Taplin, the educator, writer (Move Fast and Break Things), and film producer (Mean Streets, The Last Waltz), is director emeritus of USC’s 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.
Four
very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc
Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.”
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—“the biggest wallets,” to paraphrase
historian Timothy Snyder, “paying for the most blinding lights.”
I call
them 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 percent 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.
I use
the term techno-determinism to 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—crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI,
the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars—is a lie. To
quote Snyder once more, Donald Trump has shown that he “was lying not so much
to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality.” 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.
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 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, 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 Adam Fischer, Israel’s top-ranked venture
capitalist, has pointed out, “Crypto 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.”
The third project involves supporting Elon Musk’s $10 trillion pipe dream of
sending humans to live on Mars.
But of
all the myths the Technocrats peddle, none is more far-fetched than
transhumanism, a concept dear to the heart of Peter Thiel. 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 “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 colonization, and
transhumanism, not to mention 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 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’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.
When
Peter Thiel was three years old, according to his biographer, Max Chafkin, he
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. “Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus
told his son.
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 Ray Kurzweil, famed for his support of the
Singularity, 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.
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 Kurzweil views this singularity with optimism, Bostrom
(and others, including Musk, so he has cautioned) believes we could be heading
toward an existential catastrophe.
I don’t
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. Jaron Lanier, the early
virtual reality (VR) pioneer, makes an eloquent case for resisting
technological enhancement and the Singularity. “The reason to believe in human
agency over technological determinism,” he has noted, “is that you can then
have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If
you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the
same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and
self-determination.”
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.
The
gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, 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:
-Higher-than-average
risk of type 2 diabetes and colon cancer.
-Lower-than-average
risk of asthma and autism.
-Dark
eyes, light brown hair, male pattern baldness.
-40
percent chance of coming in above the 50th percentile in SAT tests (if SAT
tests haven’t been completely abolished by then).
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.
Peter
Thiel seems open to over-the-top strategies that might prolong his life. The
55-year-old Thiel told a writer from Inc., “I’m looking into parabiosis…This is
where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a
massive rejuvenating effect.” (In 2017, Thiel denied that he had personally
used such transfusions, saying he had not “done anything of the sort.”) 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’s oldest mouse. A second prize is offered for the team that develops the
best late-onset rejuvenation strategy for mice.
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—or reversing the human
aging process.
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—quickly. In his 2021 book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob
Dunn makes 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
“some complex mix of the dengue virus and the yellow fever virus, but also the
viruses that cause chikungunya, Zika fever and Mayaro.” In the decades to come,
people living in, say, Mississippi may experience earlier death because
tropical diseases will be moving north—even as people like Thiel propose having
us live to 200 or so. These climate change repercussions are solvable problems.
But Thiel’s investments indicate that he may be more concerned with experiments
focused on individuals’ personal longevity than in efforts that might more
directly impact the lifespans of millions of his fellow citizens in the here
and now.
Writing
in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Martien Pijnenburg and Carlo Leget try to
answer the ethical question of spending millions on life-extension research
when so many are dying at a young age: “With 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.”
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 ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need
ever make.” ChatGPT heads us in that direction.
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:
-The
company of good friends
-The
freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work
-An
“examined life” built around a core faith or philosophy
It could
be argued that the transhumanists who are building the Metaverse, generative
AI, and life-extension technologies apparently don’t care if you achieve any of
these goals. If your friends are other avatars whose real identities are
cloaked, you don’t 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’t have an examined life. You will have
become a cyborg at the end of reality.
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)—the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or
learn any intellectual task that a human being can—has led many eminent
scientists to worry. In 2012, no less an authority than cosmologist Stephen
Hawking weighed in: “Facing 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, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when
you get here—we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not—but this is more or less
what is happening with [artificial intelligence (AI)].”
As AI
analyst Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder 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 groundbreaking 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.
Ord
notes that in a 2018 survey of the top AI researchers, “half the respondents
estimated that the probability of the long-term impact of artificial general
intelligence (AGI) being ‘extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)’ was at least
5 percent.” 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?
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, “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
worshiping at the temple of Saints Peter or Elon or Zuck or Marc, we will be
trapped in the future they want.
***Excerpted
from The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of
the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto by Jonathan Taplin. Copyright © 2023 by
Jonathan Taplin. Printed with permission of Public Affairs, an imprint of
Perseus Books LLC, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, N.Y. All
rights reserved.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/22/how-musk-thiel-zuckerberg-and-andreessen-four-billionaire-techno-oligarchs-are-creating-an-alternate-autocratic-reality/
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