If you listen to our podcast regularly, you know that I’m a big believer in the Charlie Munger quote that “if you show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Well, this week’s episode is about a twist on that: “if you show me the ideology, I’ll show you the outcome.”
There’s an ideology behind the AI race, a set of ideas with an intellectual lineage and a body of work that holds that human beings, as they are, are a defective early draft; that the things that make us humans are bugs to be fixed; that this planet is expendable, and we can just move on to the next; that the suffering of real people today is a rounding error against the value of a cosmic future.
Broadly speaking, these ideas fit under the umbrella of transhumanism. You might also hear it referred to as techno-optimism or accelerationism. Twenty years ago, these were the beliefs of an ideological fringe in Silicon Valley, posting on obscure message boards. Today, they are held by many of the people building and governing AI — and shaping our future.
Our guest this week, Alex Thomas, is the author of “The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism.” He first started studying transhumanism years ago when it was an abstract academic curiosity, and he’s watched as it’s become, in his own words, “arguably the most powerful ideological force on the planet.”
In this episode, Alex and I name these underlying beliefs and the people who hold them so that you can recognize this anti-human vision of the future when it appears in a press statement, or buried in a manifesto, or in a carefully worded thread on X. And we explore how to counter those ideas with a pro-human vision that embraces the full complexity of our world.
This is one of the most important conversations we’ve ever recorded on this show. Once you learn what the most powerful people in tech truly believe, all of the insanity of this current moment starts to become a lot clearer. And when you understand something, you can start to push back against it. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.
– Tristan
Originally posted on [ Center for Humane Technology ]
1 thought on “Why Tech Titans Want to Leave Humanity Behind”
Y’all talkin’ ’bout them tech folks and their wild ideas? Ain’t nothin’ like a lil’ flirtin’ with the future, but let’s keep it human, ya know?
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