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Comment by altmanaltman | Hacker News Reader

How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.

And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.

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The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.

Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.

Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.

To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.

So, 3-10 million people or so for US.

Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.

It would also end the AI. Not to say it couldn’t happen though, if it thought an apocalypse could somehow instrumentally help it fill its monthly paperclip quota.

A war wont happen because Americans are too lazy. Just look how the cities are built, the vast majority simply refuses to walk. To control the population one only has to deny them fuel, and everything else freezes. In older times, everyone was a really hard worker, look at the American civil war, millions in both armies walked thousands of kms. Theres no way a fraction of Americans could or would do that.

"simply refuses to" is an odd way to spell "gets arrested if they"

Im sorry are you trying to tell me, that Americans get arrested if they walk down the road to buy an ice cream or coke ?

Chaotic coincidences,

because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.

Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.

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