🔮 Industrial war; family ties; crypto meltdown; the Black Death, sleep, Everest++ #377

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View every week to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

If you are reasonably new to this wondermissive, then a great way to get the baseline of my thesis is to buy my book Exponential (called The Exponential Age in America.) And if you prefer audiobooks, you can pick up the spoken version instead. I’m the narrator! 😄

The near future

🖥️ Industrial war
While drones and information operations feature heavily in modern war, steel, explosives and blood retain their centrality. In fact, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is chewing through materiel. “US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine” points out Alex Vershnin. This will force a re-evaluation of industrial capacities. Many Western nations (it’s not just hapless Germany) have reduced their abilities to support a modern near-peer war. And those Western …