Silicon Valley's 'great replacement theory'
It is no surprise that the appetite for oddball science fiction ideas that gave America everything from Scientology to Heaven’s Gate would be irresistibly drawn to artificial intelligence. The image of Silicon Valley’s enlightened CEOs hotly debating the merits of various paths toward a “transhuman” future — in which AI empowers humans to supersede our “biological substrate” and expand across the universe — is almost funny.
But the vision loses much of its charm when you consider the power these men can wield. And it becomes downright terrifying when prominent members of this cabal are given the keys to the government of the most powerful nation in the world.
Take Elon Musk, who is busy tinkering with the machinery of the federal government, occasionally throwing chunks of it into the woodchipper. Musk has a well-documented affection for “longtermism,” the ethical foundation for the proposition that ensuring the future population of the cosmos by whatever-succeeds-present-day-humans is the moral imperative of the day.
The thought flows from a slightly tweaked utilitarian worldview: We should strive to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of people, no matter whether they live in the present or in the future. If you propose that we could reach the stars and beyond to populate the universe with bazillions of “people” living happy lives, you are left, morally, with no alternative but to devote yourself to ensure that this future comes about.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/12/silicon-valley-artificial-intelligence-ethics/
These clowns sound like a secular equivalent of the rapture cult.
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