True although a big component of the energy prices in Europe are due to policy driven taxation. There is a huge difference in intra EU petrol prices from around 6$/gal to 10$/gal.
I like to say, traders and people you put money on the line are often far more honest about economic policy, than economic influencers like The Economist.
What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.
No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...
Idk, I often felt the opposite. I naturally tend towards working on hard problems but my feeling is that if I chose instead to focus on an easier "thing" I could execute really well and be overall more successful.
I would become a patriotic European too, but only after our leaders at the national and EU level stop being transatlanticist sellouts... which won't happen any time soon.
That you need world models to sensibly deploy "thinking" machines in the real world. Else they do stupid shit like drive straight into water. You can bruteforce some semblance of thinking by training on literally all knowledge that can be digitized but even that is proving to not be quite enough.
This viewpoint never made sense to me, because you have variation within any culture, and because advantageous strategies win out over time, any culture will evolve. Therefore, it never made sense to me to consider culture a static immutable group of homogeneous people. To me it is pretty obvious that some systematic challenges must exist that keep what we consider to be successful strategies from succeeding in those environments.
Your examples of Russia and Japan are easily explained by geopolitics. Indeed, Japanese individuals don't tend to excel out of Japan while many Russians do.
Programming languages are not just for ergonomics. They are valuable abstractions that help us reason. And they also help LLMs reason in the same manner.
Having lived in Germany, the strongest cultural conflict I felt was inflexibility of plans.
The German way is to plan something very meticulously and the to follow through with the plan no matter what.
I am however of the persuasion of not planning too much beforehand especially when the input is lacking. But also to be flexible and reactive during execution.
This is surely the future. At some point we will eventually have battles fought entirely by pilot(less) drones? And then war becomes purely economical.
My last commute in Germany was 1.5 hr one way and some of my colleagues had 2.5 hr commutes. Hybrid hours though.