by Jonathan Taplin<\/p>\n
Taplin, the educator, writer<\/em>\u00a0(Move Fast and Break Things), and film producer<\/em>\u00a0(Mean Streets, The Last Waltz),\u00a0is director emeritus of USC\u2019s Annenberg Innovation Lab. His peripatetic career includes stints as tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, VP of media M&A at Merrill Lynch, professor at USC, and founder of the pioneering video-on-demand company Intertainer.<\/em><\/p>\n Four very powerful billionaires\u2014Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg<\/strong>, and\u00a0Marc Andreessen<\/strong>\u2014are creating a world where \u201cnothing is true and all is spectacle.\u201d If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four\u2014\u201cthe biggest wallets,\u201d to paraphrase\u00a0historian\u00a0Timothy Snyder<\/strong><\/a>, \u201cpaying for the most blinding lights.\u201d<\/p>\n I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk\u2019s grandfather,\u00a0Joshua Haldeman<\/a>. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others\u2019 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\u2014and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (\u201cCompetition is for suckers,\u201d Thiel once posited.)<\/p>\n Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality\u2014and our economic system, imperfect as it is\u2014with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control.<\/p>\n I use the term\u00a0techno-determinism<\/em>\u00a0to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future. The future they are now selling us, however\u2014crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI, the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars\u2014is a lie. To quote Snyder once more,\u00a0Donald Trump<\/strong>\u00a0has shown that he \u201cwas lying not so much to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality.\u201d Such sleight-of-hand applies here as well. The alternative reality that these men are focused on is a world of technodeterminism, one in which AI may eventually do all the real work and a large number of humans may be rendered useless to society.<\/p>\n Read the Book Here<\/p>\n PREORDER AT HACHETTE<\/a><\/p>\n The Technocrats do not hide the fact that they plan to feed at the government trough to finance some of their more outrageous schemes. Their plan for your future involves nothing less than confronting the nihilism of a looming dystopia. 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\u00a0Andreessen<\/a>, Thiel, and\u00a0Zuckerberg<\/a>, is Web3, a virtual world (the Metaverse) accessed by virtual reality (VR) headgear, which, despite all of the clear benefits that it promises, many 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 crypto currency. As\u00a0Adam Fischer,<\/strong>\u00a0Israel\u2019s top-ranked venture capitalist, has pointed out, \u201cCrypto is not so much an investment idea that aligns with the libertarian political ideology, as it is a virulent strain of libertarian political ideology leveraging human greed through the blockchain.\u201d The third project involves supporting Elon Musk\u2019s $10 trillion pipe dream of\u00a0sending humans to live on Mars<\/a>.<\/p>\n But of all the myths the Technocrats peddle, none is more far-fetched than transhumanism, a concept dear to the heart of\u00a0Peter Thiel<\/a>. And to understand what could well be the Biggest Lie of Big Tech requires a deep dive into this social movement, which is focused on R&D for \u201chuman-enhancement technologies\u201d 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.<\/p>\n These four projects\u2014the Metaverse, crypto, interplanetary colonization, and transhumanism, not to mention AI\u2014are 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 realized transhumanism. The 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\u2019s wealth would determine one\u2019s future prospects. Transhumanism is, to quote philosopher and political scientist\u00a0Francis Fukuyama,<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cthe world\u2019s most dangerous idea.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s research-and-development facility to see the future of whole warehouses operated by five humans and 5,000 robots.<\/p>\n When Peter Thiel was three years old, according to his biographer,\u00a0Max Chafkin<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0he asked his father, Klaus, about the hide rug on the living room floor of their Southwest African apartment in the town of Swakopmund. His father explained that it was from a dead cow. \u201cDeath happens to all animals. All people,\u201d Klaus told his son.<\/p>\n This idea of his own mortality supposedly frightened the young Thiel in a way some believe he never really recovered from. Since at least 2006, he has invested millions on research that involves trying to beat death. It could be that he has listened to computer scientist\u00a0Ray Kurzweil,<\/strong>\u00a0famed for his support of\u00a0the Singularity<\/a>, which prophesizes 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.<\/p>\n Nick Bostrom,<\/strong>\u00a0the Oxford University philosopher who is considered the dean of transhumanist studies,\u00a0wrote\u00a0Superintelligence<\/em><\/a>, 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 \u201clife form\u201d 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 Kurzweil views this singularity with optimism, Bostrom (and others, including Musk, so\u00a0he has cautioned<\/a>) believes we could be heading toward an existential catastrophe.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think we have to wait for the 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.\u00a0Jaron Lanier<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0the early virtual reality (VR) pioneer, makes an eloquent case for resisting technological enhancement and the Singularity. \u201cThe reason to believe in human agency over technological determinism,\u201d he has noted, \u201cis that you can then have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0emphasizing individual human agency, it\u2019s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 have access to them, the unenhanced will have to fight to acquire the bioenhancements necessary to stay in the new rat race. This raises the specter of designer babies at considerable cost, which would become a normal expense of parenthood.<\/p>\n The gene-editing tool\u00a0CRISPR-Cas9<\/a>, for instance, has already been used in China to alter nonviable human embryos, ostensibly to see if it can be done. Applications to regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States have been made to experiment with the tool to edit out mutant genes that could cause some severe, mostly very rare, diseases. The history of technological advancement would suggest that if something can be done, eventually some ambitious scientist will do it. So the day is coming when the embryo you and your spouse have created in vitro will be tested for many characteristics, and you might be presented with a menu like this:<\/p>\n It would be up to you to decide if you wanted, for a very high price, to edit the genes of your embryo before it was implanted.