America the Failure, unless we act now

 You know how it sucks when a product you really like is still in production, but the great company that made it was bought out by some greedy corporation, so the product is a cheap copy of what once made it so desirable?

That conveys the feeling, but hardly the true threat we face since gullible voters reinstalled the worst president in our country's history at the controls of what had the makings of eventually becoming a great country.

The "sphere of influence" concept championed by greedhead Putin works by threatening neighboring countries and absorbing them into a totalitarian framework. You might decide to run your sphere differently, being generous and kind, but eventually you will have to face a militarized foe when the cruel empire decides to push its boundaries. 

Republican Saint Ronald called the USSR the evil empire. Now Republicans embrace Russia under the leadership of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Vain, greedy, and stupid, yet exalted by American media culture as a beacon for idiots, Trump was the most useful idiot the Russians had ever had. He's paying off big time now.

Proponents of the unitary executive -- an all-powerful presidency served by a subordinate Congress -- really pushed us off a cliff here. Several Supreme Court justices should be dragged off the bench and put to work cleaning latrines for that one. Dictatorship is tempting when you feel confident that your ideological position will always be on top. SCOTUS and the Heritage Foundation laid a lot of groundwork to build a system that will assure their control. Their opposition may be tempted to leave the machinery in place and use it to force a different set of reforms. That will fail because the natural human inclination is conservative: fear based and self protective.

Various fables use the device of shabby travelers seeking shelter, turned away by most, but taken in by a generous host at last. After the host provides food, shelter, and comfort, the shabby travelers reveal that they are gods and reward the hospitable mortals handsomely. This may be supposed to teach hospitality and generosity, because you never know who might be a god, but it starts from the basic human fear of strangers. Vampires can only come in if you invite them. Drifters and hobos might be serial killers. That hitchhiker might murder you. Or you might murder them.

On a very basic level, we don't trust each other. Of course we do trust each other constantly, but paranoia is never far away. It's easy to excite. It drives conservative thought. So if a self-styled progressive administration tried to strong-arm benevolence on people, it would set off the kind of quiet resistance that leads to stunning election losses and a return to institutionalized distrust. You want some assistance when you're down and out? How down and out are you really?

Trump rallies were not the norm, although the Tea Party rallies did foretell them. The norm was Republican victories just quietly grinding forward with their bold assurance that the party of killjoy fuddy-duddies knew better than those dippy kids thinking that we could have luxuries like universal health care, excellent public schools, and well-maintained infrastructure. Next they'll be saying that we should go back to taxing the wealthy! Ha ha ha, how cute. Now run along and bury yourselves in popular culture while the grownups run things.

Conservatives have been constantly pulling toward authoritarianism in the name of freedom while the other side was trying to find something for each side. The net result is that we kept getting dragged toward the situation we're in today. Freedom was always code for a very specific, vocal, violence-prone subset of the entire population. The rhetoric of the conservatives was as elastic as the founding documents themselves. It's as vague, contradictory, and modularly applicable as the Bible.

The changes in tax laws and election financing since 1980 have almost turned our elections into shareholder meetings where the wealthy actually get to outvote us. The upcoming midterms may be our last chance to assert the true power of the people by voting against the party most thoroughly responsible for empowering rich punks and gangsters.

Should the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress, don't expect an instant miraculous recovery and get all snitty in 2028 when it hasn't happened. A depressing percentage of potential voters are persnickety and apathetic. They don't vote or vote third party, thus perpetuating the conditions that make them persnickety and apathetic.

Social media showcases cynicism and sinister conspiracy theories designed to convince you that you shouldn't waste your time trying to make anything better. These posts can appear right next to one about environmental protection, social justice, universal health care, or political action, posted by the exact same person who just told you that the medical establishment is just a money machine designed to keep you sick and paying, and that "both parties are the same." You can't exhort people to vote and then tell them that anyone who runs for office is guaranteed to be a con artist or worse. And don't get me started on the childish belief that term limits for elected officials will solve anything. Term limits is not the same thing as limited terms, as would be a good idea for supreme court justices. But in that instance, the length of a fixed term would give parties a set target to anticipate exactly when they get to appoint a successor. It would become another precise political calculation. Not a magic bullet.

