The Deadliest Race of the 21st Century

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To some, the term 'deadliest race' might seem like hyperbole. Given the current landscape of banal clickbait headlines, I honestly understand that reaction. But in this case, I ask you to reserve judgment until you get to the ’takeaway’ of this article.

As a confirmed believer in Austrian economics and a lifelong laissez-faire capitalist, I am ever reluctant to display the iconography of the hammer and sickle because of its primary association with Russian communism and communism’s democidal horrors of the 20th century.

But the hammer and sickle are just tools. The hammer is one of the greatest and most enduring human tools — still used today in every trade, from stonemasons, to sculptors, to orthopedic surgeons. Likewise the sickle and its modern mechanized versions are an indispensable agricultural tool that helps feed the world.

But they are also both lethal weapons. The difference only depends on how you use them and whether your intent is to be productive or to be destructive.

The New Tools/Weapons of the 21st Century

These are some of the emerging tools of our time. How we choose to use them means everything to our future. Free people want them to build, nation states obviously are bent on more control.

Robotics

Free People: Most of us are aware of the recent advances in robotics and in the software that operates them. Used by free people, robots, drones, and related machinery can perform dangerous, mind-numbingly routine, and back-breaking labor more cheaply and efficiently, giving people more time and opportunities to pursue the higher goals in their life. A billion productive robots (and perhaps a lot fewer) could quadruple the global economy.

Nation States: In the hands of states these technologies are already being eagerly used to surveil populations and augment battlefield and aerial warfare. If a lethal drone can be built for $1,000, a million of them can be built for only a billion dollars and that expense is within reach for every nation state. A billion destructive robots (and perhaps a lot fewer) could transform the whole planet into a gulag.

Digital ID and Privacy

Free People: I wrote earlier about How Digital Identity Expands Your Freedom. The critical element is the condition of each individual owning and controlling her own identity. That’s an indispensable condition of Freedom and it should be non-negotiable in people’s minds. Owning your digital identity means you, and only you, get to decide when and where to reveal 0%, 1%, or 63% of your identity to another person or company. There is no privacy without this productive technology.

Nation States: Governments are already forcing people to accept and comply with digital identification that is owned and controlled by the state. Soon this identification will be mandatory in order to receive money, have bank accounts (KYC), and the right to work and rent a home. Frankly, that’s our current situation and has been for years. But soon the destructive use of central control of identities will lead everyone to…

Digital Currencies

Free People: The invention of distributed cryptographic public blockchains is on the order of magnitude of importance of the printing press and electric power. Bitcoin in particular, allows all people everywhere to have access to money and banking in minutes without seeking permission from anyone and to do so and with a level of privacy that nation states are working hard to eliminate. And this might be hard to grasp, but — the entire Bitcoin financial system is not owned or controlled by anyone. There are no central banks, no Bank for International Settlements, and no political policies of “quantitative easing” or routine inflation. It’s a free marketplace with money that can’t be tampered with; not now, and not in a thousand years. That’s never happened in all of human history and it’s a boon to free people. In the hands of productive people, digital currencies enable new levels of individual privacy and freedom.

Nation States: Today least 114 countries are creating or considering their own digital currencies, called Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). These digital dollars, euros, baht, shekels and rubles will soon be issued to citizens on a mandatory basis. All of your money and the wallet and bank you hold it in will be programmable by the state. Digital wallets can be geofenced so the money can only be spent in a specific area, perhaps only in your town, state or province. Products and services can be proscribed so that your digital money can’t be spent on .223 caliber ammunition, or certain books, or on only three pounds of red meat per month, or on no foreign vacations without prior state approval. Any arbitrary rule could be enforced instantly with granularity down to the individual. Break the speed limit too many times — or just use your car too much — and suddenly you can only ride a bus for a month. All of this is programmable and instantaneous with the new CBDC’s being created right now. In the hands of nation states, digital currencies enable new levels of the destruction of individual privacy and freedom.

Free Speech

Free People: Whatever you think of the current state social media, its advent gave us the ability to interact and form groups with ordinary people like us all over the world who share common interests and values. From a freedom standpoint, social media so far has been less than optimal because users subject themselves to very invasive and comprehensive data gathering that is used to monetize the platforms by destroying the privacy of the users. However, newer technologies like NOSTR and Mastodon are allowing people to own and control their social media data and to use their own digital identities to interact with others on these platforms. These new platforms are, like Bitcoin, not owned by anyone and contain no secret programing to undermine privacy or to enable any censorship. And they are accessible to anyone in the world without seeking permission or disclosing personal identity. Anyone can set themselves up on NOSTR within two minutes with no identification, and they can not be removed. Those conditions are indispensable to global free speech and these technologies permit people with hitherto no other agency to immediately engage in true free speech. ( My NOSTR public key is: npub1njffg3wfzusnqakhw90z7l5zg5pk2vjxhm2kwdcrf2kxxh7vjxascl50mw )

