Reading this in 2026, the propaganda-territories section holds up unnervingly well on its core mechanic the shift from ‘promote ideas’ to ‘use audience reaction as a reward signal’ but the map of territories is drawn entirely from the perspective of places that build the models. Western Left, Western Right, CCP, Putin. There’s a fifth category the vignette doesn’t have a slot for: countries that import the entire stack and inherit its embedded censorship-and-propaganda regime without having built any of it.
I work on AI governance from one of those countries. The Christian Coalition example is actually the closest the piece gets to my reality ‘easier to use Google’s stack and accept the associated censorship than build your own’ but you frame it as a fringe opt-out. For most of the world it’s the default, not the opt-out. We don’t get a territory of our own; we get whichever territory’s stack is cheapest to deploy, with its content moderation tuned to a context that isn’t ours. A toxicity classifier trained on US English norms decides what’s sayable in a language and political context it was never calibrated for.
The part I’d flag as having aged less well is the implicit assumption that the propaganda regimes are authored by actors who want them. In import contexts, a lot of the ‘nudging’ is unowned nobody chose it for us, it just came bundled. That seems harder to regulate than deliberate propaganda, because there’s no author to point at. Curious whether your later vignettes (2027+) ever extend the territory map past the model builders or whether the import dependent world stays off-screen.
You’ll be disappointed to hear that the import dependent world mostly stays off-screen in the scenarios I’ve written so far. This is partly due to lack of knowledge on my part, but mostly due to a genuine belief that (unfortunately) the world outside the US and China is unlikely to do anything to prevent the mad race to superintelligence that’s happening first and fastest in the US, and therefore unlikely to matter. I don’t think it has to be that way, and I hope it won’t be that way, but that’s what seems most likely to me. If you want to know what I think such countries should do, well, the tl;dr is that I think they should wake up and use what remaining leverage they have to negotiate for a slower, more transparent, and more distributed form of AI development. (i.e. they should propose & push for an international agreement of some kind, to regulate AI development, and they should try to shape the agreement in ways that are favorable to them)
Reading this in 2026, the propaganda-territories section holds up unnervingly well on its core mechanic the shift from ‘promote ideas’ to ‘use audience reaction as a reward signal’ but the map of territories is drawn entirely from the perspective of places that build the models. Western Left, Western Right, CCP, Putin. There’s a fifth category the vignette doesn’t have a slot for: countries that import the entire stack and inherit its embedded censorship-and-propaganda regime without having built any of it.
I work on AI governance from one of those countries. The Christian Coalition example is actually the closest the piece gets to my reality ‘easier to use Google’s stack and accept the associated censorship than build your own’ but you frame it as a fringe opt-out. For most of the world it’s the default, not the opt-out. We don’t get a territory of our own; we get whichever territory’s stack is cheapest to deploy, with its content moderation tuned to a context that isn’t ours. A toxicity classifier trained on US English norms decides what’s sayable in a language and political context it was never calibrated for.
The part I’d flag as having aged less well is the implicit assumption that the propaganda regimes are authored by actors who want them. In import contexts, a lot of the ‘nudging’ is unowned nobody chose it for us, it just came bundled. That seems harder to regulate than deliberate propaganda, because there’s no author to point at. Curious whether your later vignettes (2027+) ever extend the territory map past the model builders or whether the import dependent world stays off-screen.
Interesting, thanks for this comment!
You’ll be disappointed to hear that the import dependent world mostly stays off-screen in the scenarios I’ve written so far. This is partly due to lack of knowledge on my part, but mostly due to a genuine belief that (unfortunately) the world outside the US and China is unlikely to do anything to prevent the mad race to superintelligence that’s happening first and fastest in the US, and therefore unlikely to matter. I don’t think it has to be that way, and I hope it won’t be that way, but that’s what seems most likely to me. If you want to know what I think such countries should do, well, the tl;dr is that I think they should wake up and use what remaining leverage they have to negotiate for a slower, more transparent, and more distributed form of AI development. (i.e. they should propose & push for an international agreement of some kind, to regulate AI development, and they should try to shape the agreement in ways that are favorable to them)