A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a 'transhuman' future, where humanity is left behind. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, proposed that Homo sapiens would be the first species to design their own descendants. He envisions a merge between humans and artificial intelligence within 50 years. The alternative, where machines follow their own path, could lead to conflict for dominance.
The Vision of Tech Titans
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, argued that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence. He once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page's claim that our next manifestation must be digital to spread throughout the galaxy. These views are not harmless; they form a durable belief system among the elites at the helm of our technological future.
A Religion in the Making
The collection of far-fetched scenarios exhibits the hallmarks of a religion in the making. The tech oligarchs seek to build the next phase of humanity, a transhuman future where they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos. Their ultimate goal is to distill human consciousness into binary code for download onto non-biological substrates.
Risks for Humanity
The mythopoeic infrastructure carries risk for humanity. It justifies steering technology along a path indifferent to everyday humans. The fantasy directs technology toward building superhumans rather than useful tools. These beliefs have pushed forward over the last quarter century, accompanying the advance of information technologies that have delivered enormous wealth and power to a new IT elite.
Silicon Valley's Secular Religion
Silicon Valley has been a militantly secular space, creating a God-shaped hole filled with sci-fi transhuman dreams. As Musk observed, atheism left an empty space, and secular religion took its place. This new cosmogony reached new horizons with AI, opening vast possibilities for the transhuman dream.
Historical Parallels
Weird though the proposed utopia may appear, it fits a longer tradition of business titans seeking to endow their endeavors with transcendent value. Henry Ford believed he was on a mission to re-engineer the world. Altman, Musk, and the valley gang want to merge consciousness with AI and conquer the cosmos. The proposition that they are engineering a utopian vision that humanity should be grateful for is not dissimilar.
Ideology of Control
As Nobel prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote, the handful of people unleashing this technology are guided by an ideology of control and a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans. The danger is how their aspirations will reshape economies and societies, redirecting resources to turbocharge AI at the expense of healthcare, education, or poverty reduction.
Future Utopias on the Menu
There are various views in the valley about what a future humanity should look like. Altman and Page are committed to merging humans with superintelligent technology and abandoning the flesh. Musk wants something different, also spacebound but committed to flesh enhanced by computers. Peter Thiel frowns on a computer program but is drawn to the transformation of the human body into an immortal body.
Shared Sources of Moral Purpose
There are shared sources that provide moral purpose to the various flavors of sci-fi ambition. The movement for effective altruism seduced the technological elite with its appeal to unflinching rationality. It encouraged laudable efforts to eradicate malaria but eventually departed from the needs of present earthlings. Longtermists emerged to argue that improving the world of the future was worthier than spending on the present.
The Kardashev Scale and Beyond
One goal is to advance up the Kardashev scale, harnessing the energy and technological capabilities needed to transcend biological confines. Earlier groups like the Extropians proposed boundless expansion, seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, and expanding into the universe without end. Effective accelerationists argue for rampant techno-capitalism to maximize consumption of the universe's resources.
Indifference to Humanity
The flat-out indifference toward the rest of us is evident in their frequent assessments about what AI could bring. They have no idea what they are doing, as Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei noted. The lack of understanding is unprecedented in the history of technology. These moguls are largely unconstrained, plowing hundreds of millions into political campaigns to fend off regulation.
What Is to Be Done?
How should society intervene? The Trump administration has shown little interest in resisting the tech oligarchs' fantasy. But misgivings are emerging among the Maga base, from rural Virginians pushing back against datacenters to evangelicals wary of a cosmopolitan elite. Pope Leo published an encyclical pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity.
A Glimmer of Hope
One might take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs' dreamscape is far-fetched. Fordlândia today lies in ruins, testament to the incongruous dreams of an oligarchy that overvalued its power. The AI-fueled cosmic fantasy is no less nuts. Perhaps the outlandish claims will fade into irrelevance, and the transhuman project will give way to a more recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins.