<\/p>\n Peter Thiel seems open to over-the-top strategies that might prolong his life. The 55-year-old Thiel told a writer from\u00a0Inc.<\/em>, \u201cI\u2019m looking into parabiosis\u2026This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect.\u201d (In 2017,\u00a0Thiel denied<\/a>\u00a0that he had personally used such transfusions, saying he had not \u201cdone anything of the sort.\u201d) Thiel has also backed the Methuselah Foundation, which sponsors an annual Methuselah Mouse Prize, awarded to the research team that breaks the record for the world\u2019s oldest mouse. A second prize is offered for the team that develops the best late-onset rejuvenation strategy for mice.<\/p>\n Preposterous? Of course. Prolonging the lifespan of organisms in the laboratory is a far cry from extending the lives of human beings by many decades\u2014or reversing the human aging process.<\/p>\n While Thiel contemplates eternal life, the lifespan of many on Earth is getting shorter. And with the acceleration of the effects of climate change, things could get worse\u2014quickly. In his 2021 book,\u00a0A Natural History of the Future<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Rob Dunn<\/strong>\u00a0makes the frightening claim that as the planet warms, the same tropical pests that have plagued the Southern hemisphere will establish themselves in much of the southern United States, for example. They will carry with them \u201csome complex mix of the dengue virus and the yellow fever virus, but also the viruses that cause chikungunya, Zika fever and Mayaro.\u201d In the decades to come, people living in, say, Mississippi may experience earlier death because tropical diseases will be moving north\u2014even as people like Thiel propose having us live to 200 or so. These climate change repercussions are solvable problems. But Thiel\u2019s investments indicate that he may be more concerned with experiments focused on individuals\u2019 personal longevity than in efforts that might more directly impact the lifespans of millions of his fellow citizens in the here and now.<\/p>\n Writing in the\u00a0Journal of Medical Ethics<\/em>,\u00a0Martien Pijnenburg<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Carlo Leget<\/strong>\u00a0try to answer the ethical question of spending millions on life-extension research when so many are dying at a young age: \u201cWith regard to a better society, in a globalizing world as ours is, there is a moral challenge to expand our view of the common good to encompass good for all, worldwide. This expansion inevitably raises the urgent question of whether we can morally afford, as a question of moral integrity, to invest time and money in trying to extend our lives while sidelining the whole issue of unequal death.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the men who coined the term\u00a0transhumanism<\/em>\u00a0(along with Julian Huxley) was English cryptologist Irving John Good. Good wrote in 1965, \u201cSince 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 \u2018intelligence explosion,\u2019 and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.\u201d ChatGPT heads us in that direction.<\/p>\n This vision of the future is so at odds with my beliefs that, to explain the divide, I need to revert to the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his ideas about what made a good and fulfilling life. Epicurus highlighted three elements:<\/p>\n It could be argued that the transhumanists who are building the Metaverse, generative AI, and life-extension technologies apparently don\u2019t care if you achieve any of these goals. If your friends are other avatars whose real identities are cloaked, you don\u2019t have the company of good friends. If you sit home all day wearing your VR helmet (because your job has been assumed by an AI), subsisting on government universal basic income payments, you have neither freedom nor the autonomy to enjoy meaningful work. If much of what you do is based on a virtual fantasy existence, you certainly don\u2019t have an examined life. You will have become a cyborg at the end of reality.<\/p>\n The clear convergence of man and computer raises many ethical issues that we as a society will need to address. But, to date, individual researchers and firms have been left to decide the ethical boundaries. The near-term possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI)\u2014the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can\u2014has led many eminent scientists to worry. In 2012, no less an authority than cosmologist Stephen Hawking weighed in: \u201cFacing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, \u2018We\u2019ll arrive in a few decades,\u2019 would we just reply, \u2018OK, call us when you get here\u2014we\u2019ll leave the lights on\u2019? Probably not\u2014but this is more or less what is happening with [artificial intelligence (AI)].\u201d<\/p>\n As AI analyst\u00a0Eliezer Yudkowsky,<\/strong>\u00a0cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, has observed, \u201cMany 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.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not science fiction. British philosopher\u00a0Toby Ord,<\/strong>\u00a0in his groundbreaking\u00a0The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0describes the following very real scenario that many AI researchers fear:<\/p>\n [The super AI] could then take over millions of unsecured systems on the internet, forming a large \u201cbotnet.\u201d 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\u2014hackers and criminals with human-level intelligence have already done all of these things using just the internet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ord notes that in a 2018 survey of the top AI researchers, \u201chalf the respondents estimated that the probability of the long-term impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI) being \u2018extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)\u2019 was at least 5 percent.\u201d How often do you find a field where a substantial proportion of participants believe that there is a one-in-20 possibility that their work will end life as we know it?<\/p>\n The men (and they are mostly men) 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, \u201cThe 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.\u201d Today the strongest thing in the world is Big Technology. Until we stop worshiping at the temple of Saints Peter or Elon or Zuck or Marc, we will be trapped in the future they want.<\/p>\n\n
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