Three months ago, China's foreign minister disappeared for a while, and after a month he was replaced. Now it's the defense minister's turn for a lengthy absence. A real doomer interpretation would be that China's preparing to grab Taiwan, and they're just changing personnel first so there won't be any infighting. 

Hopefully that won't happen, but I was thinking, what if it did, and had an alarming thought. I'm old enough to have been an adult when 9/11 happened, so I vaguely recall the Internet aspect of the western response. Blogs were still kind of new, and overnight a network of "war-blogs" sprang into being, sharing opinion and analysis. Also, offstage, and far more portentously, legal barriers to Internet surveillance were brought down, though many of us naive civilians had no inkling for a decade, until Snowden defected. 

My alarming thought was, what would happen if there was a similar geopolitical shock now, and the developing AI infrastructure (social as well as technical) was mobilized with the same urgency as the 2001 Internet? But then, what form would that even take? Would the deep state's AI policy experts go to Big Tech and say, we need a superstrategist now, we're nationalizing your frontier research and we'll be going at top speed towards superintelligence? Then it really would be Manhattan Project 2.0.