap power. China plans to build 150 nuclear reactors in 15 years. Since 2008, the country has built by far the largest network of high-speed rail in the world – 38,000km long. Spain, a country with the second largest network, has built 2,000km.

China was able to build high-speed rail in record time, so the vision to build 150 nuclear reactors in 15 years can be materialized. If labor becomes automation, cheap and reliable energy is what drives industrialization.

China is part of the ascending world that sees technological progress as necessary. Germany has switched off the last remaining nuclear power plants recently, and thus the country is part of the technologically conservative declining world.

Great resignation (labor shortages during Covid) will lead to great automation, says Balaji. We can also say that Great resignation (on the tech progress) in the West will lead to great automation in the East.      

Balaji Srinivasan says that the authors of The Sovereign Individual have made many accurate predictions back in 1999, like the rise of cryptocurrencies, but they didn’t game out the rise of AI, drones and VR.

A sovereign individual is a person who has a power comparable to sovereign countries, think Elon Musk or Bill Gates. But after Reformation, there was a Counter-Reformation. The counter-reaction against the sovereign individual is an individual sovereign (autocrats like Xi Jinping), the autonomous robot (drone armada), and the sovereign collective (small high-trust and high-agency groups powered by AI, Crypto and Social tech).

The soviet soldiers didn’t shoot protesters when the Soviet Union was falling, because they also wanted blue jeans and rock’n’roll. Orange coin is the new blue jeans, says Balaji. But soon robots and drones might pose a challenge for the freedom loving people and crypto tribe. Because robots need to be just charged, they don’t need to be paid, pleased, persuaded and propagandized.  

Balaji explains how bitcoin is a lifeboat in places like Venezuela or Lebanon. Bankrupt states, financially or morally, have difficulties enforcing order. Sometimes this means locals are free of state tyranny and can fall back on crypto-anarchy when the fiat economy falls into disarray. And crypto-anarchy is better than pure anarchy or anarcho-tyranny (anarchy for criminals, excessive punishment for law-abiding citizens).

But AI surveillance and drones can boost the capacities of even morally and financially bankrupt states to engage in state tyranny. This is the Long Night doom scenario of digital lockdowns and digital authoritarianism that John Robb talks about.

Balaji talks often about three main power attractors today – CCP, NYT and BTC. Or hard power, soft power and smart power. These map onto AI, Social and Crypto. While the AI in the hands of autocrats can lead to the Long Night doom scenario, the twitter maximalism combined with downstream media clickbait can lead to what I call the Nuclear Yolocaust Times doom scenario. And the bitcoin maximalism can lead to a Mad Max doom scenario.  

Peter Thiel says that crypto is libertarian and AI is communist. But Balaji says that the main political and technological division is the centralization-decentralization axis. Stable Diffusion is an example of decentralized AI and CBDCs are an example of centralized crypto.

AI can help China “to make a pencil” writes Balaji in his book, The Network State. AI, Crypto and Social can make communities computable (provide team dashboards on-chain), composable (like DeFi and DeSci) and portable (think Nostr).  

But automation and AI can also lead to greater and more efficient centralization, with doom scenarios like the Long Night. It can also scale various ideologies and politics beyond their natural scale (contra Taleb’s fractal localism) – in egalitarian or libertarian directions.

Kibbutzes can 10x their average size to 5,000 members instead of 500. Small sovereign collectives can 10x their output with 10x less people – think AI startups with 2-3 people, instead of 30, challenging legacy companies.