Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

FullMoon wrote: ↑

Tue May 06, 2025 11:57 am

Navigator, in your book you outlined post-war chaos and eventual collapse into a second and worse war. Do you still follow this scenario? Wouldn't this make any 'victory' essentially a pyrrhic victory?

Navigator wrote: ↑

Tue May 06, 2025 12:48 am

spottybrowncow wrote: ↑

Fri May 02, 2025 8:31 pm

I would like to encourage all GD readers to to read this:

https://now.tufts.edu/2019/11/21/why-un ... superpower

It is somewhat dated (2019), but I think still highly relevant. In a time of increasing pessimism and doomsaying, it offered me an engagingly different perspective - maybe right, maybe wrong, but engaging, nonetheless. I look forward to others' feedback.

Spotty

In the end, the strengths quoted will eventually allow the US to prevail, but I believe there will be a lot of short term pain.

Luckily, Trumps China tariffs have completely disrupted the Chinese timeline for world domination. The unrest that will force them to act much sooner than anticipated is at hand, due to massive closures of export related factories.

force them to act much sooner than anticipated is at hand

Regular China-watchers know very well that when it comes to local "data" reporting, China's fabrication and goalseeking skills are second to none, and even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a rank amateur compared to Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics, which tramples over actual econometric reporting with the glee of a bull in a, well, China shop. It's why nobody actually believes any of the propaganda released by Beijing, and instead independent, private (and very expensive) third-party services for data collection and analysis are used to measure accurately the current state of China's economy.

So imagine how bad it must be when instead of simply making stuff up, China decides that the easier approach is simply to no longer report the fake data. The best example is surely the data on Chinese youth unemployment which hit a record 22% in the summer of 2023... at which China decided to simply stop reporting it altogether.

In the wake of the unprecedented Sunday direct hit on Israel's Ben Gurion international airport by a ballistic missile launched by the Houthis of Yemen, Israeli leadership has vowed to hit back hard. "The attack on Ben Gurion Airport has removed all restrictions from our perspective," Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has stated. He emphasized, "Whoever harms us will be harmed sevenfold" - amid an emergency meeting of Israel's security cabinet. Al Jazeera and regional media say that response has come on Monday. There are reports that 30 Israeli jets are bombing Yemen's main port, along with US military assistance:

Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem has reported that Houthi-affiliated media has said a total of nine sites have been hit in Hodeidah.

Israeli media has reported both at least 30 Israeli fighter jets were involved in strikes on Yemen, which come a day after the Houthis attacked the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, with a missile landing near the facility.

A senior US official has said the raids were being carried out in coordination with the US. Al Jazeera could not immediately confirm that information

Generational Dynamics predicts something quite different for the Mideast. (01-May-03)

The Mideast is currently replaying the Jewish / Palestinian wars of 1936 to 1949. Why? Because the generation of people who fought in those wars have been retiring or dying.

Unfortunately, the fault lines in the Mideast have never been resolved, and Generational Dynamics predicts that they can be resolved only by another crisis war. In fact, recent polling has shown the rise of a new "Young Guard" generation of militant Palestinians that will accept nothing less than the elimination of Israel.

The last crisis war in the Mideast occurred from 1936 to 1949. That war was indirectly caused by Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. Because of Nazi persecution, European Jews flooded into Palestine in the 1930s. Hostilities between the Palestinians and the Jews began in 1936, and reached a climax in a major war in 1948-49 following the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. The partitioning of Palestine has never been accepted by the Palestinians.

Throughout history, one can point to probably thousands of similar situations, where an artificial boundary is imposed between two peoples, and one or both sides oppose the boundary. Of those thousands of examples, you will probably find few or none that are resolved peacefully.

Generational Dynamics predicts that in such fault line situations, a new crisis war begins when the generation of kids that grew up during the last crisis war all retire or die, at approximately the same time. Growing up during a violent, bloody war turns them into risk-averse adults who guide society throughout their lifetimes, always looking for ways to compromise and contain problems. When they all retire or die, the society loses their collective wisdom, as the generation that grew up after the last crisis war takes charge of society. In the Mideast situation, this is happening today among both the Palestinians and the Israelis.

We are now in the early stages of replaying the extremely violent, bloody wars between the Jews and the Palestinians that took place between them from 1936 to 1949. So far the war has been little more than a series of skirmishes, as it was in the late 1930s. The full-fledged violent, bloody war is awaiting a generational change.

There's an incredible irony going on in the Mideast today, in that the leaders of two opposing sides are, respectively, Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat.

These two men hate each other, but they're the ones cooperating with each other (consciously or not) to prevent a major Mideast conflagration. Both of them remember the wars of the 1940s, and neither of them wants to see anything like that happen again. And it won't happen again, as long as both of these men are in charge.

The disappearance of these two men will be part of an overall generational change in the Mideast that will lead to a major conflagration within a few years. It's possible that the disappearance of Arafat alone will trigger a war, just as the election of Lincoln ignited the American Civil War. (It's currently American policy to get rid of Arafat. My response is this: Be careful what you wish for.)

