Sam Harris

But then when you imagine what happens next, there's just not that many stops on the way to the end of everything.

Yeah, well, it's somewhat analogous to the taboos around chemical weapons and biological weapons.

And I'd heard recently, I don't know if this is common knowledge and I just missed it, but I'd heard that at one point we realized we could create...

laser weapons that would just permanently blind soldiers on the battlefield, and we just didn't go down that path at all because it just seemed so ghastly to ever put that into use, which is interesting because on some level it's not nearly as bad as the other things we have developed.

I don't know why it was so obviously unethical to the people who saw that this technology was in reach, but there is just something horrible about the idea of effortlessly blinding people en masse as a way of winning elections.

a war, yet we're willing to blow them up, riddle them with shrapnel, etc., and yet silently blinding everybody is just, we're not going to go there.

Do you have any intuitions about why that struck us as just totally untenable, ethically?

What do you think about the growing tensions between the US and China, specifically around our somewhat equivocal commitment to protecting Taiwan?

And

Were those moments essentially gaffes on his part where he basically said we would defend Taiwan even though our official doctrine is, I think, what was it called?

Strategic ambiguity or something like that?

What's the risk of, so we're strangely, and we as I think the entire world is strangely dependent on Taiwanese manufacturing of semiconductors, but if we onshore all of that supply chain and we're no longer dependent on them, can you imagine that we would suddenly decide,

They're not a critical U.S.

interest anymore, and we don't need to have a policy that we're going to come to their rescue?

Or does that then make Japan and South Korea suddenly worried that we're not the ally we claim to be, and then they go nuclear?

There's a fair amount of talk about the coming demographic collapse in China, and that they're really just not going to be what we feared going forward.

I don't know if you have followed the work of Peter Zion or anyone else who's been hitting this topic of late, but

Yeah, yeah.

Although I don't know if that could lead them to do something more reckless rather than less reckless in the meantime.

Right.