No-Fun-Damentalism
It’s the end of the world.
Probably.
I haven’t checked. The truth is that I’ve survived so many apocalypses at this point in my life that I stopped keeping score. I know we were due one in the last few months, but there’s a whole Wikipedia list of predictions for the End Times and, at least at the time of writing, none of them have come true.
There was the end of the Long Mayan Calendar in 2012, which people who don’t understand calendars believed was a portent of the end of the world - these same people presumably panic every December 31st - and although we got a movie adaptation, there was no actual doomsday. There was the Millennium, obviously, but the idea that Jesus is due back any minute has become increasingly unconvincing with a quarter century of hindsight.
There’s even a local apocalypse. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a spiritualist cult that sprang up in the late Victorian era when spiritualism was all the rage, built a temple in the town where I work that still stands today, and is inhabited by what we’d politely call some local eccentrics. The Hermetic Order predicted that the world would end in 2010, although from what I remember of that year, it didn’t. This presumably didn’t trouble the Golden Dawn, as their organisation disbanded in 1903.
My personal favourite apocalypse predictions are the ones that attempt a double-or-nothing bet when they fail. Harold Camping, an American televangelist, predicted that the Rapture would occur on May 21st 2011. Hilariously, when an interviewer called to question him about his prediction a few days beforehand, they reported that they could hear the cleaning lady at work in the background. The world might be coming to an end, but that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t vaccuum the office.
When the Rapture failed to spirit away the most devout 3% of the population as Camping had predicted, he pivoted to saying that May 21st was simply the date where God’s judgement was set in motion, and the REAL end of the world was going to be the following October.
It didn’t.
A smarter operator than Camping was Jeane Dixon, a psychic who predicted the start of World War 3 in 1958 and the end of the world in February of 1962. When Armageddon failed to materialise, she hedged her bets and said that the ACTUAL date of the apocalypse would be 2020, when she would have been 116 years old. She didn’t make it, obviously, dying of a heart attack at 94, although her last words were allegedly “I knew this would happen,” implying she wanted credit for successfully predicting the only thing in life that’s completely certain.
The Church Of God Preparing For The Kingdom Of God has had an embarrassing run of late, predicting the return of Christ and the Final Judgement for 2008, then 2012, then 2013, then 2019, and now just “sometime soon.”
The dread planet Nibiru (a 10th planet - or 9th since Pluto’s demotion - that is drifting somewhere out in the depths of the solar system, hidden from view) was due to collide with earth in May 2003 according to one woman whose brain implant let her talk to aliens, in 2012 according to some of the 2012 doomers mentioned above, and in 2017 according to conspiracy theorist David Meade, who later updated his prediction to 2018 with the same lack of result.
A quick scan of the Wiki tells me I’ve survived something like sixty-three separate apocalypses in my own lifetime. That’s about one and a half doomsdays for every year I’ve been alive, although the various predictions about 2000 and 2012 are admittedly skewing the figures.
I started thinking about this because I’ve been reading Adam Becker’s excellent book “More Everything Forever”, which examines the current trends in Silicon Valley to predict sweeping changes and utopian futures based on very little actual evidence.
Some big names in Big Tech are convinced that pretty soon, human beings will invent intelligent computers, which will rapidly become so intelligent that they will solve all of the world’s problems for us. Or turn against humanity and wipe us all out, if we’re not careful. Assuming the former option, they believe that mankind can spread out across the galaxy and that this means a potential human future of perhaps trillions of people, all thriving joyously because the A.I has fixed everything.
Therefore, the logic goes, if we’re not spending all of our time attempting to create superhuman A.I., we’re robbing all those potential future humans of life. This means that all other considerations should be secondary to building A.I., because any suffering occurring right now on earth is only happening to a tiny fraction of all of the humans who might ever live happily ever after, and is basically inconsequential as a result.
The argument is similar if the A.I. turns evil - if we make an A.I. that decides to wipe us out, Terminator-style, then this is the main existential threat to humanity and should be treated as more serious than climate change or nuclear war or anything else. Either way, the potential for super-smart A.I. should be the only thing humanity is concerned with.
Any serious interrogation of these ideas should make it obvious that this is just religion under another name - old (sacramental) wine in new bottles. In the same way that the Christian church, draped in gold and finery, conveniently preached that lay people need not concern themselves with injustice or suffering because soon God would fix everything for them after they were dead, so the tech billionaires, bathed in equivalent wealth, tell us that we can ignore the starving masses and societal imbalances because everything will be fine once they invent the all-powerful A.I.
Or else we should all just be concerned with keeping God happy, because he is vengeful and will smite us all, just like we should all work towards preventing the super A.I. from being hostile. Either way, the hypothetical omniscient computer is all that matters.