Nation States: There is already evidence of American giants like Facebook and X/Twitter, colluding with the FBI and other federal entities by ‘de-platforming’ users and reducing the visibility of certain topics via their algorithms. But it can get much worse. In China giant social media platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and QQ are overtly censored by the state to a degree that most people in the West can not imagine. For example, it is not possible to enter and send the date April 15, 1989, in a chat window on any of these systems — because that is the date of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Likewise, thousands of keywords, slang terms, and abbreviations for criticism of politicians and policies are captured and deleted before they are transmitted to others. No doubt the software keeps a log of who made the attempt. In the near future — in any country — it could become illegal to even attempt free speech that does not support the ruling regime. And thanks to mandatory digital ID’s and Artificial Intelligence it will be possible to identify and locate dissidents at machine speed. These technologies permit nation states to immediately engage in thwarting all free speech.

Artificial Intelligence

Free People: The promise of A.I. is unfolding before our eyes. In the hands of free people, with no malign intent to control or exploit others, the applications of this capability seem endless. A.I. is already combing through all medical literature and studies to find connections that humans might have missed and make suggestions for new therapies and medications. It’s being used to improve the efficiency of clinical trials and reverse so-called “Eroom’s Law” by reducing the soaring costs imposed by regulators. As for mental health, perhaps soon a young adult struggling through a difficult stage with personal issues will communicate with an A.I. counselor that has the equivalent knowledge of the most experienced child psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians and has PhD’s in anthropology and sociology for good measure. That A.I. could have millions of “patients” simultaneously and at virtually no cost to them or their parents. It’s impossible to calculate the compounding benefits of helping people be happy and productive and to avoid the pathologies often caused by untreated mental health issues early in life. The positive impact of A.I. in the hands of free people is difficult to fathom.

Nation States: Even in these early days of A.I. we can see the apparatchiks of nation states exploiting it to pilot military tanks, aircraft and other weapons of warfare against ordinary people. China and the US are developing new robot soldiers who never sleep, can’t be reasoned with, and have no remorse. In China A.I. is surveilling the entire population through millions of cameras and billions of mobile phones. Every form of digital communication is sifted for unapproved content and mathematically examined for the social and familial connections between the people who dare speak ill of the regime. Citizens who are even in the vicinity of a protest get a knock on their door a few days later. Once the police are robots this will be even more efficient and certainly more menacing. In time, any nation state could use its own black sites, Abu Ghraib, Belmarsh, or Guantanamo to punish the slightest dissent. Perhaps A.I. will research a prisoner’s entire life to determine a his “worst fear” and then recreate George Orwell’s Room 101 to employ that very torture, no doubt performed by a robot engineered to maximize the effects. You might think I’m being overly dramatic, but I would invite you to visit Auschwitz, as I have, and spend some time in Block 11. As horrific as that was 80 years ago, today’s government employees have much better tools/weapons for intimidation and torture. The negative impact of A.I. in the hands of nation states is difficult to fathom.

The Takeaway

Every technology can be a tool or a weapon. Our newest technologies can be used to build a global society of free people and to ensure that society is peaceful and durable. It can help unlock the full potential of human creativity, happiness, prosperity and the longevity of our species. In can aid in a bloodless, peaceful revolution propelled by human intellect, civility, and the natural connections between everyone seeking the betterment of their own lives.

Unfortunately, the same technologies are already being deployed by nation states to surveil, control, suppress, and frankly, enslave their populations. Combined with robotic warfare, these efforts are on their way to creating dozens of turn-key authoritarian states like the world has never seen before. These sinister and terrifying capabilities will be inherited by whoever are the most ruthless and determined power-hungry politicians of the future. Imagine your own country, five presidents or prime ministers from now, and how readily these new weapons could turn your nation into a functional gulag where people’s only value is to generate maximum tax revenues, and all dissent is instantly detected and tortured into oblivion and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

The 20th century showed us the conflicts between malign nation states can cost hundreds of millions of lives. The greatest race of the 21st century is between free people employing our newest technologies to build and maintain systems of sovereignty and dignity for individuals, and a peaceful, voluntary, cooperative society — against the faceless servants and collaborators of the nation states who are working every day to use the same technologies to irrevocably destroy all of our avenues to freedom.

It is both essential and imperative that mechanisms that enable freedom be engineered and become operational before the nation states complete their work to entrap and enslave billions of people, as they very clearly are on the path to do. Their future will lead to massive bloodshed, innumerable millions of lives lost, and more human misery than even the 20th century.

If you re-read this article skipping each section about nation states you can visualize a wonderful future. If you read only the nation state sections you can see what is being built right now and all but the willfully blind can surmise what it will too soon become.

Some people look at a hammer and sickle and see tools to manufacture products and harvest more food. Some see weapons to control and kill people and to confiscate their life’s work.

For the love of humanity, please choose to actively support the better side.

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