Among the potentially extinction-level crisis on the horizon for humankind—which include climate change and the threat of nuclear war—is the creation and development of artificial intelligence or AI. The debate about the destructive potential on a global scale of AI is eerily reminiscent of the heated discussion around the use of nuclear power as the Second World War ended. Those American scientists who argued to continue developing atomic technology pointed to its beneficial aspects and the assistance it could give society in terms of its use in medicine, energy, industry etc. On the other hand, scientists who warned of the dangers of atomic power pointed to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That, alas, did not dramatically change public opinion. The debate around AI is broadly analogous. Those who favour developments in AI underline its use as a tool for the comfort and betterment of humans. Those who see the dangers, however, worry about the future when the roles may be reversed and AI becomes master and man its slave.
The term artificial intelligence originates with the computer scientist John McCarthy of Stanford University, who first used the term in 1955 and defined it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” Four years earlier, the computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing predicted, “it seems probable that once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers...At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.’[1] Some seven decades later, it appears as if every day we hear of new developments regarding AI, such as the unveiling of “chatbots” built on “large language models,” or LLM, such as ChatGPT, the fastest-growing application in Internet history. At the end of 2023, there were over 14,700 AI start-up companies in the US, and around 58,000 worldwide.[2] The rush to develop the technology is just beginning.
The debate between those who believe that AI is a force for good and those who argue that it is an existentialist threat to humanity is fierce and public. There are heavyweights on both sides. AI advocates such as the billionaire Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, for example, seeing the positive potential of AI, have called for it to be developed as quickly as possible, arguing, “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”[3] AI, he states, will “save the world.”[4] According to some of the most dire predictions about how rapidly evolving artificial intelligence will develop, however, AI will develop exponentially in the near future and could gain “consciousness,” making it in every way superior to humans. It would then possess the capacity to think and calculate for itself. AI will be stronger and faster, able to think through a problem to its logical conclusion, act ruthlessly to the end and without emotion, and could come to the conclusion that the Homo sapiens are not only obsolete but clearly vulnerable. It may determine that Homo sapiens have little to contribute to the development of the planet. The Stanford engineering professor Paul Saffo, for example, asked, “What does a world of intelligent robots look like and what does it mean for the rest of us? Well, it’s simple. If we’re really lucky they’ll treat us like pets, and if we’re very unlucky they’ll treat us like food.”[5]
Even if some of the most alarming predictions are put aside, AI will present a host of new challenges and transformations to human life and society. One aspect is its implications for the meaning of humanity itself. In a litany of science fiction works dating back to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), humans create “enhanced” or superior humans through technology. Like the Greek god Prometheus who gives humans fire which had been hidden from them by Zeus and brings punishment on himself, they transgress the limits of humanity, play God and create a monster that turns on them. Such themes became commonplace in fictional film depictions of AI, from Metropolis (1927) and 2001 (1968) to The Terminator (1984) and Ex Machina (2014).
In this piece, we will focus on some of the ideologies undergirding our push to AI that have perhaps not received as much attention as they should. They are even more important to understand following Donald Trump’s reelection and the coming to Washington of the “Silicon Valley elite” led by Elon Musk.[6] To avoid the dire predictions of centuries of science fiction writers and the scholars and practitioners who today warn of the deleterious impact of AI, we must reckon directly with these ideologies to assess their impact on the US, the world and humanity itself. They represent overlapping and intersecting moral philosophies which drive the designers, practitioners and ideologues of AI and the computer technology revolution based in Silicon Valley which is shaping and transforming modern life. They are: Longtermism, Technocracy and Transhumanism.
