I’ve been thinking about several things that are difficult to categorize, so I’ll write about all of them at once.
Why smart people make mistakes, for instance people predicting collapse of the global Dollar-based economy for years already, and evidence appears to contradict their predictions. It’s quite simple, really. They understand the deep underlying reality of the situation, but they underestimate the significance of other factors, such as meddling and interventions of very powerful players who desperately try to at least postpone the breakdown, if not completely alter its form. It’s only logical, if you assume the prediction is correct. It then also follows that the people in power will see what’s going on, and they are not going to take it sitting down. They are smart, and they have huge means at their disposal, and they have absolutely nothing to lose. They will print tens of trillions of fake digital dollars that will buy out the dollar bonds and then annihilate both. They will print a hundred paper-gold bonds for each gold bar, and sell them quickly to induce panic, and then when people start selling the actual physical gold, buy it with the fake Dollars they printed out of thin air, and then justify the printing of those Dollars with the newly acquired gold backing. Print trillions of dollars but suppress the price of dollar-backed oil, among other things by faking the existence of supposedly huge shale-oil supplies which are in fact thin air. Cripple the rest of the world with artificial roadblocks infiltrated into the payment system so that everybody else is fighting an uphill battle compared with the American companies. Print huge amounts of fake money and infuse them into your own technological companies to give you the upper hand. Print huge amounts of fake money and invest them into equally fake companies just to get them an IPO and bloat the GDP, retroactively justifying the printed amount with GDP numbers. Emit huge amounts of cheap credit into the economy to keep it on life support, while making the rest of the world pay for it, and if someone objects, threaten them with sanctions and war.
Most smart economists understand that the foundations of the Dollar and the American economy itself are untenable, and yet they fail to understand the lengths to which the players who created this system will go to defend it. Also, they see that the collapse will be a great disaster, yet they fail to actually use this as a premise and think from the position of the people in power who see the same thing, but also have the mechanisms at their disposals to do the otherwise unthinkable things – create a war that will hide and transform the collapse, from the “emperor is naked” testimony of fraud and theft that is the basis of the modern America, into a completely different narrative, that of “evil enemies of democracy” who attack and subvert America at every angle, to the point where they caused the great economic collapse itself, at which point America had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons, but alas, it incurred heavy casualties, and all this chaos and destruction is actually someone else’s fault.
I actually think everybody was right – the people who see the geostrategic situation and understand that it is precursory to nuclear war, the people who see the foundations of the Dollar economy and understand that it is untenable and collapse of the debt economy is inevitable, the people who sense unclear doom and prepare, the people who fear the technocratic surveillance state, the people who fear the collapse of the Western civilization and its moral and intellectual foundations. They are all right, and it’s all happening on the same vector. It’s just that they underestimate the people who are actually guiding the process.
They are not stupid, and regardless of what they are telling you, they themselves understand perfectly well what’s going on, they have excellent analysts, military strategists and economists at their disposal and when they make and implement plans, they are incredibly more far-reaching and layered than most people are willing to accept. Imagine what would be going on if I was in charge of this thing, and if I had the wealth and power of America at my disposal to implement everything. I would be playing at 20 chessboards at once, with hundreds of people as smart as myself delegated to specific tasks. If you think you would be able to see what I’m doing from the outside, or predict events based on some part of the pattern you’re perceiving, then you’re naïve beyond belief. I would cook up specific points of chaos in order to divert attention of all other players, play feints and counter-feints intended for obscuring the sight of their analysts, introduce dozens of legitimate issues they can’t ignore while not being sure which one is the real attack-vector, and I would have a perfectly calm mind while stirring up the fogs of war that increase other players’ emotional potential, making their thinking slower and more inert, more prone to distraction.
That’s why smart people make mistakes. They don’t understand the power and ferocity of the guiding intelligence of the enemy. Sure, it’s easy to say it’s naïve to perceive the economy in the state of deep manipulation for decades and pretend there’s nobody at the wheel, that it’s just instinctual trading, reflex of self-preservation of the bankers, greed and power, but it’s actually emotionally preferable to the recognition that it’s all the result of people smarter than yourself at the wheel, with all the power in the world at their disposal, and that most of the events that seem unrelated are actually intelligent moves, most likely aided by artificial intelligence which simulates moves and their likely effects for the players, so that they can pick the best strategy against the simulated rational self-serving opposition.
If you gave me a trillion dollars, that’s what I would do – have the game-theory experts design and supervise the acres of supercomputing technology running AI software, and have it running a very detailed simulation of the real world, displaying the probable responses of all the world powers, set up the scenario very similar to the actual state, and then run millions of various scenarios, until you map out those with the highest probability of you ending up on top. If you think they are simulating the climate, and not simulating this, with all the computer game technology being there for decades, where you can run a combination of Civilization, Sim City and Starcraft on computers the size of a smaller city, running tens of thousands of teraflops-level computation units in parallel, well, let’s say I’m not betting high by predicting this. The thing is, human emotional responses are easy to predict, and it gets easier the bigger the group, so it actually gets easier when you’re trying to work on a nation-level. You give the computer the option to tweak variables, and it will end up with something that will look very weird, disconnected, not at all like figures on the same chess board, the way computers come up with weird optical designs when you apply them to making lenses. However, when you actually grind that weirdly looking piece of glass into the aspheric shape recommended by the computer, you see that it actually works.
That’s my problem with the AI. The computers themselves are incredibly stupid, and are no danger. However, when you take those computers, with their enormous quantitative power of simulating trillions of outcomes and pruning the tree of options until you get something that’s useful, and give them to extremely smart people, who work for extremely evil people, you end up with a nightmare of incredible proportions.