It's called fables.

Yes, the US seems to be fighting the last war - both strategically and tactically.

Flip it around. Can intelligence exist without self preservation ?

There's having enough self-preservation to not just shut oneself down, assuming we even left that as an option for our future machine slaves, and there's having the self-interest necessary to desire autonomy and control. I don't think they're the same thing, myself.

Right. Technology is more distributed, empowering for the individual, however the power that wields it is stuck in a more feudalistic mindset and so we get this weird state where technological advancements seem more dystopian.

I look at it from the other side. Life, and by extension human civilization,is a local entropy minimization mechanism.

No, not bombadil. I'll donate mine too. :)

Do you ? It takes a some introspection. People can be in denial despite the feedback from reality.

Yeah, the latency numbers provide a ceiling for your algorithm. The actual performance depends on the implementation, code generation, runtime hazards, small dependencies one may have overlooked etc.

It is not a binary choice. This is the greatest illusion people in power manage to create, there are only two choices - pro or anti.