Always have an army

Oh, what a relief, everything will be fine!

That might be how you feel seeing the overnight trading in the US this morning.

Yesterday I opined that in terms of long-term investment trends, much of the AI-bond-rates wrangling is about as pure a smokescreen as you can get.

And I mentioned how China was manoeuvring on rare earths.

So today I’m going to tell you how deadly serious this theme is.

And it’s not going to be a pretty picture of the future.

But it’s investable, and that’s what matters.

The good, the bad and the reality

The good: there’s still time.

The bad: there isn’t much time.

The reality: our robot future is upon us.

No brakes, no off-ramp, no going back.

Survivalists and hermits are so kitsch.

Speaking of…

Ever heard of Private Teruo Nakamura, who emerged from the Indonesian jungle in 1974 thinking WW2 was still on?

We don’t have the same option as Nakamura in this tech world.

Luddites tried to resist technological change.

But this time, the Luddites don’t stand a chance – they never did, they never will.

So here’s the reality.

Thomas Hobbes, the 17^th century political philosopher is where we start.

Hobbe’s ideal ruler is seen below, a supreme monarch wielding a sword:

Source: Wikipedia

Hobbes’ most famous work, Leviathan sees him note “covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

Gotta have a sword, remember?

Fast forward to the 20^th century, Max Weber said pretty much the same thing:

“a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

How you define legitimacy is a tricky one, but between Hobbes and Weber we have the foundation of what makes a state powerful.

Either in the 17^th century, the 20^th century or now.

And it’s force, in particular, violence.

So who’s got the army?

There’s a lot of talk in the mainstream media about digital security, the potential for a massive AI-driven cyberattack.

OpenAI’s bot army attacked Hugging Face, and Nvidia bought it promptly.

Oh look, something’s been swept under the rug!

Never mind. Next!

Anthropic Claude, Google’s Gemini, the attack on the Iranian school.

It’s happened with all of them.

Bot armies for everyone!

Things are clearly getting real freaky, freaky.

And some might think:

“Oh Trump and Xi are about to hang out this week, let’s make sure this is all safe and cool, right?”

It’s going to be so much worse than you think

Forget digital security.

(Even though that could be a likely trigger for the next major sell-off in markets.)

No, ultimately this is about physical security.

“This”. Is. AI.

And that ultimately boils down to the ability to inflict violence and ensure continuity of power.

That’s the bloody ugly truth of all this.

I studied arms deals at the London School of Economics (LSE) — my thesis work showed me that the world’s not pretty or evenly shaped.

And the best we can hope for in a violent world is for a bit of transparency around the machinations.

So the current market madness around the trifecta of AI-bond-rates is just a smokescreen that offers none of that transparency.

You’ll always get full transparency from me about what this boils down to.

Which is…

Physical security ensured by physical robots.

Elon is building a robot army

It’s a scary world, and I’ve sugar-coated absolutely nothing today.

Call it Hobbesian techno-realpolitik if you’re highbrow, call it a “robot army” if you’re trying to get your point across in a Tesla earnings call:

Source: Wired

Now of course…

I’d prefer we live in a utopia that doesn’t need 10 million Optimus robots a year to ensure my physical safety and wellbeing.

But at least Elon would likely stand up for my ability to run my mouth about politics in public!

So again, the reality is both harsh, confronting and clear…

You don’t have to like the future, you just need be better off in it.

Maybe it’s not uplifting in the traditional sense, but I reckon this is the nature of investing in 2026.

And in 2027? Elon’s robot army could go into full production:

Watch Elon’s Final Moonshot, free here