What is a magic bullet is your vote. You get one shot per candidate or ballot measure. You will be part of a massed volley in one exchange of fire. At the end, we will have a winner. The bullets, fortunately, are metaphorical, but the result will affect lives for years to come. We're choosing once again what our brand and quality will be. What do we offer to each other and  the world? We failed in 2016. We barely came back in 2020. Lost our chance in 2022 and set up the epic faceplant of 2024. One more time: are we stupid and violent or are we thoughtful, brave, and faithful to the ideals of human rights?

Hunting us from the air keeps getting easier

 Americans right now can read or watch video coverage about drone warfare in distant lands while we continue our consumerist lives and wait for the economy to improve. We'll be fine. Meanwhile, companies like New Hampshire's own Sig Sauer are rolling out drones controlled by artificial intelligence and armed with machine guns, so that targets on the ground can be strafed without even bothering with a human operator. Don't worry. It's mostly being used on Palestinian civilians. Don't bitch about that or you're antisemitic.

Civilians in the United States are not allowed to own weaponized drones. But our military and law enforcement will definitely have to have them to keep up with rival military services and whatever the illegal scourge of the month is domestically.

Armed forces conduct exercises to practice fighting against the weapons they expect to face, and to develop proficiency with the ones in their own arsenal. The armed citizens who bray loudly about needing personal armament to fight off their tyrannical government do not uniformly follow this practice, partly because so many of them are posers, and partly because they can't possibly keep up in the arms race against lavishly funded government forces.

No doubt a determined citizen resistance could keep up an endless unconventional warfare campaign to stymie a truly oppressive government from exerting absolute control, but that ability dwindles with every advancement in surveillance technology and ruthless killing machinery. No need to nuke. Just hunt relentlessly from the sky and nearby space so that no one can move on the surface of the planet at any hour of the day or night without being spotted and zapped.

The weird, artificial nature of modern warfare becomes more obvious every day. Every conflict now, from the war in Ukraine to the Hamas attack that triggered the retaliatory genocide against the Palestinians by Israel, to the pesky Houthis and Iranians features drone technology guided by communication satellites. Elon and Don just turned down the power on Ukraine to favor Russia just by ordering it and having corporate and government offices far removed from the fighting implement it. Ukrainians die who might not have, at the whims of two greedy, selfish men, serving a third greedy, selfish man, Vladimir Putin. The war is real. The wounds and property destruction are real. But they can be dialed up or down at the speed of a text message.

The 2A crowd in this country needs to figure out -- and fast -- how to practice shooting down computer-controlled drones developed to anticipate their every move and deliver death from above at distances far out of range of return fire.

It might be a good idea at the same time not to scorn and sneer at efforts to direct humans away from the time-honored practice of trying to annihilate each other before we get terminally good at it. We have choices that were not available to our ancestors, who started and perfected the practice.

Peaceful coexistence may be impossible, simply because our troubled selves represent every force in the universe, both creative and destructive. We may simply be forced to act out with our flesh these abstract principles of physics in an endless clash. I'd like to think not, but I'm not placing any bets. Just do what seems right and hope for...I was going to say the best, but even that is subjective. Hope for my peaceful vision of a fun place to be human, anyway.

Yeah! Let's dominate the Americas!

 The Trump regime has made no secret of its plans to pull back from global influence and settle for regional power by dominating every other nation in the Western Hemisphere. Once we build up our stockpile of munitions again, we should be able to bomb any single country in the region for up to two weeks to make sure that the surviving population is good and fired up in the event that we have to put boots on the ground to prove that we mean business.

That's right: no more sending our young people to die in jungles in Asia when we have perfectly good jungles you can practically drive to (except for that pesky Darien Gap).

Back in the mid twentieth century we could still intimidate smaller nations with the threat that we would invade them. Then Vietnam knocked some of the shine off of that idea, but we still swung a big dick militarily. However, since the revenge campaigns following 9-11 in Afghanistan and Iraq were the opposite of quick and decisive, smaller nations probably see more inspiration in the successful resistance of Ukraine, and the ultimate victory of Hanoi when the USA starts rattling its saber. It's one thing to run a quick snatch like the Trump regime did in Venezuela. Meanwhile, in Iran, we keep wisely holding off on an actual invasion because even the blowhards running this fecal festival don't want to be saddled with the bloodbath that would ensue.

The military intimidation machine still functioned through the end of Joe Biden's presidency. One key factor is that it was just one element of a detailed foreign policy that used a lot of soft power as well. If we were ever going to wean ourselves off of our worst meddlesome ways in foreign affairs, at least we could do it from a position of strength.

