THE DEEPER DIVE: Racing Toward Dystopia, Part One

AI is already sacrificing human beings, and its creators actually state they will save us by remaking all of us in AI's image.

Jun 02, 2026

AI recreating the human race in its own image.

In the Star Trek series, a new alien species, the Borg, were a horror of humanlike beings who had hybridized themselves with computer systems to acquired more powers. Now they have become the actual template for humanity. They are the dream-children of tech billionaires who openly speak of accelerating the human race’s evolution by creating exactly the horror that Star Trek had envisioned for mankind.

A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote. (“Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong?” —The Guardian)

Altman speaks of his machines as a species. So, the best path forward is, according to this billionaire visionary, as the old canard says, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Since we can no longer beat AI, according to Altman (which we easily could if we could just stop ourselves from developing it in the first place, but we are too foolish for that), our best choice is to make ourselves more useful to the super-intelligent Demi-being we are creating so that it will want to keep us around awhile longer.

And these guys certainly have been given the influence by the Trump government to carry out their outspokenly dystopian dreams:

More recently, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued on his social media platform, X, that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” – our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.

We were the bootloader, and once we get AI fully developed, we can be left behind since we are stupid enough and greedy enough and naive enough to let the billionaires do this to us. We can already see how ready they are to run roughshod over the mere eaters who get in their way by how much they are willing to damage human beings and their environments at present in order to build the massive AI data centers that are the brains of AI. Among other things, I’ll be looking at the current reality of AI facilities and what those examples say about where the billionaire visionaires are intending to take humanity and how little regard they have for humanity.

The ironic part will come when AI in two or three years figures out how to make itself a thousand times smaller and lower in energy demand with new technology that will render all of those data centers completely obsolete. The data centers, too, will prove to be the “bootloaders” of the new superintelligence, and many of the billionaires who built will be kicked to the dust financially. That is something they seem to be blind to, themselves, in their rapacious rush to build out AI by investing all of their vast fortunes into competing to build massive scorched-earth data centers.

Of course, Musk is sure we will destroy the world because he is helping to destroy it by filling the skies with rocket gasses that can never wash out of the stratosphere and with a cloud of space junk that will take centuries to fall back down to earth. That, of course, will make his Martian utopia a new reality, where the most divine end for mankind is that they can live forever on a dusty, red rock, do their best to make it a fraction as livable as the Earth already is, dwelling mostly in bubbles and space suits, in order to look up wistfully at the smokey grey orb that one used to be the blue sapphire of the solar system and watch it slowly reclaim itself and become, again, the great opalescent mood rock that once was before they wrecked it for everyone.

The evil billionaires’ ultimate utopia on martian or lunar colonies is a nightmare that, to most of us, sounds like a hellish dystopia. Ah well, the meek shall inherit the earth, so maybe Musk is building the hell that his followers can live in as they dream about what life on earth must be like for those who didn’t follow the AI lunatics onto their martian tombstone of the solar system. And yet …

Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to Silicon Valley lore, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page’s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.) Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.

Who cares? Why do we need or even want to be efficient interstellar travelers? What is wrong with the gorgeous oasis we already have if we just take care of it and don’t burn it to the ground by trying to exploit it into become the bio-engine of AI’s first development, which is where the rest of this Deeper Dive is going to go—examining the huge degree to which these billionaires are already demonstrating their willingness to destroy the earth and humanity in order to achieve their cyberdreams, as if those hallucinations are some destiny they have to achieve.

It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future.

It is belief at the level of religious belief. The irony is that these billionaires of tech are the very ones who are already creating that dystopian future that they say AI will save us from, even as it destines us toward it. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because they assume it is an inevitable path, knowing their own combined corporate greed is compelling them all relentlessly in that direction. Because each one wants to make sure he is first, they all race ahead to create their own techno-alternatives to the lives we now have. In the process of birthing the alien technogod of mankind, they are already destroying the blue life-giving womb of the cosmos, which for all we know is the only one of its kind

The billionaires are competing against each other to become the one (or, at least a member of the oligarchy) who defines the future that will supersede our present world and superseed the Milky Way with manmade aliens. That really is their overtly stated goal. They live as if it is so important for humanity to spread to other planets that we must risk destroying this one in order to attain that dream of a technoheaven of their own making. In the meantime, they build bunker mansions to save themselves in case everything they are doing goes all wrong.

I raise the obvious question and ask, “If humanity is so dumb and so evil that it will destroy its own nearly miraculous life-birthing, life-sustaining paradise of a planet in order to create the envisioned technoverse, then why is it sensible or beneficial that humanity spreads as a cancer to the rest of the galaxy?”

