Many of the wealthiest and most influential people in the tech industry have visions straight out of science fiction: people’s minds uploaded into computers, a relentlessly expanding empire spanning the stars, all needs satisfied, all desires satisfied through the power of unimaginably advanced technology. The tech billionaires regard this as the only good option aside from extinction. They claim that this is just the future as revealed by a close study of technology and its development.
The technology wizards that many seem to admire seem to have spooky views like transhumanism and posthumanism which seek to use technology to transcend the limits of the human condition. Transhumanists think of using biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms to improve performance and capabilities. Posthumanists dream of a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment, and imagine a time when humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is the cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a controversial artificial intelligence think tank. He’s an AI alarmist but envisages a “glorious transhumanist future” if we can avoid extinction by superhuman AI. He believes that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves, transcending humanity and becoming something more. That includes ending illness, aging, death and increasing intelligence and other mental capacities.
He says, “If you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough”. The one thing that could bring this glorious future is the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines that can outperform humans at any task. He thinks such a machine may not be far off. “My sense is that we are zero to two breakthroughs” away from AGI, he says.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, agrees with Yudkowsky that AGI is inevitable and could be coming soon but he sees a radically different future. In an essay on his website, Moore’s Law for Everything, he says, “The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel." In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker writes about the scale of ambitions he seems to indicate in the essay:
Altman apparently wants to make the United States into one enormous company town, with shares in OpenAI replacing the dollar. The US government would become, in effect if not in law, a division of the company, responsible for disbursing company dollars to us, the public. This would, Altman hopes, encourage us to think of OpenAI’s success as America’s success and as our own — Altman explicitly makes this identification in his essay.
All products would come from OpenAI in his proposed future, because in that future AI does literally everything, meaning that the company dollars can only be spent at the company store... Thus, Altman’s promise of goods halving in price every two years would depend solely on his goodwill, because things will cost whatever Altman and the OpenAI board want them to cost. This is a proposal for total capture of the national economy, making Altman functionally the king of the United States and possibly the world.
Mark Andreessen has been one of the central figures in the tech industry for more than thirty years. In early 1993, he suggested a new feature in a software project out of CERN that was only about two years old at the time, known then as the “WorldWideWeb". Andreessen's innovation launched the modern Web. In October 2023, he posted a Techno-Optimist Manifesto pushing the idea that technology could cure essentially all the world’s ills.
He claims that slowing down progress on AI is “a form of murder,” because he thinks an advanced AGI would inevitably save lives. He claims that an intelligence explosion is coming. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in 2023. He seems to think that the mildest regulations of technology is a sort of terror campaign against the likes of him.
He thinks that more people in existence is always good, saying, “Our planet is dramatically underpopulated,” contending that Earth could easily” support more than fifty billion of us, and that humanity’s numbers will surge far beyond that as we take to the stars. “Not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.” For any objections to this assertion, his retort is “shut up and multiply”. This principle has been repeatedly defended by Yudkowsky on his blog LessWrong.
Jeff Bezos has repeatedly said that he wants a trillion people living in space to enable a future of perpetual growth, lest we “stagnate” here on Earth. “I have won this lottery, it’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space,” Jeff Bezos said in 2017. “We need to build reusable rockets, and that is what Blue Origin is dedicated to… taking my Amazon lottery winnings and dedicating [them] to [that].… It’s a passion, but it’s also important."
