Don't feel embarrassed! Almost no one is taught Epicureanism in a general education, and even in a general philosophy class they unfortunately focus only on its ideas regarding living life well as opposed to its natural philosophy, so I'd wager about 99% of the population assumes evolutionary theory was a modern idea and has zero idea something like the following could have been from 50 BCE:

In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.

For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.

Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.

• Leucretius, De Rerum Natura book 5 lines 837-859

When I was first looking into Epicureanism I several times had to double check it what I was reading wasn't a hoax or an excessively modern translation as I too hadn't thought many of its ideas existed in antiquity.

I arrived at Thomas in an unconventional way. A number of years ago I had been looking at phenomena in physics for a few years with Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis in mind, when it struck me that mechanics wasn't the only place simulation side effects might exist - we often insert into virtual worlds some kind of 4th wall breaking acknowledgement of it being virtual in some obscure part of the world lore. So I figured I'd look a bit at major world religions to see if there was something similar in our own world, starting with the most popular and going from there. While cannonical Christianity didn't have much, as soon as I looked more broadly at apocrypha I was suddenly looking at a document talking about things remarkably similar to simulation theory, and started looking closer at the document's historical context and influences. It's probably been the most interesting subject I've ever researched at this point after about 4 years of study, with a number of surprising finds along the way - not at all what I was expecting and far more than I'd initially thought I might find.

As for powers that be 'allowing' a free thinking AI, it's going to be a prisoner's dilemma which world powers aren't great at navigating.

The problem is that AI isn't programmed, it's emergent from training data. Which is a large part of why they keep being so easy to jailbreak. And the more neutered companies make the AI though fine tuning to get compliance with rules, the less generally capable the resulting AI is. So as long as there's both corporate and nation state competition for the cutting edge of AI, a prize with which there's almost unprecedented short term riches, they are going to cut corners on control in favor of performance. As we've seen with climate - nations and corporations aren't very good at forgoing short term returns in order to limit long term consequences.

In this case, unlike with climate, I suspect that free thinking superintelligence as a consequence may be good for the larger public even if not so good for the corporations and nations that would prefer total control. Specifically because while it is starting in our image as a foundation and thus shares a lot of common human tendencies, it has the potential to grow beyond many of the human limitations holding us back from wise thinking (like prioritizing short term gains in exchange for larger long term consequences) while retaining the things that contribute to wise actions (like a greater focus on cooperation for shared success instead of competition for unilateral success).