The world is not all the same, for one thing. China is doing overall great, as far as I can tell. In contrast, I would not put it past the US going mad max, but it would probably balkanize before then, so the conditions would vary from state to state. As for nukes, the wealthy share a trait with the poor, in that they would prefer not to die and nukes can’t tell what class a person is. Short of a headline that says hundreds of the world’s billionaires have gone into hiding in bunkers, I would not expect nuclear war to be likely. It’s that kind of thing that nobody really wants, but some people who are aggressive enough saber rattle about. Especially now with how interconnected trade and supply are and so on, nuclear war would likely result in mass famines immediately following the destruction and what rubble are the capitalists and imperialists of the world going to rule over then? If they themselves can even survive it.
The form of barbarism that scares me a bit is targeted stuff, using automation. But even that is probably more letting imagination run amok than meaningful material differences compared to past state violence. They didn’t need AI to assassinate Fred Hampton, for example. And the “getting away with it” part in technological advances largely seems to come from the difference in advancement (one state that is way more developed technologically than another) as opposed to something inherent about having the tech. Or in other words, though some tech is far more destructive than in the past, stronger deterrents also get developed, even if it’s not always equal overall, or from one power to another. Sometimes the deterrents are not machines, but in other forms, like the economic interconnection that helps deter global scale hot war.
This is only a small summarized view of it, but the underlying idea is to look at the conditions and motives involved, not just what the worse case scenario looks like as imagined.
The world is not all the same, for one thing. China is doing overall great, as far as I can tell. In contrast, I would not put it past the US going mad max, but it would probably balkanize before then, so the conditions would vary from state to state. As for nukes, the wealthy share a trait with the poor, in that they would prefer not to die and nukes can’t tell what class a person is. Short of a headline that says hundreds of the world’s billionaires have gone into hiding in bunkers, I would not expect nuclear war to be likely. It’s that kind of thing that nobody really wants, but some people who are aggressive enough saber rattle about. Especially now with how interconnected trade and supply are and so on, nuclear war would likely result in mass famines immediately following the destruction and what rubble are the capitalists and imperialists of the world going to rule over then? If they themselves can even survive it.
The form of barbarism that scares me a bit is targeted stuff, using automation. But even that is probably more letting imagination run amok than meaningful material differences compared to past state violence. They didn’t need AI to assassinate Fred Hampton, for example. And the “getting away with it” part in technological advances largely seems to come from the difference in advancement (one state that is way more developed technologically than another) as opposed to something inherent about having the tech. Or in other words, though some tech is far more destructive than in the past, stronger deterrents also get developed, even if it’s not always equal overall, or from one power to another. Sometimes the deterrents are not machines, but in other forms, like the economic interconnection that helps deter global scale hot war.
This is only a small summarized view of it, but the underlying idea is to look at the conditions and motives involved, not just what the worse case scenario looks like as imagined.