Generational Dynamics predicts that a major new violent, bloody Mideast war must occur, sometime in the next ten years, depending upon when the generational change takes place. There are signs that the generational change is occurring now, and this means that the next bloody, violent Mideast crisis war will take place within 3 or 4 years. There is no "Mideast Peace Roadmap" that has any chance of stopping that.

spottybrowncow wrote: ↑

Fri May 02, 2025 8:31 pm

I would like to encourage all GD readers to to read this:

https://now.tufts.edu/2019/11/21/why-un ... superpower

It is somewhat dated (2019), but I think still highly relevant. In a time of increasing pessimism and doomsaying, it offered me an engagingly different perspective - maybe right, maybe wrong, but engaging, nonetheless. I look forward to others' feedback.

Spotty

• Moore's law simplified is that information processing doubles every 18 months. I've heard that's slowed down a bit lately as we reach physical limits of transistor size.

• The singularity is where information processing changes completely and doubles at a much faster rate, creating a discontinuity in the processing curve

• AI is now becoming a thing, I saw a video where an expert estimated AI was doubling how smart/intelligent it is every 6 months. Not sure how that's measured or how to square that with Moore's law. If AI intelligence is the same thing as information processing, than we may be entering a knuckle of the "singularity", where the rate of change isn't a single point, but a range of time.

• AI at the moment is fast and smart at some things, but also misses some significant things. If you tried to run a company just off of just AI right now, it wouldn't work.

• However, if intelligence of AI double every 6 months, it really won't be long until AI starts being smarter than the smartest person. 5 years is 10 doublings or 1000X smarter. As an engineer, I'm frankly astounded that AI can take problems I had in classes in college and solve them in seconds - where is would take me hour(s) in a team to get the same results. Where will we be in 5 years?? Think of all the expensive occupations that are really just about transferring knowledge.. Doctors, Teachers, Engineers, Accountants, Lawyers - will we all be obsolete? (hint the occupations with the most staying power are the ones that actually physically do something, like plumbing... until robots can be built at scale cheaply)

• AI takes enormous amounts of energy - maybe it's gets more efficient as they improve software, maybe not, but there is only so much energy available and you can't build a power plant quickly. This will slow down the progress.

• AI takes lots of chips, which are mostly made in Taiwan... that could definitely end up being a problem

• Global war, along with destruction of infrastructure including power generation could definitely affect the trajectory of how fast AI is adopted, however, John also pointed out that war leads to heavy investment in leading edge technologies like AI.

• John also had a graphic on the singularity as I recall, where the first decade after it occurred would be chaotic, and then it would become a utopia.

• I think part of the human condition is to learn how to strive and work through things. It builds character, confidence and resiliency. A world where everything is easy, where a computer/AI can do everything better than a person can (so why bother trying?), is tragic. I know the things I've accomplished in life have come from determination, hard work and support from friends/family. I pause to think what I would be like if I hadn't had to work to get where I am... scary...

• Moore's law simplified is that information processing doubles every 18 months. I've heard that's slowed down a bit lately as we reach physical limits of transistor size.

• The singularity is where information processing changes completely and doubles at a much faster rate, creating a discontinuity in the processing curve

• AI is now becoming a thing, I saw a video where an expert estimated AI was doubling how smart/intelligent it is every 6 months. Not sure how that's measured or how to square that with Moore's law. If AI intelligence is the same thing as information processing, than we may be entering a knuckle of the "singularity", where the rate of change isn't a single point, but a range of time.

• AI at the moment is fast and smart at some things, but also misses some significant things. If you tried to run a company just off of just AI right now, it wouldn't work.

• However, if intelligence of AI double every 6 months, it really won't be long until AI starts being smarter than the smartest person. 5 years is 10 doublings or 1000X smarter. As an engineer, I'm frankly astounded that AI can take problems I had in classes in college and solve them in seconds - where is would take me hour(s) in a team to get the same results. Where will we be in 5 years?? Think of all the expensive occupations that are really just about transferring knowledge.. Doctors, Teachers, Engineers, Accountants, Lawyers - will we all be obsolete? (hint the occupations with the most staying power are the ones that actually physically do something, like plumbing... until robots can be built at scale cheaply)

• AI takes enormous amounts of energy - maybe it's gets more efficient as they improve software, maybe not, but there is only so much energy available and you can't build a power plant quickly. This will slow down the progress.

• AI takes lots of chips, which are mostly made in Taiwan... that could definitely end up being a problem

• Global war, along with destruction of infrastructure including power generation could definitely affect the trajectory of how fast AI is adopted, however, John also pointed out that war leads to heavy investment in leading edge technologies like AI.

• John also had a graphic on the singularity as I recall, where the first decade after it occurred would be chaotic, and then it would become a utopia.

• I think part of the human condition is to learn how to strive and work through things. It builds character, confidence and resiliency. A world where everything is easy, where a computer/AI can do everything better than a person can (so why bother trying?), is tragic. I know the things I've accomplished in life have come from determination, hard work and support from friends/family. I pause to think what I would be like if I hadn't had to work to get where I am... scary...

Bob Butler wrote: ↑

Sun May 04, 2025 12:44 pm

Yah. The greater the disaster, the greater the need for progressive change. We're getting a bunch of disaster. The rich elites having too much say in government? Too much prejudice?

Personally, I'd rather the current system had been preserved by a Kamala victory, but with Trump we are getting a true economic collapse and constitutional crisis. A real S&H crisis, missing only a crisis war thus far. Still, give him time...