[08] Arms Races

Title Card

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Editing

Transcription

Air Date

Oct 31, 2023

Script

Intro

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ZFi: GM and welcome to Moloch Traps, our new podcast here at From Aa to Zzz. I’m ZFi, this Zombie Shepherd, and we’re excited to be bringing you this new show in collaboration with BanklessDAO and its Audio/Visual team. To be clear, opinions in this series expressed by either of us are our own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of BanklessDAO at large.

This week, we will continue to study and discuss excerpts from the "Meditations on Moloch" essay, written by Scott Alexander. The essay provides examples of multi-polar traps and delves into various instances from history, biology, and economics to illustrate how competition often results in collective harm.

In today’s episode we’ll discuss the concept of Arms Races. Let’s start with Alexander’s words on this dangerous example.

Segment 2 — Arms Races

ZFi:

(reading from Meditations)

8. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their budget on defense. In the absence of war – a condition which has mostly held for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure, health, education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend enough money on defense risks being invaded by a neighboring country that did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos unused.

INSERT HOWL CLIP:

(Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!)

Segment 3 — Open Discussion

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Zombie Shepherd notes:

In 2021-22 Fiscal year the US spent 877 Billion on defense and the next ten countries only spent a combined 849 billion. This is the cost of keeping the dollar as the world reserve currency and invading or persuading other sovereign nations to bend to our will. This is not the cost of defending a country no one dare attack. When we say we don’t have money to take care of our own citizens it’s because we have lined the pockets of the war machine. And these numbers are down from the previous five years with an expected continual decrease. 344.4 billion of that went to private contractors. Which means that close to 40% of our entire defense budget went from the pockets of citizens into the hands of private companies that also sell arms to our “enemies.” The US defense budget makes up 12% of federal spending and close to 50% of all discretionary spending. Oh and hear is the best part, they are also selling these weapons to federal and local police forces so they can use them on US citizens. Do you feel safe yet?

Let's make sure to discuss AI, compute, and cyber security as arms races.

Also more obvious things like bio warfare, nukes, and even the race to synthetic biology and nanotech as emerging weapons and possibly malthusian traps.

If you don't genetically alter your citizens the next country will and your citizens will be phased out of evolution just like agriculture did to nomads.

 

ZFi notes:

• the best possible outcome is that we waste more resources than everyone else
mutually assured resource destruction to avoid population and city destruction

• the worst possible outcome is that we get sick of wasting and start poppin off
almost certainly guarantees a global thermonuclear war and mutually assured destruction

• we tend to think nukes when we think arms races, but it starts at sticks, stones, and walls

• the cold war was obvious and blatant, but there are parallel races that dont get the attention

• i wonder if we could create a race toward optimization of resource allocation to ensure society is taking care of everyone in society to ideally pull everyone up
is it possible to arms race to a normalized 100 year life span standard?
is it possible to arms race to 100% literacy?
is it possible to arms race to something valuable like free energy or room temperature superconductors?
probably, but it would almost certainly end up getting used as a weapon, so its not an altruistic race - its the same old shit

Conclusion

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Zombie Shepherd: (start and then hand off as appropriate)

Summary

What would YOU do? @listener?

Outro

Zombie Shepherd:

Thanks for watching today’s episode of Moloch Traps. We hope you enjoy this series. As always, none of what we say is legal or financial advice, and we encourage listeners to do their own research in these areas before making any related decisions.

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We’ll see you next time, frens!

 

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