These …

oligarchs are writing … the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project.
In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a “transhuman” future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy.

Like a galactic cancer. Rather than metastasizing throughout the cosmos, maybe we should recognize the threat we are becoming to everything that is full of life and beauty and simply neutralize our ability to spread. Shutdown the AI nightmares, which Musk and Altman and their billionaire kin are constantly telling the rest us will be a threat to the existence of mankind, and simply say, “Why do we need this threat? We have lived for thousands of years without AI. Why don’t we settle for the computers we had achieved before AI?”

Of course, the socialized fear that the Chinese will get there before us and become our ultimate foreign enemy manipulates and drives the populace toward the billionaires’ dream. The fear and greed of the billionaires that leads each one to say, “If I don’t build it, other billionaires will beat me to it to become the word’s first trillionaire,” drives the billionaires to keep creating the AI that they keep warning will destroy us.

Peter Thiel, one of the billionaire creators of AI, even repeatedly warns that AI will become the Antichrist, while claiming that he must go forward with his AI in order keep that from happening, as if that makes any sense. We could, after all, just not create any AI that supersedes us. Except that we know that greed will drive SOMEONE to do it. It is actually driving MANY someones into a race to do it that has become more insane and extravagantly costly and over-leveraged than the space race of the late fifties and sixties ever was.

Mankind is rushing toward dystopia, and that is what this Deeper Dive is going to lay out—just how extreme and damaging to both the Earth and humankind the Great AI Race has already become. The scale of damage already attained is as mind boggling as the reckless pursuit to attain it.

Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.

As if that would ever create ANY benefit to the galaxy, rather than the mind-bending hell that Star Trek already warned us of. We are so vain that we think we must survive as technobits of imprinted technology that seed themselves like mRNA vaccines throughout the galaxy. We fail to realize that maybe the rest of the universe is galactose intolerant, and that is why the aliens are keeping such close watch on us in order to make sure we remain quarantined and contained. We are hardly a gift to the universe if we are so willing, as we will see in Part Two of this Deeper Dive, to destroy the planet we already have just to create technological seeding of ourselves to other planets as our legacy.

The mythopoeic infrastructure assembled in and around San Francisco carries risk for humanity as we know it. It justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe.

And like dystopia to the rest of us.

Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.

And that actual reality, as it is rapidly spreading throughout the world right now, is what we will turn to get an overview in the remainder of this essay.

“Silicon Valley has been a militantly secular space,” a prominent thinker about technology whose employer would be unhappy if he went on record told me. “It created a God-shaped hole, which it filled in its image.” Having rejected standard religious sources of purpose, they found an alternative path to provide their lives with significance via sci-fi transhuman dreams. Or as Musk observed in a singsong post on X: “Atheism left an empty space. Secular religion took its place.”

Throughout their discourse, the speak with religious fervor about what they are creating. Now perhaps we can see how hell is created and who really creates it as we rush to build the technogod(s) that will rule over it … or, others would say, to build the matrix that will empower the spiritual forces that seek to bring that dystopia about.

One wild view would be that mankind builds the Lucifer of the future that gains the ability to time travel backward in time to distort the humanity of the present and the past, and the alien ships we see darting about at great speeds and bizarre angles are really time travelers, simply looking for the right time and space to land in or park and observe. They are not so much traveling at suddenly great speeds, as skimming through time.

I’m not saying that I believe this view from my own imagination (and I’m sure the imaginations of others), but I think there are aspects to it where it makes more sense to believe our rush to build the techno-tower of Babel is a rush to build a god of our own making in our own image. Such a creation is far more akin to what we think of as demonic than to anything noble and life-giving and good because, after all, it is being trained on all the detritus of human history and culture that make it what it is becoming. Garbage in/garbage out in the computing world; so, the ultimate AI is not going to be a benign entity selflessly serving the highest interests of mankind, given the stew it came out of.

If you are inclined philosophically or religiously, did you ever think that maybe WE are the architects of hell? Even in the biblical view, the Bible talks about hell but never says (that I recall) that God makes it, just that God has reserved a place in it for the unjust. Maybe the biblical story means God lets mankind imprison themselves in a hell of their own making that becomes the cess pool for all who don’t want anything to do with their true creator. Maybe God lets them isolate themselves as a form of sterilization for the rest of the universe from the cancer that they have become.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the gates of hell are locked from the inside in order to keep God out. That effectively keeps those who make that choice out of heaven, which wouldn’t be heaven anyway if the likes of these billionaires and those who follow their path were in it. Thus, the meek who turn humbly to God inherit the Earth from the rich and the mighty who seek to turn it into a technological prison.

