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The strategy you describe, exporting paper currency in exchange for tangible goods is unstable. It is only viable if other countries are willing to accept your currency for goods. This cannot last forever since a Trade Surplus by your definition scams other countries, with real wealth exchanged for worthless paper. If Country A openly enacted this strategy Countries B, C, D, etcetera would realize that Country A's currency can no longer be used to buy valuable goods and services from Country A. Countries B, C, D, etcetera would reroute trade amongst themselves, ridding themselves of the parasite Country A. Once this occurs, Country A's trade surplus would disappear, leading to severe inflation caused by shortages and money printing.
Hence, a Trade Surplus can only be maintained if Country B, C, D, etcetera are coerced into using Country A's currency. If Country B and C decided to stop using Country A's currency, Country A would respond by bombing them to pieces and removing the leadership of Country B and C. Coercion allows Country A to maintain a Trade Surplus, otherwise known as extracting tribute, from other nations. If Country A does not have a dominant or seemingly dominant military, the modified strategy collapses.
I do not think America has a military capable of openly extracting a Trade Surplus from other countries. While America has the largest military on Earth, it is unable to quickly produce new warships, secure the Red Sea from Houthi attacks or produce enough artillery shells to adequately supply Ukraine. America's inability to increase weapons production and secure military objectives now indicates that America cannot ramp up military production enough to fight another world war. If America openly decided to extract a Trade Surplus from other countries, a violent conflict would inevitably result. America is unlikely to win this conflict, so it should not continue to maintain a Trade Surplus.
Quick! Someone fund my steel production startup before its too late! My business model is to place a steel foundry under your house to collect the exponentially growing amount of cars crashing into it!
Imagine how much money we can make by revolutionizing metal production during the car crash singularity! Think of the money! Think of the Money! Think of the Money!!!
Good point. I am inherently drawn to the idea of increasing brain size because I favor extremely simple solutions whenever possible. However, a more focused push towards increasing intelligence will produce better results as long as the metric used for measuring intelligence is reliable.
I still think that increasing brain size will take a long time to reach diminishing returns due to its simplicity. Keeping all other properties of a brain equal, a larger brain should be more intelligent.
There is also one other wildly illegal approach which may be viable if you focus on increasing brain size. You might be able to turn a person, perhaps even yourself, into a biological superintelligence. By removing much of a person's skull and immersing the exposed brain in synthetic cerebrospinal fluid, it would be possible to restart brain growth in an adult. You could theoretically increase a person's brain size up to the point where it becomes difficult to sustain via biological or artificial means. With their physical abilities crippled, the victim must be connected to robot bodies and sense organs to interact with the world. I don't recommend this approach and would only subject myself to it if humanity is in a dire situation and I have no other way of gaining the power necessary to extract humanity from it.
Thank you for writing this article! It was extremely informative and I am very pleased to learn about super-SOX. I have been looking for a process which can turn somatic cells into embryonic stem cells due to unusual personal reasons, so by uncovering this technology you have done me a great service. Additionally, I agree that pursing biological superintelligence is a better strategy than pursuing artificial superintelligence. People inherit some of their moral values from their parents, so a superintelligent human has a reasonable probability of being a good person as long as their parents are. Unfortunately, due to selection effects this is not a given.
Have you read the research of Suzana Herculano-Houzel, particularly her paper The Human Brain In Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-Up Primate Brain? This research argues that humans are intelligent for two reasons.
- The primate brain is the only mammalian brain which maintains a nearly constant neuron density as the brain's size increases. For comparison, the neuron density of rodents decreases as brain size increases.
- A 10 fold increase in the number of primate neurons requires a 11 fold increase in brain volume.
- A 10 fold increase in the number of rodent neurons requires a 35 fold increase in brain volume.
- Humans have the largest primate brain.
I bring this up because I agree with the conclusions presented in Suzana's work, with brain size being directly related to intelligence. I think it is better to select for a trait directly related to intelligence, brain size, than for a trait indirectly related to intelligence, such as IQ.