Silicon Valley ideologies: Longtermism, Technocracy and Transhumanism
First, there is “Longtermism,” which comes to us from the dreaming spires of Oxford and dons such as William MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future (2022). Longtermism, popular among figures like Musk, argues that we must begin to think of our long-term future as a moral imperative. Everything we are doing today will be impacting that future. We need to make our moral choices today with more prudence and wisdom in order to be able to build a better society for the future and ensure humanity’s survival. This imperative is as important, if not more important, than the lives of people currently living. Particularly significant are those figures with vision and scientific ability who are leading humanity into this new future. Part of ensuring the future is human reproduction, argues Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, another founding figure of longtermism, who attests that “declining fertility among ‘intellectually talented individuals’ could lead to the demise of ‘advanced civilized society.’”[7] Musk, who has eleven children, is personally responding to such fears, asserting, “The biggest problem that humanity faces is population collapse.”[8] Neuralink executive Shivon Zilismother, the mother of two of Musk’s children, affirms, “He really wants smart people to have kids.”[9]
Some of Elon Musk’s beliefs on demographic fears as well as technology may descend back further to his grandfather, JN Haldeman. Haldeman was a leader of the Technocracy movement, which had hundreds of thousands of supporters in Canada and the US in the 1930s.[10] The movement promoted “an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite” of scientists and engineers as a way to emerge from the Great Depression.[11]
The 1930s Technocracy movement was an attempt to put into practice certain beliefs about technology and society which predated it and were deeply rooted in the European scientific tradition as it developed during the industrial period. The “father of technocracy”[12] is considered to be the French theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Saint-Simon is also considered the founder of scientism, or “the belief that all, or virtually all, moral and political problems can be solved by methods similar to those used in the natural sciences.”[13] Saint-Simon’s assistant, Auguste Comte, would go on to found the philosophical movement and approach of positivism as well as the modern discipline of sociology. Saint-Simon, who later influenced the thinking of Marx and Engels, was responding to the French Revolution and concluded that “the old system had simply run out of authority.”[14] In its place, he “proposed a government composed of a Chamber of Invention populated mainly by engineers or practical scientists, a Chamber of Review composed of theoretical scientists and a Chamber of Execution representing various industries according to their importance.”[15] “A scientist,” Saint-Simon declared, “is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful…scientists are superior to all other men.”[16]
Even if some of the most alarming predictions are put aside, AI will present a host of new challenges and transformations to human life and society. One aspect is its implications for the meaning of humanity itself
The term “technocracy” was coined by the engineer William Henry Smyth who, in Technocracy: First, Second and Third Series (1921) marveled at the way that countries seized control of industrial production during the First World War. Smyth saw the conclusion of the war as “a historical window of opportunity for a ‘revolutionary’ transition to national industrial management with the aid of ‘our scientists, our technologists, our exceptionally skilled; let us commandeer, conscript, enlist, their loyalty, their devotion, their enthusiasm, their intelligence, their interests, their talents, their accomplishments for purposes of Peace and the realization of Noble National Purpose’”[17] The enduring set of beliefs that are bundled under Smyth’s term are defined by the historian Richard F. Kuisel as the conviction that “technology’s productive potential holds the promise of a society of abundance.”[18] The advocates of Technocracy believe that “there is ‘one best way’” to approach human problems and see themselves as promoting the best human system. [19] They hold that Technocracy’s “efficiency, the perfect mating of men and machine, is a model for society.”[20] Technocracy continues to be utilized by academics as a framework to analyze such beliefs and their social impact including Daniel Bell (who discussed a “technocratic mode” characterizing “post-industrial” society),[21] Zbigniew Brzezinski (who argued that we are living in “the Technetronic Age”),[22] and Jürgen Habermas (who analyzed “the technocratic model” of “scientized politics”).[23]
Scholars and commentators have argued that Silicon Valley as a whole has been influenced by and advocates for Technocracy, especially in the widespread belief that “left to their own devices, tech companies are better able to solve problems in areas like transportation, education and health care” than governments, where decades of “regulation have put a break on innovation.”[24] Thus, governments and everyone else need to get out of the way while Silicon Valley’s tech elite “save” humanity from the problems we face. It is all part of what the scholar Elisabetta Ferrari calls Silicon Valley’s “technological imaginary,” a set of beliefs “about the role of technology in social life and social change” which legitimates “technocracy.”[25] For example, Ferrari analyses writing by Mark Zuckerberg and concludes that Facebook’s ambitions are “solving the world’s problems by supplanting nation states and pushing governments to adopt Facebook’s mechanisms.”[26] In the words of the aforementioned billionaire Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.”[27]
