We have convinced ourselves that simulation has exhausted the middle of everything— war, technology, politics, the economy— and that the only serious move left is the last one. Simulation has not exhausted the middle. It has exhausted our patience for it. The middle is still where the complications live, where the position is ambiguous and the... See more

The opening Eisenhower spent years agonizing over could have been modeled by anyone with a map and a calendar and enough compute. Simulation compresses whatever it can reach. Human effort migrates to whatever it can't. This is how it has always worked. It will be more true after AGI than before. That is more phases of more games compressed into... See more

Across every domain we have stopped playing openings. We have stopped playing middlegames. The instinct everywhere is to skip directly to the endgame. To reason backward from the terminal state and treat everything between here and there as something to recite and move on.

Consider modern war. A century ago, wars were fought with openings. The first... See more

In Yemen we bomb buildings that are already rubble. In Iran we pretend to destroy Fordow and the Iranians pretend to believe us, then hit Al Udeid and we pretend not to notice. In Venezuela we spend months blowing up boats in the Caribbean and stage the abduction of a man while his government stays intact. These are wars not being fought, but... See more