Konrad, thanks for your thoughts. A few considerations:

* I think Pascal was wrong, empirically speaking. Modern cognitive therapy is based on the notion that we can reason with our emotions, so it’s not as simple as he put it.

* Caesar: he was considered a tyrant in his own time, and Cato the Younger wanted to put him on trial for what he did in Gaul. That said, I don’t think a comparison with Hitler and Stalin is apt because the standards were different two millennia ago: everyone (including the Gauls) was trying to conquer everyone else, and there was no concept of genocide.

* AI: at the moment I’m not too worried because I think that talk of general AI is hype, we are not even close to that. But yes, should we ever get there, it will be crucial to see how gAI will generate its own goals and purposes.