edit: When I wrote the below last night, my phrase “invading Venezuela” was a guess. Today it’s a fact. Speed is real. Speed kills. We need to catch up if we’re going to slow things down.

What if electricity had been invented by the Nazis at the start of World War II?

The freedom loving Yanks, running on oil and gas, wouldn’t have stood a chance against the electro-Nazis and their next level superiority in logistics, communications, night missions and raw industrial output.

The speed of electricity, its ease of movement, its efficient power, is on a whole other level.

That’s how I feel about the AI we call LLMs. It’s software on a whole other level.

Whether that paradigm shift is as significant as electrification is probably too soon to tell.

But I have been using consumer level LLMs for about 18 months now on a daily basis, sometimes for hours a day, on a fairly wide variety of projects, from writing code to research to learning software to making music, from graphics to data analysis. And I am convinced it is on another level.

While not every part of our world is software, software can drive every part of our world. (For better or worse.) If electricity now drives almost every part of our world, what’s to say that a software that essentially optimizes the efficacy of all systems isn’t as important as electricity once was?

Who would the electro-nazis be today?

Who is talking about eliminating 100 million Americans? Or invading Venezuela?

In our reality, the revanchist, eliminationist, racist, crypto-populist movement that has captured many of the levers of state power is MAGA.

Power flows.

There is no acceptable future without electricity. It should be solar and wind and nuclear.

Similarly, there is no (medium-term) future without AI.

It should be peaceful and just and democratic.

The only way to achieve that goal is to make it Democratic in the short term, at least.

Aversions to AI now are understandable but they are not defensible. Find your way to an ethical model or all such ways will be blocked.

back on Earth 1

This video is a key for unlocking American political culture circa 2026:

The right has to engage with insane people to eke out their wins. The left does not.

That doesn’t change the balance of power or who has the oligarchs on their side (see above comic book cover). But it’s comforting in its own small way.

Back on Earth 2, where we currently live, the USA has been taken over by a criminal gang. There’s no other way to describe the situation given Jack Smith’s testimony, also put out by the US government, this December 31, 2025.

To survive the present crisis with dignity and liberty requires both caution (i.e., ignoring “ragebait”) and courage: advancing truly democratic economic and cultural policies, at the direct expense of entrenched power.