A potentially odd thought, but the power and reach of US tech oligarchs is based on US softpower – the same stuff this guy is basically saying is useless. One reason US stocks/companies get lots of investment/support is the belief that US companies have more default in-roads to all western nations – invest in a US tech co, you get access to all western markets. It’s one reason they have the market power they flex. Even Iran had reports of their cisco devices failing during recent US aggression – so even the USA’s enemies had figured US tech was ‘country neutral’, stupidly, and their obvious mistake cost them dearly. Other nation’s will see that as a learning moment.

Western nations have started pulling away from US tech / hegemony. Places like France are eye’ing Linux, the Netherlands central bank declared it reasonable to expect US tech excised from their banking ecosystem in 4 years or so, Canada’s openly declaring US ties a weakness. So investing in a company like Microsoft, may no longer translate into investing in a company with a global reach within the western world – their stock ‘should’ eventually price this in. It’s one reason the tech overlords have directed the US government to challenge any/all pushes for data sovereignty.

And as for the end of nuke dominance and rise of AI drone warfare and all that… he’s an AI hammer salesman, declaring all problems are AI nails… hes clearly biased. We’re seeing drones as a viable option currently, because people are so scared shitless of nuclear conflicts. Just because people are too scared to use the massively destructive weapons, doesn’t mean that the deterrent factor of those weapons is meaningless. It’s why few countries have directly helped ukraine in their conflict with Russia. Hell, the states and Israel are busy justifying a war to try and prevent a country from getting nukes – and they’re beating up a country that only had drone power. While their campaign isn’t going as well as they may claim publicly, I know Iranians who’ve confirmed things like “All the airports are destroyed, and most of our projects/work is closed, so we’re just sitting at home kind of waiting at this point”. Those drones didn’t really help deter anything / protect the people all that much – having nukes likely would’ve, as we see in cases like North Korea and Russia. Even in cases like the USA, where their veering into a fascist dictatorship garnered little comment from western nations, who were afraid of upsetting their nuclear-umbrella.