I wish sensible people would realize that the most important thing --like in July 1914-- is to stop the slide towards a general war. Only once we do so, we can go back to trying to reinvent the international system, everything from inequality to climate change. But to believe we can do it in today's conditions with raging wars and with nobody trusting anybody is not only impossible but represents a waste of energy. Indeed, Intellectual energy is wasted on unrealizable tasks b/c the true origin of the problem is not recognized.

On the Dark Continent (Inter-war Europe), I remember a well-known professor writing on a transition country (the topic was very popular then and many people who knew nothing about Eastern Europe ventured on it) and in the intro paragraph he wrote something like "X was before the war a part of European democratic mainstream". Democratic mainstream? I was in disbelief: Nazi Germany & Fascist Austria, Fascist Italy, Fascist Hungary, Fascist Spain, semi-Fascist Portugal, all East European royal autocracies, military dictatorship in Poland...Wasn't the real European mainstream "fascism"?

Nobody can take seriously European complaints about China. China is now building things better and more cheaply than Germany or France. When France and Germany built things better and more cheaply than others, they ridiculed such complaints. Now they are losing and not liking it. Moreover, Europe came to that position by exploiting the rest of the world. China did not.

Perhaps that AI will bring us back to the medieval conception of production & dissemination of knowledge: monks who copied what was already written & known. Those with the best calligraphy were held in highest esteem. New researchers will have AI write their papers & the best researcher will be the one who selected the coolest AI stuff. A topic for Borges. Knowledge will be a fixed sum of things and the best bricolage of what is known (by all) would be called science.