The tech billionaires are still doomsday prepping. And as the BBC reports, it seems that AI is making some of them more paranoid than ever that society as we know it might soon crumble.
For years now, reports of the wealthiest bracing for the end of the world have dominated headlines. In 2023, Wired reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was breaking ground on a roughly 5,000 square foot underground basement facility— which Zuck, while speaking to Bloomberg, characterized as just a “little shelter,” and definitely not a doomsday bunker — on his sprawling compound in Kauai, Hawaii (which notably sits on top of a historic burial site.) Back in 2017, it was reported that Palantir founder Peter Thiel had obtained a passport for New Zealand, where he owns a massive property and intends to flee in the case of societal collapse.
These days, the race for AI dominance has ignited a new wave of existential fear among the tech elite — particularly among those in the AI industry, who frequently discuss how worried they are that uncontrollable artificial general intelligence (AGI) will cause the current world order to crumble.
Figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who now helms the rival AI firm Safe Superintelligence, among others, have voiced their concern that still-unrealized AGI, or an AI system that’s generally more intelligent than humans, will send human society into irreparable chaos.
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever reportedly once told the OpenAI team, according to the journalist Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI.
Many of these folks are putting their money where their mouths very often are: Altman, for instance, is known to have a stockpile of guns, gold, sprawling properties, and other resources he can turn to in the event of AI-inflicted armageddon.
“I try not to think about it too much,” Altman told The New Yorker of his end-of-the-world dread back in 2016. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
To be clear, when — or if — AGI might ever be realized remains unclear. As Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at Southampton University, told the BBC, AI industry leaders tend to “move the goalposts” on their superintelligence predictions.
“It depends who you talk to,” Hall added. “The scientific community says AI technology is amazing, but it’s nowhere near human intelligence.”
But AI also doesn’t have to be conscious or achieve human-level intelligence in order to cause chaos in our social world. If the recent release of OpenAI’s video-generating tool Sora 2 has demonstrated anything, it’s that generative AI is turning the web into an increasingly unreal place to spend time; as the gap between what’s clearly digitally-generated slop and what’s real continues to close, AI will remain a powerful engine of misinformation.
What’s more, public-facing generative AI tools have already wrought profound changes on our interpersonal and even interior worlds, as more and more minors and adults alike 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, enter into destructive, unhealthy relationships with the emotive AI bot that cause tumult in their real lives.
Following obsessive interactions with chatbots, some have ended up divorced and in custody battles; others have ended up jobless and even homeless; others have been involuntarily committed and even jailed; even more, minors included, have died. The demands of building, training, and powering AI are also taking troubling tolls on the environment, and mass job loss due to automation is a real threat that’s already impacting many workers.
But from Altman to Zuckerberg, many of the bunker-building, AGI-seeking billionaires have painted equally rosy, utopian visions of imagined AI-powered futures, in which all humans, freed of the constraints of work, collect universal basic income and enjoy life as AI saves the climate and cures disease. In other words, according to many of the most dominant forces in the AI marketplace: the tech could destroy humanity as we know it, or it could save us all — and which comes to pass is up to whether their specific company ultimately wins the arms race.
And no matter what happens to the rest of us? Rest assured, the billionaires propelling the AI race forward have all the property, passports, bunkers, firearms, and gold they might need to ride the consequences of their own actions out.
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