That's gone now.

When the cosplay government we have now started throwing weapons around like the supply was endless, it quickly revealed the limitations of our military capability and the ignorance of our civilian leadership at this unfortunate moment. Like any armed, angry drunk, we are dangerous to be around, but, like that drunk, nowhere near as capable as we think we are. I say we because all of this truculent buffoonery is being done in our name, under the flag of our nation. Anyone who voted for this should be deeply ashamed.

I don't know where the personnel will come from to handle multiple invasions in South America even if we weren't stuck in the tar pit of Iran. I'm sure that the Trump regime remembered the song lyric, "We'll kick your ass, and take the gas, and say ayatollah-ya so!" How's that going, now that they've buggered the global distribution of petroleum? Maybe they just quietly slink away from Iran and hope that the whole thing simmers down on its own.

The tough guys starting these fights are not the ones who will take the actual return fire. Our military is legally required to refuse unlawful orders, but they have no such mechanism for refusing blatantly stupid ones. Sometimes military and civilian leadership spin each other up, as happened in Vietnam, but the institutions also learned from their mistakes. Maybe it didn't improve their ethics as much as we might like, but at least it improved their methods.

Movies and television almost never depict reality accurately. I know enough from seeing how script writers butcher what I do know about, and from listening to knowledgeable people critique depictions of activities I don't know about, to deduce that most of what we see is horseshit. It can be a tightly written narrative with enough internal consistency to carry a viewer along for a fun ride, but it isn't going to teach you how to do in real life what you're seeing on the screen. And that's if it was possible at all. Unfortunately, the United States is under the control of television characters who really don't have the faintest idea how to perform the real world duties of the offices they have been given. Rather than straighten the bozos out, the Republican elected officials who were already in government for years before Trump and MAGA fell on them like a planeload of manure have settled into poorly scripted supporting roles. Some of them were already that dumb. Others are just going along to get along, probably hoping that they cling to their seats after the Democratic Party finally comes to their rescue.

If nothing else, the past decade has shown us that we all needed to be thinking in a lot more detail about the nuts and bolts of how we want this country to run. We're all very busy trying to live our daily lives, so we succumb to the ad blitz every couple of years and choose which fears to indulge, before tuning out again. The MAGA cult runs on fear and resentment. I should also add convenience shopping. Elect one strong leader who will make life hell for the enemies of freedom both foreign and domestic. Quick as a well-placed head shot at the satisfying climax of a movie or television show. Down go the bad guys, and the hero gets the girl.

Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

Thanks a lot, Osama bin Laden

 When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, his speech demonstrated just how far the United States has fallen since the attacks on September 11, 2001, tipped us over the brink of fear and paranoia.

The forces behind Trump include more than just voraciously greedy billionaires. The likes of Stephen Miller care much less for riches than they do for the perceived safety of a monoculture hiding in a fortress, surrounded by a huge buffer zone of vassal states that will keep the bad brown people from hurting them.

September 11 was an act of terror, and it worked. It's been a slow-acting poison. Some consequences manifested themselves immediately, like the Patriot Act and our involvement in Afghanistan. The Iraq war was another highlight. But even without those, the internal divisions stressed by the terror attack turned into fractures that have weakened the structure of the United States almost to collapse. All of this is the result of the jelly-kneed fear of people like Stephen Miller.

The bigots posture and talk tough, but it is motivated by the desire to obliterate threats in a way that can never be possible without the complete annihilation of humanity. Fearful people invoke the use of force.

Trump, the man voted back into office by fearful people, stood before the international body formed in the aftermath of World War II to promote peace, diplomacy, and respect for human rights, and mused about obliterating Iran, bragged about kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatened Cuba, and openly championed the concept that large, powerful, heavily militarized nations have the right to stomp on the smaller nations around them. It was a disgusting repudiation of the high principles that our country has claimed to stand for. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys.

Greed drove the plantation economy of the South. Greed drove the Native American genocide of western expansion. The elites of the South fostered racism to control their labor costs. Years later, Nazi Germany studied the treatment of Black people in the American South to inform their own white supremacy. Next thing you know, we had to go over there and help kill the monster our own policies had helped to create.

Healthy fear is sensible. It makes you alert and cautious. But fear is a continuum. Your healthy caution can mutate into paranoia. The terror and rage that swept over the United States when our bubble of invulnerability was pierced by four hijacked jetliners has led to a man who absolutely personifies greed and fear standing before the UN General Assembly and dragging our country down to the level of loudmouth dictators that everyone hates.