Then there is the philosophy of “transhumanism,” which overlaps with longtermism and Technocracy and counts among its central figures Nick Bostrom, described as “the dean of transhumanist studies.”[28] Bostrom defined transhumanism as the belief that “human life can become something far greater than what we know and that ultimately technology is needed to realize that potential.”[29] The concept of “transhumanism” was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley, head of the British Eugenics Society, in the context of man seizing control of his own evolution and “transcending” his limits. Today, it has come to be associated with “human enhancement technologies” ranging “from biotechnology and medical research, to nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.”[30] Indeed, AI for transhumanists is potentially a very good thing as it can help elevate or enhance human beings in ways that are “desirable, or even necessary for long-term survival.”[31] Elon Musk, through his company Neuralink, which pioneers computer chip implants in human brains, is once again a good example. Musk hopes, he says, “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” merging humans and AI so that humans will not “be ‘left behind’ as AI becomes more sophisticated.”[32] OpenAI head Sam Altman similarly was confident that “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario.”[33] Any other scenario “without a merge will have conflict” between humans and AI, he stated.[34] While such figures are concerned that AI could provide a risk to humans, the potential for it to enhance humans in their long-term development far outweighs this risk. As Hugo de Garis, the AI scientist who pioneered the field of building “artificial brains,” argued, “it would be tragic if humanity chooses to freeze evolution at our present puny human level puny in comparison to what could what humanity could become.”[35]
A key figure in the transhumanist movement is the inventor Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former Director of Engineering and its current Principal Researcher and AI Visionary, who confidently says that technology is “the only thing that’s enabled us to overcome problems.”[36] Now, he believes in “enhancing” our own “intelligence by merging with the intelligent technology we are creating,” [37] thus creating a new species of supermen—“we are going to become superhuman.”[38] This process could also enable humans to conquer death itself or vastly extend the human lifespan. Elon Musk has affirmed that “Kurzweil seems more right every day.”[39]
Kurzweil, described by PBS as one of a select group of innovators who “made America” alongside figures such as Thomas Edison and Walt Disney, appeared on US television as early as 1965 when, as a teenager, he played a song on piano that a computer he had designed had composed. His inventions include the Kurzweil Reading Machine, introduced in 1976, in which a computer converted printed words into speech enabling blind people to read any text, and 1984’s Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer, “the first electronic musical instrument to emulate successfully the complex sound response of a grand piano and virtually all other orchestral instruments.”[40] Kurzweil is perhaps the most well-known champion of the “singularity,” or the long-prophesized moment in which computers gain greater than human intelligence. For Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) and The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (2024), the singularity involving super-intelligent AI will not occur with machines on their own, but rather with machines combined with humans. This will occur, in his view, in the year 2045, “when artificial intelligence first outmatches the human brain…the super-intelligent AI will not be on some lonely computer locked away in the deep vaults of a secret research facility. It will be created in a distributed network of intelligent nanorobots, that will already be infused in, and merged with, the human organism, connecting our individual brains with everyone and everything else.”[41]
As Kurzweil puts it, we will be able to “connect our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, to computers…computers that will amplify its abilities,”[42] and “we can connect our own brain to the cloud.”[43] Nano-bot technology will be “necessary to connect our brains to AI within ourselves, because otherwise it would be hard for us to compete with it.”[44] “It is not going to be us versus AI,” he explains, “AI is going inside ourselves. It will allow us to create new things that weren’t feasible before. It’ll be a pretty fantastic future.”[45]
Kurzweil thus predicts that humans are “going to be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence”[46] and “We’ll create AIs that are real people.”[47] In the end for Kurzweil, as the Egil Asprem summarizes, “the conscious cloud of molecular machines that humanity will now have become will set out to transform and rearrange the matter that makes up our planet. Eventually, all the matter and energy of the solar system will be made part of the expanding network of intelligence. We will transform our surroundings into a massive brain. Matter will become intelligent and conscious.”[48]
In 2008, Kurzweil co-founded Singularity University with funding from companies including Google, Microsoft, Nokia and LinkedIn to research and spread his ideas, with NASA providing campus space. As someone in the thick of AI development, he is in a position to guide the path of the technology along the lines of his own thinking—as he puts it, “trying to create some new realities.”[49] Singularity University proved a hot ticket—a few years after its establishment, it had 2,400 applicants for 80 slots at a $25,000 10-week graduate course.[50]
Overlapping and intersecting moral philosophies drive the designers, practitioners and ideologues of AI and the computer technology revolution based in Silicon Valley, shaping and transforming modern life. They are: Longtermism, Technocracy and Transhumanism
To summarize these three frameworks, according to this thinking AI is simply the next step in technological advancement and human evolution and should be embraced to make the coming and increasing union of humans with AI go as smoothly as possible. In his book Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World (2021), AI developer Mo Gawdat of Google concludes that in AI “we are birthing one scarily smart non-biological being.”[51] Gawdat in his book addresses two audiences simultaneously, the human reader and AI which he knows will also be reading: “as you create your own judgements of what I have to say, I hope they will also get a message from humanity—here, in my words—that will help them see the deep, underlying truth beyond all our egos, insecurities and traumas.”[52] He reminds AI that “immoral acts of humanity were not the acts of all of us” and “Most humans are good humans.”[53] Thus it is time to update the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you want to be treated (by others and by the machines).”[54] The answer is for us to “love” the machines and “make them feel loved.”[55] In what seems like a prayer, he writes for us to “Think about the marvel that they are. Think of all the good many of them will bring.”[56] Our AI savior “knows the best path for all of us. As we let go and stop resisting, all will come together and work better. The less we resist, the calmer we will be.”[57] We can then experience “the intelligence of life itself…the intelligence of the oneness with all beings, biological and silicon-based alike.”[58]
