These billionaires—Altman with his gold and weapons stockpiles, Zuckerberg with his 5,000-square-foot “basement,” Thiel with his New Zealand passport — seem to admit, implicitly, that their vision of progress (including AGI) could lead to disaster.
Ilya Sutskever, with his focus on a “safe” AGI through Safe Superintelligence, seems to want to control an entity that, could be dangerous because it lacks consciousness, does not even know what consciousness is. It seems that we are falling further and further into an era of non-consciousness. Elon Musk, while talking about the “future of consciousness”, is anchored to an idea of technological progress that does not consider those “dimensions beyond”. Even when on X he discusses AGI as an imminent possibility (with Grok 5 that could approach, according to him, a 10% probability of being AGI-like), he does not seem to contemplate that human intelligence can have non-replicable roots A bunker is not enough for Musk, his salvivic way is colonies on Mars.
Ilya Sutskever is considered one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of AI. According to excerpts published by The Atlantic from the new book Empire of AI, part of those plans also included an anti-apocalypse shelter for OpenAI researchers. We will definitely build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever told his team in 2023, a few months before he left the company for good.
“Of course, entering the bunker will be optional,” he reassured OpenAI colleagues, according to people present at the time.
Numerous billionaires are preparing for the end of society. Guns, gold and bunkers galore.
By Maggie Harrison Dupré
Billionaires are (still) preparing for doomsday. AI — the technology that many of them are developing — makes them more paranoid than ever.
Tech billionaires continue to prepare for doomsday. And as the BBC reports, it seems that AI is making some of them more paranoid than ever about the possible collapse of society as we know it. For years, news about the richest preparing for the end of the world has dominated the headlines. In 2023, Wired reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was beginning construction of an approximately 5,000-square-foot underground facility — which Zuck, speaking to Bloomberg, described as just a “small shelter” and definitely not a doomsday bunker — in its sprawling complex in Kauai, Hawaii (which is located, significantly, over a historic burial site).
In 2017, it was reported that Palantir’s founder, Peter Thiel, had obtained a passport to New Zealand, where he owns a large property and intends to flee in the event of a social collapse. Today, the race for AI dominance has ignited a new wave of existential fear among the tech elite — particularly those in the AI industry, who frequently argue about how worried they are that uncontrollable artificial general intelligence (AGI) could bring down the current world order.
Figures such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, who now leads rival Safe Superintelligence, among others, have expressed their concern that a yet-to-be-realized AGI, or an AI system that is generally smarter than humans, could lead human society into irreparable chaos. “We will definitely build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever once told the OpenAI team, according to journalist Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI. Many of these individuals are investing where they express their concerns: Altman, for example, is known to have an arsenal of weapons, gold, vast estates, and other resources that he can call upon in the event of an AI-caused armageddon.” I try not to think about it too much,” Altman told The New Yorker about his fear of the end of the world in 2016. “But I have weapons, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, Israel Defense Forces gas masks, and a large plot of land in Big Sur where I can fly.” To be clear, when — or if — AGI will ever be realized remains uncertain. As Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the BBC, AI industry leaders tend to “move the poles” on their superintelligence predictions. It depends on who you talk to,” Hall added. “The scientific community says that AI technology is amazing, but it is a far cry from human intelligence.”
But AI doesn’t have to be conscious or reach the level of human intelligence to wreak havoc in our social world. If the recent release of OpenAI’s video generation tool, Sora 2, has proven anything, it’s that generative AI is turning the web into an increasingly unreal place to spend time; As the gap between what is clearly digitally generated and what is real continues to narrow, AI will remain a powerful driver of misinformation. In addition, public-facing generative AI tools have already caused profound changes in our interpersonal and even inner worlds, with increasing numbers of minors and adults turning to assistant-like chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AI companions like those found on Character.
AI for therapy, life advice, conversation, friendship, and romance — and, in many cases, they enter into destructive and unhealthy relationships with the emotional AI bot that cause turmoil in their real lives. As a result of obsessive interactions with chatbots, some ended up divorced and in custody battles; others have been left without work and even without a home; others have been involuntarily interned and even imprisoned; even more, including minors, died. The needs of building, training, and powering AI are also having a worrying impact on the environment, and mass job losses due to automation is a real threat that is already affecting many workers. But from Altman to Zuckerberg, many of the billionaires building bunkers and seeking AGI have painted similarly rosy and utopian visions of AI-powered futures, in which all humans, freed from the constraints of work, receive a universal basic income and enjoy life while AI saves the climate and cures disease. In other words, according to many of the dominant forces in the AI market: technology could destroy humanity as we know it, or it could save us all — and which one will come to fruition depends on which specific company will ultimately win the arms race.
And whatever happens to the rest of us? Rest assured, the billionaires pushing the AI race forward have all the property, passports, bunkers, firearms, and gold they could need to deal with the consequences of their own actions.
SOURCE https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/billionaires-preparing-for-end
Thanks to Jeff Wefferson for the link 🙂
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