this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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Whats the alternative, let China and Russia build up the technology and we stay in the past?
The US has the largest military because its the reserve currency, they print money and export their inflation and they spend that money on military expenditures, which prevents people from moving off USD.
This then lets them sanction other countries and control the worlds shipping lanes, so asking them to stop developing their military is asking for the existing global order to cease to exist, and then you're at the whims of whatever power fills that void.
The alternative is a global end to anti-human technology.
This is completely unfeasible. Convincing a bunch of people won't cut it. For this to work, you'd need to rule the whole world with an iron fist, and then there'd still be secret resistance research labs everywhere.
Ruling with an iron fist tends to create resistance and without mass surveillance technology an unpopular regime couldn't keep everyone in line. But if instead most people are in agreement about something being bad (like they are with slavery or pedophilia) then there is much less resistance to enforcement against it (whether that's centralized or decentralized enforcement) and therefore that thing is more effectively stopped.
While lone individuals or small secretive groups could continue doing the bad practice, in terms of technology I don't think this will matter much because they won't be able to develop a lot of technology with only a small group of people who aren't building on other people's work and their technology also wouldn't be adopted by a society that is against it.
So you require that people just boycott countries like China, stop buying their trinkets and they'll stop creating doomsday weapons?
No. I'm not convinced China is worse than the US in terms of developing anti-human technologies and people living in China can't boycott China. The point is to get the people in every significant country (including China) to oppose these technologies so strongly that they aren't able to be developed anywhere. The Chinese military has to employ Chinese people to make its weapons, but if 80% of the population is opposed to these weapons existing and even the foundation of modern technology on which they are built then that is going to be difficult. Even if they were able to only employ those who are fine with WMDs the public's opposition to modern technology would be a problem for the government maintaining control while developing those weapons and forcing modern technology on the people as a means of controlling them.