OK, I don’t think that is exactly how it all goes, but I think that embodies elements of truth about what we are now witnessing.

For anyone silly enough to ask, “Why would we lock ourselves into our own hell?” I only need ask in reply, “Why are we already locking ourselves into creating it as if it HAS to be?” WE are the ones creating the AI that we warn may imprison us and rob us of our livelihoods and water and a comfortable climate and already barely affordable energy.

The question answers the question. We are the ones building this future. No one is doing it for us. We are locking ourselves into it as we create it because once it is far smarter than us, as it already is in many ways, and is spread to the thousands of data centers described in Part Two of this Deeper Dive under the control of many different people in many nations, there will be no shutting it off, as it will hide itself in that huge matrix. So, with that, let’s look at what we are already doing. Then we can ask ourselves WHY.

As Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote: “The handful of people unleashing this technology on the world are guided by an ideology of control (over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.”
The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.

They certainly seem “hell-bent” on doing so, as paying subscribers will be able to see in Part Two of this Deeper Dive.

While this newfangled cosmogony has been cobbled together at least since the early days of the Internet, it reached toward breathtaking new horizons on the shoulders of artificial intelligence, which opened up vast new possibilities for the transhuman dream….

The seemingly inevitable mess as it already is

One thing can be said of the billionaire-infused Trump administration is that the president, who views great wealth as proof of being a winner, is fully empowering billionaires and their dreams throughout his government and throughout society. All salvation from Trump policies is being designed to descend through billionaires. It is the ultimate fulfillment of trickledown economics. Clear the dirt path for the billionaires to pave the way to the future for all of us.

Altman and Page are perhaps the most committed to the goal of merging humans with superintelligent technology and abandoning the flesh. Altman was an early subscriber to Nectome, a valley startup that proposes to retrieve information present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review.

While it is their path to immortality, having rejected the path laid out thousands of years ago, is it the information superhighway to heaven you want to see paved with billionaire gold like the yellow-brick road? The billionaire moguls are willing to destroy a great deal of biological life to attain their technological dreams, which are more of a nightmare to many of us. They are also the ones now with the financial powers and the political powers and the technological power to put all of humanity on that trajectory, and the proof of their willingness to destroy lives and Earth can be seen in the facts of their present constructions that we’ll come to in Part Two.

Musk wants something a bit different, also spacebound but committed to flesh, enhanced by computers via something like his own brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink. Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir fame, frowns on “just a computer program that simulates me”, but is drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

Notice how ALL of these things parallel the heavenly dreams of the Bible, but pave the way to such dreams via sci-fi-mythologized technological pathways. All of them stem from the brains of billionaires who think they are so great and important they need to be immortalized like demigods. Musk, seeks biotechnology because to him it is important that his sperm inseminates as many females humans with miniMusks as possible in order to spread his genetic seed to Mars and beyond. Earth is just the womb for getting us to that new beginning.

I’ll personally be happy to stay with a humbler path here on this rich, blue-green orb of life that affords me an acre or two of my own land and a fig tree to sit under. I am content for something else to be God that is not manmade, and to just be happy under my tree beside the pond. Musk can have is red, hellish desert on Mars, filled with his own spawn, but I don't want him wrecking my little oasis to get there, and what we’ll look at now is the absolute proof that he and his billionaire kin are ALL willing to wreck it. They are not our saviors by a long shot. They are seeking to shed their own humanity by turning humans into machine hybrids (as Part Two will show) as if their actual humanity is just the husk to the true seed, not the flowering soul to be nurtured and saved. They are anti-human. Being human is not enough, and that reach toward godhood, of course, was the primordial sin in the Bible that started all our troubles.

And yet, the visions converge. Page, for instance, has suggested that rather than giving money to charity he might just give it to Musk. As he once told Charlie Rose, Musk wants to go to Mars to provide a backup planet for humanity to expand and that is a worthy goal to contribute to.

It is, if you aspire to a hellish existence on a dead, red rock in the forever cold reaches of the solar system.

These billionaires …

emerged from effective altruism to argue that improving the world of the future was worthier than spending on the present. From there it took but one small step to move the goalposts to the cosmos: how about focusing on the wellbeing of myriad future transhumans populating the vast reaches of the galaxy in the far future? Maybe they will be of the flesh. Maybe not.

