>Who controls the AI controls the world.

Is this any different than the previous tech booms (or any industrial revolution for that matter). The US developed and exported almost all of the consumer (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and infrastructural software (IP, Verisign, Linux).

The US domination through software is so normalized that the limit of these imports by highly sovereign countries are seen as dangerous or in violation of human rights in the 'western' internet.(China,Russia)

Hard to see how AI will be massively different than the history of Software in general in terms of geopolitical power.

The US exported Linux? Linus Torvalds is Finnish and made it in Finland though?

Same fallacy as with python and guido van

Linus Moved to the US in 2004 and became a citizen with his family later.

The linux foundation is a california nfp.

I mean, kinda, in that today's tech leaders consider themselves god-kings, and not, like... people who sell word processing CDs at Circuit City.

And that of course is a reason to repost this wonderful exchange in "A Clash of Kings":

> In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?

> "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.

> "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel."

> "That piece of steel is the power of life and death."

> "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?"

> "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords."

> "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?" Varys smiled.

EDIT: Seeing no reactions yet, I just wanted to explain that the way I see this coming battle on controlling the AI that controls the world is that we have the governments, the billionaires and the ethicists saying what should be done, and us software professionals as the sellswords with our fingers on the literal trigger.

That analogy rests on some precarious assumptions, like:

1. That the "AI" being bandied about (read: LLMs) really is able to "kill" the other blocs.

2. That such an action will be safe from retaliation.

3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.

> 3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.

Either you misunderstand the quote, or you haven't read the book or watched the series.

George Martin's central motif of what power really is doesn't have a definite answer, several characters propose different theories, in this case Varys poses more of a question than an answer.

You might say that the AI holds the power, you might say the Engineers hold the power, you might say the congressmen that regulate it hold the power, you might say the citizens who vote the congressmen have the power, you might say the president by control of the military holds the power, the users, god, chance, the smart, the capitalists, the shareholders, etc...

I slogged through the ~4,000+ pages of the 5 books--not that I consider myself a fan at this late date--and the subtext of my post was: "I don't think that thought-experiment maps usefully to anything around us right now, it barely did for the characters in a medieval fantasy."

All models are wrong, some are useful, I don't think this one is that useful, unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere.

" unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere."

But the model is that no one person holds all of the power? That power is many things at once and held by many people? Both in the book and in reality, matches to me.