Why tech oligarchs are willing to risk apocalypse
By MICHELLE GOLDBERG
In a series of private speeches last year, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and Silicon Valley thought leader, said the young activist Greta Thunberg represented the spirit of the Antichrist. It was more than just a hyperbolic slur. Thiel was expressing a Promethean theology, one that sanctifies technology and expansion. In Thiel’s worldview, the forces of dynamism must struggle against the evils of stagnation, represented by Thunberg’s leftist environmentalism. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” Thiel said.
Thiel’s philosophical assumptions might sound bizarre to outsiders, but they appear to be widely shared among the tech elite. “AI and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming,” Jeremy Nixon, a founder of an artificial intelligence hub called AGI House, said in May. The technology, some tech titans believe, will allow humans — at least some humans — to escape the bounds of Earth and even perhaps the inevitability of death. It represents liberation from hopelessness and decay.
It’s worth keeping this strange new quasi-religion in mind as we consider the warnings coming from AI insiders that their inventions could cause mass death. As you probably know by now, this past week Jacob Coxon resigned his research job at Anthropic and went on social platform X to warn, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” His words were amplified by Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment science, whose job is to try and keep the technology aligned with human goals. “Jacob is correct here,” wrote Hubinger, who placed the probability of AI wiping humans out within the next 10 years at more than 10%.
These warnings lead to an obvious question: If this technology could destroy human life on Earth, why continue to build it? Often the answer is that since its development is inevitable, responsible actors need to get there first. It’s not a preposterous argument — if you really believe in AI’s awe-inspiring capabilities, you don’t want to cede sole control of it to your foes. But as an explanation for the industry’s oddly blithe attitude toward apocalypse, it’s incomplete, because it doesn’t account for tech leaders’ messianic dreams.
Their fantasies of transcendence take different forms. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, once said, “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.” Elon Musk plans to escape to Mars. “We want to be on a path toward making true the things that we read in science fiction books and see in the movies,” he says in footage featured in Alex Gibney’s searing new documentary, “Musk.” “A future where we’re forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event is less inspiring.” Jeff Bezos, who stepped down in 2021 as CEO of Amazon to spend more time on his space company, wrote, “We don’t want to face a civilization of stasis, and that is the real issue if we just stay on this planet.”
Some imagine themselves as digitally enabled Übermenschen. In 2023, billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” with a section titled, “Becoming Technological Supermen.” In it, he borrowed language from Italian futurist — and fascist — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, writing, “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche to argue that absent such an assault, life becomes meaningless and small. In a section titled “The Enemy,” Andreessen listed ideas that would restrain technology’s momentum, including “tech ethics” and the concept of “existential risk.”
Part of the reason the public has turned so quickly and decisively against AI is the bizarre mismatch between the costs they’re being asked to bear and the rewards they expect to receive. Data centers blight the landscape, AI slop degrades the culture, chatbots help kids cheat in school and sometimes drive people mad, and technology executives prophesy mass joblessness. For this, ordinary people get improved search engines and help writing emails. Great benefits could be on the horizon — we are constantly assured that AI will enable huge medical advances — but they’re not here yet to justify the hazards.
For those most invested in AI, though, the intolerable risk lies in failing to advance the technology, and thus being confined to stultifying, finite ordinary existence. “For decades, large tech firms have insisted that the technologies they own and control are ‘inevitable’ and thus unstoppable,” write Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in their trenchant new book, “End Times Fascism.” “Now they increasingly claim the authority of the supernatural: the right to usher in a new stage of human evolution, governed by deities of their creation.” As Klein and Taylor point out, these visions, so obviously derived from sci-fi and video games, can be hard to take seriously. But it doesn’t matter whether you believe in a future of cybernetic ascendance. The point is that the people driving the AI revolution do.
In an interview last year, my former colleague Ross Douthat asked Thiel what seemed like a simple question: “I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” Thiel paused for an uncomfortably long time before finally, after some hemming and hawing, saying “Yes.” His next word, though, was, “but,” after which Thiel started rambling about transhumanism. “The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body,” he said.
Our tech oligarchs would probably like human civilization on this planet to flourish, but some don’t seem to see it as mission critical. More important is that they reach their posthuman or interplanetary apotheosis. If they must wager our lives to summon their digital god, it’s a chance worth taking.
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