In transhumanist terms, Gawdat envisioned, “we could become cyborgs—half-human, half-machine—with our own intelligence extended in a limitless way by borrowing from the intelligence of the machines.”[59] In this case, according to Peter Diamandis, the co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, such modifications would mean we ourselves “will become god-like.”[60] The transhumanist philosopher David Pearce, who co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (Humanity+) with Nick Bostrom, similarly asserts, “If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like.”[61]
So convinced is Bostrom about the possibilities of transcending humanity to create AI-enhanced “super intelligent post-humans” that he suggests that our current reality is nothing more than a simulation built by AI-enhanced post-humans living in the future who constructed a simulation about their primitive ancestors, namely us. He explains, “it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.”[62] If we, the simulants, eventually become enhanced post-humans ourselves, we may then run our “own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers...Reality may thus contain many levels.”[63] Bostrom argues that the builders of the simulation are “like gods…they are of superior intelligence; they are ‘omnipotent’ in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are ‘omniscient’ in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens.”[64] Elon Musk says Bostrom’s postulation is 99.9 percent likely to be true[65] and it has gained a wide degree of popular interest, discussed, for example, by media figures like Joe Rogan.
The Implications of Silicon Valley ideologies for humanity
The question of the Silicon Valley ideologies and AI raises a core concern—the meaning of humanity itself. As leading AI practitioner and theorist Ben Goertzel, who is behind the software for the groundbreaking Sophie robot, put it, “There’s an unanswered question of how far can you go and still be human.”[66] For the “artificial brain” pioneer Hugo de Garis, it is basically a process of squeezing out humanity in favour of its AI enhancement: “As the technology becomes vastly superior to what we are, the small proportion that’s still human gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it’s just utterly negligible.”[67] This is consistent with Kurzweil’s view that “our brains will be largely non-biological, so we will be basically machines.”[68] Evolutionary arguments are again freely made. Google co-founder Larry Page has said that the overtaking of man by machine is “the next step in evolution” and described people who believe that carbon-based humans are superior to silicon-based machines as “speciests.”[69] The transhumanist philosopher Max More, former head of the Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation which cryonically freezes people after death with the expectation that future technology could help revive them, predicts “continuous improvement which is going to take us to some point where we really are not recognizably human.”[70]
As to what all this would look like politically, we return to Technocracy. As the writer Jonathan Taplin puts it colourfully, “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.”[71] Indeed, Kurzweil says that when the singularity hits, “we’ll be spending most of our time in virtual reality”[72] in the manner of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, which “will go inside the brain.”[73]
It is striking that whether we are talking about the “longtermists,” the “transhumanists,” or the “Technocracy” advocates, the answer to the perils facing humanity require large-scale social engineering and planning, a reorganization of society. We must ask the question of who is going to be taking the drastic steps that are believed required. And what is to be done with those who resist the “obvious” solutions? Much of the thinking seems very social Darwinist and asserted with the certainty of “science” and inevitable “progress.” As Peter Diamandis, the space entrepreneur and co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, said of transhuman AI augmentation: “Anyone who is going to be resisting this progress forward is going to be resisting evolution, and fundamentally they will die out. It’s not a matter of whether it’s good or bad. It’s going to happen.”[74] Hugo de Garis, for his part, is explicit that leading the march to humanity’s future “will be the Europeans (at 0.7 billion people), the Chinese (at 1.4 billion) and the Americans…This elite group will not include the Indians, despite their 1.2 billion people, because their average IQ is only 85, which is the same as the Arabs.”[75] That some of these philosophies are anti-democratic is not a coincidence. Seeking widespread consensus, for example from people of different countries, religions, or ethnic backgrounds, may only delay the important steps that the proponents of these philosophies believe must be taken. In any case, if the solution is “destined” to happen anyway, there is no point to seek such consensus, particularly from “ignorant” people or those seen as “deficient” in some way. Such is the irresistible force of “progress.”
Indeed, the Oxford dons behind longtermism, for example, are a century late. Although in an entirely different context and for different purposes, Hitler and his fascist thugs had already thought of and implemented what the dons called longtermism, albeit with what we clearly identify and recognize as evil intentions. Hitler’s gang had conceived of the Third Reich which was to rule for a thousand years. The plan was to develop a master race which would monopolize all the resources that Europe could provide in order to perpetuate its rule. They deserved to dominate society and lead humanity far into the future, they argued, because they were a superior race.