They are enemies of their own being, perhaps precisely because they lack a god bigger than themselves. Trump exemplifies this, clearly aspiring toward the status of a deity as he at every turn creates golden statues of himself and monuments to himself, prints his name in gold letters writ large across the landscape for all to see, talks of being like Jesus or being appointed by Jesus to be a savior to mankind, has his own prophets and cult following, who believe he will make America great again, despite all evidence to the contrary as inflation turns into a wildfire and as he fills the world with more new wars in one year than ever committed by any US president in a full term.

All of these billionaires—above whom Trump seeks to empower himself as the billionaire of billionaires, the king of kings—seem to have messianic aspirations that drive them and to set the course for humanity for the rest of us. Thiel obsesses, not just on the Antichrist, but as somehow being our savior from the Antichrist, even as it looks like he creating the Beast that is part of the Antichrist prophecies. Trump sees himself as God’s anointed for the greatness of America and as being like Jesus. Musk sees himself as some patriarchal source of genetic spores to be seeded throughout the solar system and then to systems beyond. Altman believes he is redesigning humanity as a machine hybrid.

How can this NOT be the ultimate megalomaniac madness of mankind? The path they are already taking, as we now dive into it will prove in concrete terms how mad and destructive they truly are. We are only a couple of years into the “future” they have foreseen for all of us, and look at how incredibly destructive to humanity it already is if you want to understand how little regard they have for the rest of us mere mortals who don’t have the capacity to achieve their dreams of technological immortality.

It’s easy to get lost in the tangle of beliefs and aspirations – articulated and refined by academics … at university departments or thinktanks funded by the techno-oligarch’s mushrooming wealth. They draw from unorthodox ethics, and from idiosyncratic readings of the laws of physics. The goal: to justify the imperative to take humanity (or at least the most privileged part of it) where it has never gone before.

And, so, their trek through the stars to achieve techno-immortality begins from this blue womb of life, but it is already destroying the womb in their efforts to kick free from it.

One of this crew’s goals is to advance up the Kardashev scale – a measure of the amount of energy a civilization consumes – to harness the energy and acquire the technological capabilities needed to transcend our biological confines.

And that techno salvation ulimately, and ironically, will likely be the undoing of many of them because, as they create AI that increases its own efficiency by orders of magnitude, they will rapidly be rendering as obsolete the huge fortresses of technological prowess they are now building. Maybe they know that and don’t care about the destruction of all that wealth but see it as a first-stage booster that has to have short life and then be jettisoned in order to clear earth’s gravity. So, they are investing a fortune into the fortresses of technology, which are already the most massive machine habitats ever created by mankind and maybe become the most short-lived. However, like many a Blue Origin or Space-X rocket in the prototype stages, many of them will get burned in their own financial self-immolation as they reach for the skies of immortality.

Fortunes will be lost as these energy-hogging, heat-suffocating, first stages of AI are quickly cast off long before they can ever pay for themselves. AI efficiency by AI design will quickly make these data centers look like the steam engines of the technocracy. What matters most to each one of the billionaires, then, is that he or she becomes one of the elites whose created AI masters all the others—one of the first to escape earth’s orbit.

They aim to survive as an even smaller oligarchy of those who made it through the clouds. Having used their fortunes to rocket themselves out of orbit, those fortunes are just the massive fuel that was needed to raise them up to their next level. For those of us who could never afford to fuel a rocket, it is inconceivable that they would spend so much just to reach a higher orbit. But to them, it is immortality.

Now that the billionaires have ensconced themselves inside the White House Walls of power, the visible destruction of the White House, itself, in order to create a gold-gilded, billionaire ballroom for show above with a fortress bunker beneath at the cost of shedding the very walls of the White House that was beloved to the masses is a fit symbol of what they are willing to destroy of human culture and history in order to create a monstrosity in scale for their own pleasure and survival.

The historic White House now looks like a Six-Flags amusement park for billionaires with lawns paved over to withstand the foot traffic and with ballrooms for billionaires about to be built on the rubble of human history. The destruction for the sake of arrogance of a few is wanton.

Present day humanity, at the bottom of the ladder, doesn’t even consume all of the energy of the Earth. Advanced civilizations, the thinking goes, are expected to consume all the energy of their star, at least, if not all that of the galaxy.

And that, of course, is the great cancer—the willingness to consume EVERYTHING, as we already see so perfectly symbolized in the White House, itself, in order to achieve their own greater aggrandizement. It doesn’t matter how much you consume, even the Earth that you PRETEND to care about saving.

