• FermiEstimate@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    Right? Most of this stuff was already the case in 2012, so it barely even counts as a prediction.

    China’s lead in rare earth production doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere, nor does Haiti having a crisis of some sort or terrorists being called freedom fighters. And having AI do the targeting work in place of humans has been floating around as an idea since what, when The Forbin Project came out? 1970 or so?

    • vzq@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I feel bad for Haiti, they’ve been dealt a shit hand from the very beginning. But it’s been crisis after crisis since Spanish times.

      And for the tech stuff, Vannevar Bush’s 1947 Atlantic article gets you 95% of the way there.

      • FermiEstimate@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        For sure. It’s kind of fascinating, in a grim way, to contrast Haiti’s revolutionary course with the US, where basically every major power was cool with them a few years after their revolution.

        One wonders how history would be different if the nations of the world had spent centuries screwing the US with debt and propping up their worst leaders and left Haiti to do its own thing.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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          5 days ago

          The difference was that the US was a white bourgeois revolution by slavers and imperialists trying to start a new empire, seperate from their original one while Haiti was a black slave revolution against imperial powers. One of those is business as usual while the other is a fundamental threat to the status quo.

      • mnemonicmonkeys
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        5 days ago

        But it’s been crisis after crisis since Spanish times.

        I’d like to clarify that Haiti was actually a French colony. And a major contributing factor to Haiti’s ongoing problems is the fact that France convinced the other world powers at the time to demand that Haiti pay France reparations for the revolution.

        • vzq@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          The entire island of Hispaniola was Spanish until the 17th century. Shirt was pretty dire back then too.

          But yeah, the French are the major power that fucked them good until the Monroe doctrine took over.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 days ago

      If you wanted to stretch it, WWII was supposed to start with mechanical computers that made missing with a bomb impossible (the way it is with electronic systems now).

      Obviously that didn’t happen. Basically, they were really expensive, single-purpose machines and didn’t work so well actually in a moving, vibrating airplane.