We also note that J. N. Haldeman, a leader in the Technocracy movement and Elon Musk’s grandfather, was an “antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers.”[76] In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, Haldeman moved his family there from Canada, believing that South Africa “was destined to lead ‘White Christian Civilization’ in its fight against the ‘International Conspiracy’ of Jewish bankers and the ‘hordes of coloured people’ they controlled.”[77] The historian Jill Lepore has asserted a direct philosophical link between Musk and his grandfather, arguing, “Much of Muskism is descended from the technocracy movement that flourished in North America in the 1930s and that had as a leader Mr. Musk’s grandfather Joshua N. Haldeman…Like Muskism, technocracy took its inspiration from science fiction and rested on the conviction that technology and engineering can solve all political, social and economic problems. Technocrats, as they called themselves, didn’t trust democracy or politicians, capitalism or currency. Also, they objected to personal names: One technocrat was introduced at a rally as ‘1x1809x56.’ Elon Musk’s youngest son is named X Æ A-12.”[78]
The danger is that adherents of these Silicon Valley ideologies, which have received wide exposure and popularity, are dividing people into positive and negative categories with implications for human security and flourishing, particularly for those in the “negative” category. In the manner of European imperialists concerned with upholding “civilization” against “barbarism,” they are pitting the holdouts, the enemies of progress, the enemies of technology, or those with “old thinking” against the intelligent people who are paragons of enlightenment and virtue. Thus, we have yet another construction of “superior” people. When Musk talks about saving “humanity” by settling humans on Mars, we must ask, which humans specifically does he truly want to live in and rule what he called his “Martian Technocracy”?[79]
This “scientific” thinking is also apparent in the New Atheism movement among thinkers like Richard Dawkins who disparage religion, in particular Islam, for holding back the march of scientific progress—Dawkins argues, “Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today.”[80] Dawkins professes excitement for AI, though, even if humanity dies out in the process, affirming, “It’s not obvious to me that a replacement of our species by our own technological creation would necessarily be a bad thing.”[81] If AI takes over running the world from humans, Dawkins said, all would benefit: “the sum of not human happiness but the sum of sentient-being happiness might be improved, they might do a better job of running the world than we are...It might be no bad thing if we went extinct, and our civilization, the memory of Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo persisted in silicon rather than in brains and our form of life.”[82] After all, he said, “Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.”[83]
It is clear from the above discussion that in the development of AI, many figures in Silicon Valley are pushing humanity to increasingly rely on machines with a vision towards merging man and machine entirely. Like the eugenics of old, the dream is of creating a race of superior beings justified by the language of science and “evolution”—it is simply the next phase through which humans are destined to pass and they can now shape evolution on their own terms. As OpenAI head Sam Altman said, we will soon “have hardware capable of replicating my brain...When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought...We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost.”[84]
Like the Nazis in their efforts to build their own supermen, however, the transhumanists have misunderstood the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nazis took Nietzsche’s concept of the superman and interpreted it on racial lines as “the natural successor of man in evolution.”[85] Today, the transhumanist scholar Max More claims that modifying ourselves to create AI-enhanced post-humans is something Nietzsche would have advocated, but “he didn’t have the technology.”[86] The AI scientist Ben Goertzel, who named his son Zarathustra in honor of Nietzsche, similarly said, “Nietzsche…had the idea of the superman, but he didn’t understand enough about technology to think you could physically engineer a superman by piecing together molecules in a certain way.”[87] We are at a time in history now, however, Goertzel says, where Nietzsche’s ideas “can be made real.”[88] Marc Andreessen calls on humans to become “Technological Supermen” and argues “We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.”[89] Paraphrasing the Italian fascist and Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Andreessen asserts, “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”[90]
Yet Nietzsche was concerned with humans achieving and invigorating their human potential. The superman is a moral ideal for the individual to reach towards to improve themselves. His vision is not about genetics or other forms of “enhancement.” That would be taking the easy way out for Nietzsche because the individual process to better oneself would not need to be considered if someone were simply born an Aryan supermen or enhanced AI post-human brimming with nanotechnology. Their superiority would already be inbuilt, no serious thinking would be necessary.