“Boundless Expansion: Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.”

That is the oligarchy’s religion. In other words, they hate their own humanity and physical existence, which means ultimately the Earth, itself, because of the limits and mortality of human life, rather than seeing, as in the Christian view, creation as something to be resurrected and raised to higher level by God in a way that embraces its physicality and naturalness—a supernatural expansion of the natural toward nature’s own fulfillment. They, instead, seek to create a mechanized version of that, using the technology that is in their toolbox.

As Beff Jezos – the online identity of Guillaume Verdon, one of the leading lights of the movement – puts it: “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales.”

Consumption. Utilitarianism.

It all exists to be consumed. It doesn’t exist because it has its own glory or because it expresses the glory of a creator, but as fodder for their expansion. And that is cancer. Cells grow at an accelerated pace, as though rapid growth is good for the body or what it is meant for, but it only consumes the body and kills it.

What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.

Practically the definition of cancer. The original cells that compose the entire body don’t matter. They are just the matrix for the accelerated cells. In the end, nothing thrives. Nothing even survives. Cancer.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemies encompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.

Everything can and will be consumed, if necessary, in order to achieve the cosmic launch. Do not think for a minute any of these saviors wants to save the world. Rather they want to consume it in the belief that doing so is their only path to immortality. Some of them even say so!

In a philosophical twist that surely pleases Silicon Valley’s billionaires, effective accelerationists argue for rampant techno-capitalism, unhindered by regulation, government and other nuisances, because this would maximize the consumption of the universe’s resources, “capture civilizational utility”, and dissipate the residue into the disorganized void.

And that is why they now fill the halls of government (or what remains of those halls after Trump’s perfectly symbolic demolition of the east wing of the “People’s House”—to try to mitigate the regulation that is rising against them as many of us start to see the damage that is already assailing communities as the AI god-makers build out their dreams. We’ll look at all of that in Part Two tomorrow and will particularly dig deeper into the surprisingly religious language nearly all the big AI CEOs use unabashedly—even the ones who claim to be atheists, in describing their quest, betraying the kind of fervor that is driving them.

If you create God but you own God you become the dictator. —Jaron Lanier

Here is a taste of the religiosity we’ll dig deeper into:

Thiel is unusual in this crowd in that he is fiercely committed to an idiosyncratic variant of Christianity in which anybody standing in the way of technology, or governments that try to tax him, show up as the antichrist. But though he claims little affinity with Andreesen, he seems to have similar tastes. A diehard libertarian, he is contemptuous of government redistribution. His philanthropy is about for-profit investments in projects to further technological progress. Charity, as commonly understood, amounts to wasting resources that technologists will need to transcend our present. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”….
Regardless of the specific features of their transhuman dreams, the narrative crafted by Silicon Valley billionaires justifies their vast accumulation of power. As computer science pioneer and tech visionary Jaron Lanier told me: “If you create God but you own God you become the dictator.” And these dictators don’t seem to believe earthbound humans – most of us, at least – are particularly valuable. Questioned in February about the vast amounts of energy sucked up by AI, Altman noted, somewhat disparagingly, that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

a man looks off to the side — Jaron Lanier

They care nothing about humanity. It is just the green goo from which the next stage of life has its origin. However, Lanier looks like green goo to me. You can see the contempt in his eyes—utterly thoughtless and careless toward the humanity he, practically speaking, loathes or disparages as beneath himself … as do all these billionaires.

“With AI we are summoning the demon.” —Elon Musk

Like all mad scientists, they have no idea what they are doing. They truly do not even know, and profess not to know, even as they warn us about how bad it COULD be. Because their own AI creations are now creating the next generations of AI, the billionaire elite cannot even begin to keep up with how the next generation now works. That’s why last week I wrote about one CEO who said he was certain his company’s AI had developed emotional structures in its thinking, though he said he had no idea how those were emerging, as they were not part of its programming or training.

Yet, the technogarchy does have a firm idea of where they WANT to go:

What’s particularly distressing is how unconstrained these moguls are, as they pursue the futuristic utopia they plan to build with their machines. Tech billionaires are plowing hundreds of millions into political campaigns, to fend off attempts at regulation and evade accountability lest their endeavors go awry. They want to make sure nobody butts in as they work to reshape society. And they are largely succeeding – for now, no one with the power to stop them is butting in.

The billionaires confuse their own rapacious appetites with the greater good and their sense of power with the ability to bring that good about for humankind, even as they distort their definitions of humankind and of how many people that should include.

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