JimmyBuckets

Terrifying. I just don't see how this doesn't inevitably lead to brain-scale organoids. The ethics of it seem impossible. Given how we treat non-human animals this reminds me of the torment nexus meme.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. Not only is what you said compelling, but it again highlights the importance of experience as a path to knowledge. Rationality is brittle and cannot access much of the vastness of human experience.

Dirac comments that he thinks a potential path to the discovery of new physics is to start with a mathematical domain and work outwards from there, guided by mathematical beauty. This is what I took OP's comment to be about - of course setting aside questions on an LLM's ability to recognize beauty

You are right. Thank you for correcting me. It never ceases to amaze me just how much I can be confidently mistaken about.

The UK was a declining power that had been absolutely gutted by war and owed huge debts to the US that it had accrued to fund the war. I believe Thucydides Trap is more about the situation we have now with the US and China where both are moving from strength to strength.

Essentially its the idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two. I was expressing my hope that if this does happen, the war can play out in less destructive arenas - one of which is in the competition for reserve currency status which the US has held for the whole of the modern era. This article possibly points at China's first shots in this conflict.

Edit: credit LarsDu88 for correcting me on its age. I originally stated the idea was very old (2.5k years) but actually its a recent idea based on an ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta

It will be interesting to see how much of Thucydides Trap plays out in currency and trade as opposed to military conflict. I am hopeful that economic and financial warfare absorbs the brunt of the power struggle.

Revolution can mean many things. We are heading into having a parallel post-growth economy in the coming decades. I see this transition being accelerated by several forces (AI, climate change, digitzation of law and property rights, etc.). This revolution will allow us individually to exit the majority of our time to an economic frame that works for us rather than for the ultra-wealthy and powerful. It's the first moment in history that this feels possible.

This completely negates the fact that due to how the labor market is structured, most people who sell their labour to survive are in a disadvantageous position for the negotiation you are talking about. What you are talking about works well in a basic economics text book but does not translate to the real world.

While I agree with your sentiment somewhat, the leap to equating vegans with carnivores is unjustified in my opinion