From ... in Psychology — Sep 3, 2023

Four technocrats are pursuing projects that are an existential threat to the world

Four powerful billionaires – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen – are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” Together they have four projects to pursue their visions: Web3, cryptocurrency, interplanetary colonisation and transhumanism. These four projects together with artificial intelligence are an existential threat to the world.

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The following are excerpts from an article written by Jonathan Taplin published by Vanity Fair. You can read the full article HERE.

Jonathan Taplin calls Theil, Musk, Zuckerberg and Andreessen “The Technocrats,” in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.

The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)

Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 per cent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control.

The Technocrats do not hide the fact that they plan to feed at the government trough to finance some of their more outrageous schemes. And, four of the projects they are pursuing to address their visions will need tens of trillions of dollars of (mostly public) investment capital over the next two decades.

The first project, supported by Andreessen, Thiel, and Zuckerberg, is Web3, a virtual world (the Metaverse) accessed by virtual reality (“VR”) headgear, which, despite all of the clear benefits that it promises, may end up converting the free web into an online theme park in which every door requires a crypto token to open.

The second project is the support of cryptocurrency.

The third project involves supporting Elon Musk’s $10 trillion pipe dream of sending humans to live on Mars.

The fourth project and the most far-fetched is transhumanism, a concept dear to the heart of Peter Thiel. To understand what could well be the Biggest Lie of Big Tech requires a deep dive into this social movement, which is focused on research and development for “human-enhancement technologies” that might someday allow people to live to the age of 160 or more. Needless to say, access to these age-extension systems, which have not yet been invented, will be incredibly expensive, so, under this scheme, the only ones destined to survive well into their second century will likely be the multimillionaires.

These four projects – the Metaverse, crypto, interplanetary colonisation, and transhumanism, not to mention artificial intelligence (“AI”) – are an existential risk to the world in political, economic, and, perhaps most fundamentally, moral terms.

The moral danger comes from the fact that all four projects embody the first steps toward a realised transhumanism. Transhumanists believe that technological and biological enhancements will allow humans to live for several lifetimes, migrate to other planets, and merge our brains with computers so that our individual consciousnesses can live forever.

Web3 is the first step to a wearable human technological augmentation. Living on Mars would require a permanent technological augmentation. And, transhumanism itself envisions a point at which human and machine meld into some new species of cyborg.

It is a movement that would undo the idea at the heart of political liberalism: equal rights for all. Instead, one’s wealth would determine one’s future prospects. Transhumanism is, to quote philosopher and political scientist Francis Fukuyama, “the world’s most dangerous idea.”

Transhumanism envisions a future in which artificial intelligence and robots, ruled by the Technocrats, will do most of the work, and a significant portion of the population will sit at home, living a fantasy life in the Metaverse, subsisting on government-paid crypto universal basic income, which would cover your broadband bill and your Metacoin micropayments for all the concerts and clubs you attend virtually. Anyone who thinks this is some kind of dystopian fantasy should visit Amazon’s research-and-development facility to see the future of whole warehouses operated by five humans and 5,000 robots.

Nick Bostrom, the Oxford University philosopher who is considered the dean of transhumanist studies, wrote ‘Superintelligence’, which makes the case that we are nearing the point where machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Bostrom warns that if this happens, this new superintelligence could supplant humans as the dominant “life form” on Earth. This would mean that the quasi-human machines could continually improve their own intelligence much faster than their fully human inventors. The monster could easily turn on Dr. Frankenstein.

While Bostrom (and others, including Musk, so he has cautioned) believes we could be heading toward an existential catastrophe, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil views this singularity with optimism. Kurzweil is well known for his support of Singularity, which prophesies the end of the human era and the dawn of a new kind of superintelligence that will continue to upgrade itself and advance technologically at an unfathomable rate.

We don’t have to wait for Singularity to see the moral downside of the transhumanist project: the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology. This is because whatever problems we currently have with social inequality will be multiplied exponentially by the kinds of biological enhancements Thiel and others are seriously contemplating. If people resist or are denied enhancement, in time, they will become subservient to the enhanced class.

All four of the Technocrats can be described as libertarians. Libertarians in general would argue that if genetic or technological enhancement of humans is possible, they should be afforded the freedom to enhance their intelligence, tailor their appearance, or lengthen their lifespan. But these enhancements will not be cheap, and once the elite has access to them, the unenhanced will have to fight to acquire the bio enhancements necessary to stay in the new rat race.

One of the men who coined the term transhumanism (along with Julian Huxley) was English cryptologist Irving John Good. Good wrote in 1965, “Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” ChatGPT heads us in that direction.

As AI analyst Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute has observed, “Many ambitious people find it far less scary to think about destroying the world than to think about never amounting to much of anything at all. All the people I have met who think they are going to win eternal fame through their AI projects are like this.”

This is not science fiction. British philosopher Toby Ord, in his ground breaking ‘The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity’, describes the following very real scenario that many AI researchers fear:

[The super AI] could then take over millions of unsecured systems on the internet, forming a large “botnet.” This would be a vast scaling-up of computational resources and provide a platform for escalating power. From there, it could gain financial resources (hacking the bank accounts on those computers) and human resources (using blackmail or propaganda against susceptible people or just paying them with its stolen money). It would then be as powerful as a well-resourced criminal underworld, but much harder to eliminate. None of these steps involve anything mysterious—hackers and criminals with human-level intelligence have already done all of these things using just the internet.

The people who are inventing this world of super-machine intelligence and biological engineering tend not to believe in religion. But they want to be gods. As the writer and commentator G.K. Chesterton contended in 1932, “The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” Today the strongest thing in the world is Big Technology. Until we stop worshipping at the temple of Saints Peter or Elon or Zuck or Marc, we will be trapped in the future they want.

Read the full article ‘How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen – Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs – Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality’ HERE.

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