Yeah, I guess, "intelligence is all about awareness of death" is kind of a bomb of a premise. I admit, not the best thought I spat out through my keyboard. I suppose I mean some narrower sense of intelligence here. On one hand, you're absolutely right - crows, octopuses and toddlers solve problems without any hint of understanding mortality. Yet "children have no concept of time" is incorrect: not only do they have one, but most kids also grasp that death is irreversible and happens to everyone by about age 5-7.

I don't blame you for immediately rejecting the rest of it. But do hear me out: the point about the inevitability of invention does have real support. Historians call it multiple discovery - tons of things have been invented independently - calculus, the telephone, the jet engine, to name a few.

Neural nets, GPUs, and the scale of Internet text made something like LLMs close to inevitable. Of course, we could debate forever whether any of these on its own was ever inevitable. The point is - society tolerates any cost of a useful invention for the benefit of saving time. So it's reasonable to assume this will be the case with AI as well, which is really happening as we speak.