AI TRIBES Can I give another view that is neither zero nor infinity for AI? Thesis: AI boosts productivity within the trusted tribe, but reduces economic trust between tribes. So: within a tribe, you can share context, search across your archives, and be more digitally autarkic than you ever were before. In the fullness of time, you can also script robots to build for you in the physical world. However, between tribes, we’ll see an onslaught of AI spam and scams. From AI sales and marketing calls, to AI slop websites, to fake AI resumes. (There are crypto countermeasures for this, but even those reduce to web3 of trust. That is, you have to trust the person who’s cryptographically asserting to you that a particular AI photo is real.) In short, AI may radically increase productivity within tribes but also radically reduce trust between tribes. Costs for verification, proctoring, and vetting are soaring. AI may therefore break almost as many markets as it enables. China may be the major exception to this rule, as it can simply centrally curate the Chinese Internet to disallow AI fakery. As a consequence, it could have the largest scaled cooperative tribe on earth in the digital age. The Democrats can’t do that as they hate AI, and the Republicans can’t do that as they hate the idea of Chinese-style digital borders. Moreover, the Democrats and Republicans are also fighting each other. So there likely isn’t a large “American” trusted tribe in the AI age. The country is not even a functional economic zone, to paraphrase the meme. However, by the same logic, AI does make small aligned tribes far more productive than ever before. And a highly aligned startup tribe might be far more productive than a much larger, internally disaligned legacy state. So: the future could look like a thousand Estonias and China. A thousand million-person network states, and one billion-person superstate. Neither zero nor infinity, but one thousand and one.(Balaji)