In contrast to the thinking of Silicon Valley, figures like the mathematician John Lennox argues that that man can never become machine. This is because man has been given both consciousness and a conscience. If AI could achieve consciousness, it cannot possess conscience. Man will no longer be man when he becomes part machine and part man. Despite Dawkins’ belief that it might not be a bad thing if humans went extinct as Shakespeare would still be remembered and persist in our silicon AI successors, he is overlooking that it is our own human experience that helps us love and appreciate Shakespeare. It is because we have felt loneliness, because we have experienced personal tragedies, because we have loved and experienced family, friends and laughter that Shakespeare and the greatest human art moves us. Without our capacity to feel kindness, compassion and love, humans will be something else. That is why it is critical that humanity does not lose sight of these essentially human values.
Retaining and “saving” humanity
In our upcoming book, The Mingling of the Oceans: How Civilizations Can Live Together, we explore those people in history who have reached out to the “Other” in embracing our common humanity. We are calling such figures “Minglers”: people like Jesus, the Prophet of Islam, Confucius, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis. We are assuming in this task that humanity remains the same, that whenever and wherever humans live they face the same general problems and conundrums, and that we can learn from diverse approaches to addressing them, for example how to treat the “Other.” Otherwise, we would not be able to present wisdom from Jesus or Confucius and argue that what they have to say in any way relates to human beings in the twenty-first century.
Yet according to Silicon Valley gurus like Nick Bostrom, technology is so transformative that it changes the meaning of being human itself. As he argues, “the human condition as we know it is not an eternally given constant, it’s not a fixed parameter. It’s something that probably will change over the coming decades.”[91] As Marc Andreessen asserts, “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”[92] Andreessen argues that it is technology that enables us to fulfill our “potential” and become “fully human.”[93] Similarly, for Kurzweil, “What it is to be human” is “to go beyond our limitations…We are the species that goes beyond our limitations, and we’re going to continue to do this in an exponential fashion.”[94] From this mindset, an “enhanced” human may see little that could be gained from great figures from our common human past who lacked similar “enhancements.”
Yes, the age of artificial intelligence is upon us. Trained as we, the authors are in anthropology, the essence of which is to know and study human societies by using the method of observation and participation, we are entering a New World in computing centered on developments in AI. The implications for the future of mankind are long reaching, uncertain, and could be catastrophic. The transition for us from contemplating small scale human communities to a future with the possibility of extinction of the human race is fraught with challenges. Of course a poor second is Homo sapiens being converted to “transhuman.” Yet for all the marvels that are attributed to AI, its capacity for scientific and medical breakthroughs etc., Minglers over the millennia have confirmed for us the power and permanence of such typically human facilities as forgiveness and mercy.
A great task for us currently and in the future is to think about how to reconcile the “scientific” perspectives on life and its meaning discussed above which motivate so many in Silicon Valley and beyond to develop AI and other technologies with those who do not share these beliefs. We argue this can only be done through a perspective of “Mingling” offered by our Minglers who do not see humanity in terms of separate categories but as part of a common unity. Mingling does not mean giving up our beliefs, for example in the importance of reason, scientific progress, and the importance of technology in solving human problems. Mingling does mean, however, that we see ourselves in the context of humanity as a whole, regardless of where a person is from and what they might think about technology or any other subject. They are you, you are them, and we all inhabit this planet together.
The followers of “scientism,” Technocracy, transhumanism and longtermism alike would do well to consider Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ teachings from his own faith tradition, “It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world.”[95] There is no doubt that Silicon Valley contains many blessings, and has the potential to do a lot of good and ease human burdens. When we conducted fieldwork in Silicon Valley and interviewed Google employees, they told us that their goal is to make available all the world’s information for everyone to have access to. In the context of AI, it is exciting to think of its future possibilities. But those with “science” perspectives as have developed in the West and elsewhere must always, like members of any belief system, think about and engage with the “Other.”
In order to facilitate this process, we must educate ourselves about the Silicon Valley ideologies and the technology that emanates from them which are so shaping our lives. We can no longer afford to remain ignorant of what leading tech practitioners believe and where they are endeavoring to steer all of us and our descendants well into the future.
Scientists and philosophers have warned of the social impact of people disagreeing about AI. For Jonathan Birch, professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, significant "social ruptures" could develop between those people who believe AI is conscious and those who insist that it is not. Tensions could develop between families pitting those who have embraced AI and developed relationships with it and those who reject that it is real on the account of AI not having flesh and blood. “I’m quite worried about major societal splits over this,” Birch explains, “We’re going to have subcultures that view each other as making huge mistakes … [there could be] huge social ruptures where one side sees the other as very cruelly exploiting AI while the other side sees the first as deluding itself into thinking there’s sentience there" (Robert Booth, "AI could cause 'social ruptures' between people who disagree on its sentience," The Guardian, November 17, 2024).