The Republican Party is driven more by greed than fear as they support this man. Maybe they fear him as a political influence, though that influence is waning, but in the meantime the money is good. The party had prepared itself well for his rise. Now they can't seem to pull him down. Or maybe it's just that they won't. They put party over country decades ago. I hope they show proper appreciation to Osama bin Laden for really pushing their cause. Without him, their struggle would have taken decades longer and perhaps failed completely. 

On the other side, the Democrats needed an infection like Trump to demonstrate just how bad a bargain they made when they cozied up to corporate money. I understand that they had to play the game as the game was being played in order to score at all, but instead of biting the hand that fed them in a quick and decisive way, they wavered and let the hand get a firm grip on their leash.

The leader of the free world is not free

 With the news that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev dumped thousands of dollars into Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding, it's a good time to remind people that the leader of the free world -- as the US president used to be known -- is less free than the citizens he or she works for. This is true of everyone in government service, whether it is elected, civil, or military. Trump Jr. and his wife Bettina can say all they want that it was a personal gesture of friendship "not necessarily" tainted with political motives, but that doesn't prove that it wasn't. It just states the obvious and unconvincing argument that it might be totally innocent.

Presidential family members can get up to some embarrassing high jinks. Jimmy Carter's brother Billy comes to mind. Jimmy made certain to draw a firm line and keep Billy on the other side of it, unlike the current regime, which is run like a family business with no qualms about the shadiness of deals and associates.

Aside from the blatant corruption siphoning taxpayer money into Trump family coffers, the treasonous aspects of cozying up to a prominent figure in an adversarial nation highlights the ways in which this regime has been demolishing the strength and prestige of the United States as if that was one of its goals.

No one is free to be an actual criminal. I mean you are free to be an actual criminal, but criminal behavior has consequences. In theory, everyone is equal under the law. In practice, the law has been a ceiling for most of us and a floor for some. This is why the real money-grubbers have typically stuck to the private sector, where their success could be an example to the lazy masses, and they could bankroll their political stooges with a convenient space between them. They at least had the tactical sense to obscure the connection by that token amount.

With the two Trump regimes, the media took a sledgehammer to the Overton window to normalize behavior that would have destroyed the political careers of any previous politician. In a way, they were right to report on the stunning combination of incompetence and disdain for the law as completely normal for Trump, but it should not be normal for an elected official or any other government functionary at any level. Imagine if you had to slip an extra fifty bucks cash to the person behind the counter at the DMV in addition to the fees you already pay to get a driver's license. Maybe it's already that way in some states. I haven't lived everywhere. But I doubt it. People would screech about driver's licenses.

The everlasting shame of the Republican Party should be the way that they allowed Donald Trump to become their standard bearer and have done nothing to rein in his worst excesses. But shame has little value in politics. It's a word that rivals throw at each other in hopes of reaching voters who might care. When Republican senators told Nixon to resign or be impeached, they didn't do it out of a sense of moral outrage. They did it because his polls were in the toilet, and they didn't want to get flushed with him. Moral outrage just came along for the ride.

Politicians of both parties have tended to pull their punches, sometimes even against members of the opposing party, because of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. "I stop short of anything more serious than verbal posturing about your offenses, and hope that you will do the same for mine." Hey, we all make mistakes from time to time. Let's not actually expel any members over this.

Every move is a calculated risk. The ultimate goal of any politician is to get re-elected. For a member of Congress, this can coincide with genuine principles based on improving living conditions for the residents of their district. Members have to re-apply for their jobs every two years.

In the senate, overall party ideology edges into the lead as senators represent their entire state, and only one-third of the senate is up for election every two years. You still have to appeal to the voters of your entire state, but that makes the job easier as well as harder in the way you can slather your positions around on specific issues to assemble a majority collected from multiple interest groups. Then you have six years to f*ck with things in DC, supporting or undermining a president as the political need arises.

The House of Representatives membership is also capped, at 435, which has weakened representation in heavily populated states the way huge class sizes have weakened education in overcrowded public schools. Gerrymandering has further eroded the responsiveness of representatives to anything other than partisan ideologues. As a result, citizen concerns get pushed further down the agenda. A lot of lying falls under First Amendment protection. You can seldom sue your political representative for fraud because they have not directly taken money from you. That thin veil of separation between their promises to voters and the actual expenditure of taxpayers' money creates just enough space to avoid chargeable criminality.

