Ask A Genius 1322: U.S.–China Conflict, Cyber War, and the Rise of AI Power
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/25
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think the U.S. will be at war with China? I do not mean economic war. Economic tariffs can be considered an act of war in certain contexts. So these actions—not only highly provocative and destabilizing, potentially shredding decades-long alliances—could be seen as acts of war, especially by countries that are not firm allies of the United States.
Rick Rosner: At least my hopeful view is that Trump and company are doing, or will be seen as doing, so badly that they lose the momentum to escalate things further or pursue even crazier actions. That’s the optimistic take.
The pessimistic view is that Trump doesn’t care how unpopular he is and might keep doing reckless, stupid stuff anyway.
The thing that happened today that has everyone running around like a pissed-on anthill is Pete Hegseth—now the Secretary of Defense—holding a strategic meeting on attacking Yemen… on Signal. It is a secure messaging app, but it’s not meant for top-level military planning.
When you have a high-level strategy meeting, you’re supposed to do it inside a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. That’s a room within a room, designed with electromagnetic shielding, vibration isolation, and no electronic devices allowed. So, no one can spy on you, even with side-channel surveillance techniques.
They ignored all of that. They said, “Let’s just have a Zoom meeting.” And they accidentally invited a reporter from The Atlantic, who sat in on the whole thing and then wrote about it.
One of the biggest intelligence breaches of the 21st century. I don’t know how much-classified info got out, but it’s undeniably fucking stupid. Even Fox News is saying it’s a disaster.
So, we hope optimistically that Trump keeps screwing up so badly that he derails his efforts. He’s been back in the office for nine weeks now. And he already went underwater in approval ratings—in May. Then May (the polling aggregator) went out of business. ABC shut it down. So now, the most cited aggregator is RealClearPolitics, which includes more conservative pollsters.
He stayed above water on their average until last week. Now, even RealClearPolitics shows him underwater. The country has much anger; maybe that widespread pissed-offness slows him down.
But when you talk about war with China—we’ve already been in a cyber warwith China for decades. They try to hack us. We try to hack them. Thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of times a day. That’s been going on for years.
So sure, we can be optimistic that they’ll slow down with the stupid shit. But we can’t be optimistic that they’ll get smarter or be less sycophantic to Russia.
Hegseth—the same guy who held the Signal strategy meeting instead of using a SCIF—just announced that we’re shutting down cyber operations against Russia, which is fucking insane. Russia hits us electronically as often as China, maybe more.
And now we’re going to stop fighting back? That’s absurd. I would hope that some agency—some team that a moron does not run—is still quietly doing what needs to be done to defend us.
But it’s not that war will start with China. We’ve been at war—cyber and espionage—with China and Russia for a long time. With Russia, since World War II. First, the Cold War. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. And within a few years of that, we were in a cyber war with them.
I hope that our current compromised state of idiocy will make China back off and let the U.S. self-destruct. But that’s not what they did the first time Trump was president. They didn’t escalate directly. They didn’t launch overt attacks. But they did increase operations—kept spying, kept hacking. They even sent a spy into Mar-a-Lago.
Mostly, when the U.S. went isolationist, China stepped up with its initiatives—especially the Belt and Road Initiative. That’s the global infrastructure and investment strategy China’s been using to build influence across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
So, when America pulls back, China steps in. I assume they’ll keep doing that as we continue acting like dipshits.
What do you think? Do you see the world divided into American and Chinese blocs?
Jacobsen: Others talk about a multipolar world—not in the classical sense, but in a darker, more fragmented sense. You’ve got fiefdoms, fallen democracies, and ruling theocracies or autocracies. Constant small wars—localized conflicts—fighting and bargaining for scraps of territory. It’s low-grade chaos.
The old-school idea of a multipolar world was more structured. After World War II, the U.S. dominated—a unipolar moment. Then came the Cold War and the bipolar era: the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, we started to see a gradual relative decline of U.S. dominance—not because the U.S. failed, but because other nations and technologies rose in parallel—global tech diffusion kind of levels the field.
So now, as these geopolitical realignments happen—mini-empires, fiefdoms, new spheres of influence—another transformation is taking place: the rise of actors operating outside state structures. People working with AI, especially in the private sector, are quietly amassing power and strategic advantage in domains not strictly tied to national borders or military force.
Rosner: And we’re watching that power accumulate among billionaires—some of them fucking stupid, others just reckless gamblers. Take Musk. He’s lashed his empire to the U.S. government, sure. But there are plenty of other billionaires who’ve aligned themselves with Trump because, well, he’s corrupt and easy to manipulate. If you want to get things done in the U.S. under Trump, you must be on his good side.
Jacobsen: Over time, the power of traditional nation-states may shrink relative to that of other entities—corporate alliances, AI collectives, techno-oligarchs—especially those backed by strategic intelligence. That’s assuming intelligence and strategy still provide a sufficient edge.
Rosner: But here’s the thing: being smart doesn’t mean you’ll run the world. I’ve got a high IQ, too. The billionaires who have taken over large chunks of the world didn’t just strategize better—they got lucky, took huge risks, and some just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Musk is a chaotic gambler who made massive bets—and they paid off. Bezos? He started by selling books online.
Jacobsen: Now Amazon has a thousand tentacles—and based on a recent interview, he says he spends 95% of his time focused on AI.
And that makes sense. AI is a horizontal enhancement layer. Bezos discusses integrating AI across all services to boost productivity, quality, aesthetics, and everything. Whether it’s narrow AI or a more generalized system, the idea is to lay this intelligence layer across existing verticals and all rise.
Rosner: It’s like raising the floor. But it raises an interesting question: are morefloors to be added? If AI achieves superintelligence, will it find new ways to outcompete regular intelligence?
Jacobsen: Right. There’s a limit to how fast you can do a Super Mario speed run. At some point, physics and code optimization hit a ceiling. But even then, if you reduce the complexity of the code or enhance its efficiency, you’re doing more with less. That’s like putting heels on your shoes—the floor rises under you, and everything you build from there gets lifted.
So yes, your point is well taken—but the floor metaphor shouldn’t be taken too literally. AI isn’t just speeding things up—it’s altering the structure. Reducing friction and improving systems. So even if we’re not adding entirely new floors, we’re reinforcing and elevating the one we’re standing on.
So, there are many ways we’re not even thinking about “the floor” properly. He’s missing a broader framework when he talks about it simplistically as a horizontal enhancement layer. There’s a more expansive way to conceptualize it than he’s realizing.
Rosner: Yeah. Anyway—fuck.
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