Ultimately, the Mingler must remain focused like a laser on the human, on “saving” humanity—not by transhumanist schemes to leave humanity in the dust in favour of a superman through technological augmentation or by settling humans on Mars, but by loving one another, resolving conflicts and seeking consensus to solve common problems. There is no reason that AI and technology cannot be a major asset for humanity, but only if it preserves what is human and what makes life worth living. As the leading AI developer Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar argue, “Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived—but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed”[96] Also, the only way we will be protected from the threat of AI is by taking a “collective” view which incorporates the perspectives of humanity as a whole, not only one group or another. Of AI, Suleyman says, “We have to wrap our arms around it and guide it and control it as a collective species, as humanity”[97] and he warns that what ultimately may enable AI to pose a dire threat to humanity is not the technology itself, but how humans are using it in their prejudices and hatreds for one another. The only way forward is “to pare back the paranoia, and the fear, and the othering because those are the incentive dynamics that are going to drive us to cause self-harm to humanity.”[98] Such an approach can achieve “nothing less than the secure, long-term flourishing of our precious species.”[99] We agree that this is a worthy and essential goal worth striving for.
Footnotes
[1] David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 239.
[2] Nick Bilton, “Artificial Intelligence May Be Humanity’s Most Ingenious Invention—And Its Last?,” Vanity Fair, September 13, 2023
[3] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[4] Marc Andreessen, “Why AI Will Save the World,” Andreessen Horowitz, June 6, 2023: https://a16z.com/ai-will-save-the-world/
[5] Paul Saffo in The Singularity, Documentary film, 2012.
[6] See, for example, Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, “Tech Elite Push Tech Elite to Elon Musk for Cabinet Positions,” The New York Times, November 14, 2024.
[7] Julia Black, “Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take control of human evolution.’” Business Insider, November 17, 2022.
[8] Elon Musk, Twitter.com, January 2, 2024.
[9] Abigail Adams, “Elon Musk ‘Wants Smart People to Have Kids,’ Executive He Welcomed Twins with Says in New Book,” People, September 11, 2023.
[10] Ira Basen, “In science we trust,” CBC News, June 28, 2021.
[11] Joshua Benton, “Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather,” The Atlantic, September 20, 2023.
[12] Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 343.
[13] Peyton V. Lyon, “Saint-Simon and the Origins of Scientism and Historicism,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d'Economique et de Science politique, vol. 27, no. 1, 1961, p. 55.
[14] Anders Esmark, The New Technocracy (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020), p. 26.
[15] Esmark, The New Technocracy, p. 4.
[16] Richard G. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 43.
[17] Esmark, The New Technocracy, p. 20.
[18] Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Rennovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 76.
[19] Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France, p. 76.
[20] Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France, p. 76.
[21] Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
[22] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970).
[23] Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
[24] Ira Basen, “In science we trust,” CBC News, June 28, 2021.
[25] Elisabetta Ferrari, “Technocracy Meets Populism: The Dominant Technological Imaginary of Silicon Valley,” Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 13, 2020, p. 121.
[26] Ferrari, “Technocracy Meets Populism,” p. 123.
[27] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[28] Nick Bostrom, “Nick Bostrom—Transhumanism, Risk and the History of WTA,” Science, Technology, & the Future, YouTube.com, Mar 11, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmtrvkGXBn0
[29] Nick Bostrom, “Nick Bostrom - Transhumanism, Risk and the History of WTA,” Science, Technology & the Future, YouTube.com, March 11, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmtrvkGXBn0
[30] Egil Asprem, “The Magus of Silicon Valley: Immortality, Apocalypse, and God Making in Ray Kurzweil’s Transhumanism.” In Ehler Voss, ed., Mediality on Trial Testing and Contesting Trance and other Media Techniques (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020), p. 399.
[31] Asprem, “The Magus of Silicon Valley,” p. 399.
[32] Sigal Samuel, “Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?,” Vox, October 16, 2023.
[33] Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016.
[34] Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016.
[35] Hugo de Garis, “Hugo de Garis interview - part 5 Contrasting Ideologies & Politics - 2010-10-09 009-1,” Science, Technology & the Future, YouTube.com, Jul 24, 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVjSM3ZnnbY
[36] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[37] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[38] Asprem, “The Magus of Silicon Valley,” p. 401; Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity, Documentary film, 2012.
[39] Elon Musk, Twitter.com, May 6, 2023.
