The question was posed in a safe environment. Douthat, one of the Times’ most reliable conservatives, offered Thiel sufficient context to escape with an easy answer. Douthat prefaced his question by saying: “a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.” He was referencing the movement to radically enhance and evolve humans to achieve immortality. Transhumanist adherents advocate for a range of innovations, from genetic biohacking to uploading our consciousness to a computer to merge with A.I., freezing ourselves through cryonics, and robotically adapting our bodies through expansive bionics that reach the level of cyborgs.
Douthat clearly thought that Thiel would choose human over machine. But Thiel responded with a long hesitation. In a video of the exchange, Douthat—to his credit—is clearly taken aback.
Thiel has long been cagey and ambiguous about his beliefs—likely a strategic play for his career as an investor—but he has clearly been fascinated with transhumanism for a long time. This recent interview, though, seems more direct and dangerous. Thiel seems unwilling to answer the question: Does he eventually want to be a literal, honest-to-god brain in a jar wired to a Macbook Pro?
Yes… That’s been the plan the whole fucking time. I thought we all knew this already?
There is just something about watching the slow, but inevitable collapse of the U.S. and eventually humanity as we know it, due to the very deliberate actions of one billionaire who was born in another country and who has been playing both sides against each other, while all other silicon valley billionaires have just accepted this as inevitable and are holding brainstorming sessions about what they can do following the collapse, rather than just stopping the guy who is orchestrating the whole thing.
Transhumanism is our inevitable fate, but this was all kicked off by a movement thar coerced Americans into believing they had to organize against secular humanism before things got anymore out of hand.
Thank God (can I still say God or do I have to say Thank Thiel?) we didn’t let that happen.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/we-asked-grok-whether-its-new-logo-is-a-broken-cross.html
I fucking hate these people so much!
Yeah, an oracle for the masses is something very convenient.
Just remind me, who had the power - Alexander or his fortunetellers? Caesar or his fortunetellers? Or whether Delphi oracle ever managed to turn the religious part into power?
BTW - I understand how such ideas can be out of sincere desire to help humanity. Magic thinking is natural, and some perception of the world is natural, and evolution is just not fast enough for the technical developments we have.
And what I’d want in the future to account for that (sort of a panopticon, not because I’m an exhibitionist, but because you can’t make a subset of society always tracked and visible without making everyone always tracked and visible ; and lack of banking privacy, for example, in Scandinavian countries doesn’t seem to hurt them that much) might well be worse than what they want. A bit like Zamyatin’s book.
It’s just that “might” doesn’t negate the fact that they are already doing a few very bad things, like genocide. Perhaps their mitigation is just not worth such sacrifices. Perhaps mine is better then.