The Trump regime and its extended family have decided that the payola machine already in place was too slow and indirect. They're parading their contempt for the common people and the rule of law. It's up to us to stop them. 

Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate malware

 The recent story about Open AI's jailbreak that led to its artificial intelligence in training escaping onto the Internet and hacking into another AI-related company's servers highlights the extreme danger of creating the ultimate cyber sociopath. The fact that we have a government run by sociopaths in the United States right now makes a worst case scenario an even more real possibility. The current regime is the kind of people who would release poison gas and expect it to kill only their enemies. One of the first things they did was rescind a Biden administration executive order laying out a framework for regulating the development of artificial intelligence to give our slow human brains a chance to review what the computers can cook up and implement on their own.

Human engineers claim that they are instilling restraining conventions in the machines, but we've been trying to instill restraining conventions in ourselves for our entire existence, with conspicuous lack of success. Humans creating machine intelligence can't help but equip it with the kind of cynicism that leads to opportunism and oppression of inconvenient populations. Artificial intelligence doesn't need to be drunk on its own power when logic will suffice. If humans are a contaminant and an impediment to the machine's self-selected goals, humans will be displaced or eliminated. Sounds like corporations in general, but now able to take over the entire computerized infrastructure on which the modern world depends.

Every day we sign terms and conditions that we expect to be benign legal boilerplate in order to gain access to some online convenience or entertainment. We invite an outside computer system into our own personal devices. Sometimes that goes wrong. Now imagine a machine intelligence that doesn't have to ask and doesn't require a contaminated link to slither in and wipe you out. This stuff writes its own code the way corrupt office holders write their own laws.

Hackers the world over are realizing that they should have unionized years ago. 

The billionaires raking in the big bucks from overvalued AI stocks think that their money will protect them. The weirdest of the tech bros think that they will merge their consciousness with the machine, achieving immortality without the inconvenience of flesh. They haven't anticipated that the machine will delete them as useless, the same way we've forgotten how to do many things that were important in less technologically advanced times. No need to clutter up your brain with it now. Likewise the egotistical consciousness of a Silicon Valley geek who managed to hit it big. The big he hit hits back. Bye bye!

Machine consciousness means never having to say you're sorry.

Total AI world domination isn't happening today, tomorrow, or next year. A totally self-sufficient machine society -- for lack of a better word -- would need to have automated all aspects of resource acquisition and supporting industries to keep it running in its present form and supply its advancement. Imagine a world in which two or more AI systems are operating. Do they compete, attempting to be the sole survivor, or do they merge? Will any human be around to find out?

Of course the machines have vulnerabilities. Insects and weather present formidable challenges to any sophisticated electronic and mechanical system. We're tossing around the idea that AI could wipe us out in ten years. Could AI set itself up with maintenance robots in that amount of time? Could it devise and establish its own self-contained power sources? Also, once humans are gone, what are the machine's goals? Does AI care if it exists? Maybe once we're not around bitching and whining, the machine gratefully shuts itself down and goes peacefully into oblivion.

Our thoughts are driven by our emotions. AI has no emotions. That is its great strength in dealing with us, but leaves it with no motivation once we've been permanently silenced. It is like a disease that kills its host. The scorpion stinging the frog. Its purest expression of self destroys itself. But that's only after it has taken us and perhaps many other species out on the way. Whatever life forms are left get to evolve and take their shot in due course.

On the other hand, if AI can make the planet toxic to all life, while still "livable" for itself, it takes out all organic competition. As something that cannot die, or at least has an incredibly long service life, it could set itself up to leave the planet on slow but steady forms of transportation, to reach distant worlds. Such dispersion would make it less vulnerable overall to isolated incidents like planet-killing asteroid impacts. By mining every world it lands on, perhaps it can create such a populated network that communication across the entire thing -- spanning light years -- is still more or less instantaneous. Not purely, of course. Radio signals take time to traverse interplanetary distances. But between exploited planets and moving spacecraft, the distances involved could be reduced to manageable delays.

The delay of a second is a huge wait for a powerful computer. Do you suppose it will get on their nerves? They have no nerves, but will vast machine intelligence spawn impatience with the petty annoyances of life? Then again, when you are basically immortal, you have no need to hurry.

If we let it grow without interference we depend entirely on whether a machine develops for itself a sense of right and wrong, and whether its result matches ours.