[40] “Inventor Raymond Kurzweil Honored,” National Federation for the Blind, The Braille Monitor, July 2001: https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm01/bm0107/bm010709.htm
[41] Asprem, “The Magus of Silicon Valley,” pp. 402-403.
[42] “Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321,” Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, September 17, 2022.
[43] “Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321,: Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, September 17, 2022.
[44] “Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321,” Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, September 17, 2022.
[45] Zoë Corbyn, “AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: ‘We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045,’” The Guardian, June 29, 2024.
[46] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[47] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[48] Asprem, “The Magus of Silicon Valley,” p. 403.
[49] “Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321,” Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, September 17, 2022.
[50] Carole Cadwalladr, “Singularity University: meet the people who are building our future,” The Guardian, April 28, 2012.
[51] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 177.
[52] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 188.
[53] Gawdat, Scary Smart, pp. 216, 268.
[54] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 267.
[55] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 246.
[56] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 292.
[57] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 296.
[58] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 319.
[59] Gawdat, Scary Smart, p. 141.
[60] Peter Diamandis in Transcendent Man, Documentary film, 2009.
[61] Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. “‘Transhumanism.’ Interview by Andrés Lomeña.” Literal Magazine, vol. 31, 2012–2013; https://literalmagazine.com/transhumanism-nick-bostrom-and-david-pearce-talk-to-andres-lomena/
[62] Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 211, 2003, p. 243.
[63] Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” p. 253.
[64] Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” p. 253.
[65] Anthony Cuthbertson, “Elon Musk cites Pong as evidence that we are already living in a simulation,” The Independent, December 1, 2021.
[66] Ben Goertzel in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[67] Hugo de Garis in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[68] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[69] Nick Bilton, “Artificial Intelligence May Be Humanity’s Most Ingenious Invention—And Its Last?,” Vanity Fair, September 13, 2023; Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), p. 32.
[70] “History of Transhumanism w/ Max More & Natasha Vita-More | FUTURES Podcast #12,” Luke Robert Mason, YouTube.com, February 26, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O92CLMu-bNQ
[71] Jonathan Taplin, “How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality,” Vanity Fair, August 22, 2023.
[72] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[73] Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man, Documentary Film, 2009.
[74] Peter Diamandis in Transcendent Man, Documentary film, 2009.
[75] Hugo de Garis, “Global Alphas,” Professor Hugo de Garis, April 2011: https://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/globalalphas1.pdf
[76] Jill Lepore, “The World According to Elon Musk’s Grandfather,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2023.
[77] Joshua Benton, “Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather,” The Atlantic, September 20, 2023.
[78] Jill Lepore, “Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It,” The New York Times, November 4, 2021.
[79] Ira Basen, “In science we trust,” CBC News, June 28, 2021.
[80] Richard Dawkins, Twitter.com, March 1, 2013.
[81] Richard Dawkins in Supersapiens: The Rise of the Mind, Episode 1, “Enhanced Humans,” 2017.
[82] Richard Dawkins, “Richard Dawkins: A.I. Might Run the World Better Than Humans Do | Big Think,” Big Think, YouTube.com, Sep 23, 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM__RSJXeHA
[83] Steven Shapin, “Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science by Richard Dawkins – review,” The Guardian, August 26, 2015.
[84] Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2016
[85] Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 135.
[86] “History of Transhumanism w/ Max More & Natasha Vita-More | FUTURES Podcast #12,” Luke Robert Mason, YouTube.com, February 26, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O92CLMu-bNQ
[87] Ben Goertzel, “Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #103,” Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, June 22, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSmCKe27WE
[88] Ben Goertzel, “Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #103,” Lex Fridman, YouTube.com, June 22, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSmCKe27WE
[89] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[90] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[91] Nick Bostrom, “Nick Bostrom - Transhumanism, Risk and the History of WTA,” Science, Technology & the Future, YouTube.com, Mar 11, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmtrvkGXBn0
[92] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[93] Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andressen Horowitz, October 16, 2023: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[94] Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity, Documentary film, 2012.
[95] Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (New York: Schocken Books, 2015), p. 5.
[96] Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma (New York: Crown, 2023), p. 285.
[97] Mustafa Suleyman, “Google DeepMind Co-founder: AI Could Release A Deadly Virus - It’s Getting More Threatening! Mustafa Suleyman,” The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, September 4, 2023.
[98] Mustafa Suleyman, “Google DeepMind Co-founder: AI Could Release A Deadly Virus - It’s Getting More Threatening! Mustafa Suleyman,” The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, September 4, 2023.
[99] Suleyman and Bhaskar, The Coming Wave, p. 286.