There’s no evidence they’ll ever invent it, by the way. Anyone who made it through my recent email about the failings of current A.I. will know my thoughts, but in the broader scope, science can’t even really agree on what constitutes intelligence, or sentience, or thought. Cows, for example, will work to free other cows if they are trapped, which would strongly suggest that a cow is a) intelligent, b) sentient and c) empathetic. These are complicated traits for an animal that we often use as a shorthand for stupidity, but if you declared that you had made an intelligent, sentient A.I. because you’d made something as smart as a cow, you’d probably be laughed out of the room.
And you shouldn’t be, because big tech can’t even manage that.
There’s also a lot of crossover between billionaire tech CEOs and the speculative imortality movement. This ranges from people who have signed up to be cryogenically frozen (including the increasingly loopy PayPal founder Peter Thiel) to the infamous Bryan Johnson, who is on a quest to live forever via an endless routine of supplements, vitamins, fringe medical treatments and blood transfusions from his own son. Thiel has allegedly also been experimenting with blood transfusions to keep him young.
For the most part, however, the rich tech-bros who chase immortality seem to be betting their future eternities (or even their resurrections) on the same A.I. God-computer. If you point out that, for example, freezing a human body will rupture all of its cell membranes and turn the person into something that is solid when frozen but merely pink slush at room temperature, cryo-tech devotees will shrug and say that at some unspecified future point, a smart A.I. will figure out a way to dee-goo-ify them.
Once again: This is just religion under another name. The faith in everything working out thanks to a higher power, and in living forever or being resurrected into eternal happiness, is nothing new.
The only major difference is that tech religion comes out of things that these people have built themselves. They can program a computer, and that has tangible results, so they believe in their ability to make complex things. They then extend this idea, with breathtaking arrogance, to assume that they can one day build a god. All gods are man-made, but this one would presumably have assembly instructions.
It’s all worse than nonsense, because it’s actively harmful - people who have enough money to fix real world problems have talked themselves into the idea that they should keep their money and actually be given more in case it somehow leads to Utopia - but it got me thinking about Doomsday cults as a whole.
Sooner or later, the tech CEOs that dominate the modern world are all going to die. They’re terrified of this, clearly, which is why there’s so much cod-religiousity and apocalyptic thinking among their number. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is 58 years old. Elon Musk is 54. Bill Gates is 70 and Steve Jobs is dead.
Even the princeling Mark Zuckerburg is 41, and recently obsessed with his own health and fitness. Jeff Bezos seems to have had similar thoughts when he suddenly went from lifelong computer nerd to suspiciously muscular in his late fifties. He’s now sixty-one.
Already willing to freeze themselves and attempt all kinds of fringe experiments, it’s almost certain that these middle aged men are taking weird drugs. Musk is famously addicted to Ketamine, amongst much else. Bezos’ sudden bulk smacks of steroids and my personal suspicion is that Peter Thiel’s increasingly strange beliefs, combined with his bulging veins and ever-more-purple complexion, are signs that he’s abusing trenbolone, a steroid known to cause psychological disturbances and intellectual impairment. Thiel has already put money into the so-called Steroid Olympics, so we know he’s not averse to anabolics, and at the very least, he’s starting to look like a man whose blood pressure would make Count Dracula horny.
All of the major tech CEOs are reaching - or have reached - the age where a person starts to realise that there isn’t an infinite amount of time left on the clock. They seem to have all turned to some combination of drugs, fringe science, and the substitute religion of intelligent A.I. My question is what happens when the A.I. bubble bursts and they have so little to show for it.
Historically, people who predict the end of the world don’t actually recant. Harold Camping, who predicted the Rapture but still didn’t cancel the cleaner, revised the date once, failed to see the End Times come about yet again, and then admitted that the Bible says “No man knoweth the hour” of judgement.
Which it had actually said all along, if he’d bothered to read it. But Camping still didn’t renounce his Christianity or, presumably, his faith that the end of the world would play out as the Bible told him. Just not when he thought it would.
The Church of God Preparing For The Kingdom Of God, which was 0-for-4 on its apocalypse forecasts, still has a website that makes predictions for the future. Church leader Ronald Weinland failed to foresee his own prison sentence (tax evasion, of course…) but still thinks he can see the future.
Hateful evangelical leader Pat Robertson said the world might end in 2007, and was wrong every year past that until his death in 2023, but his church still raked in millions. Jeane “I knew this would happen” Dixon was wrong so many times it would have to be a separate article, but still had a long and successful career as a psychic, at least financially.
My point is that people who are proved wrong about their unsubstantiated beliefs usually don’t re-evaluate their position. They tend to dismiss the failure of their ideas as unimportant, or else double down.
This could be a problem when super-intelligent A.I. fails to emerge.
On the one hand, it’s possible that tech oligarchs will take the traditional path, hand-waving away their lack of concrete success and continuing to promise results in the near future. This has certainly been the playbook for Elon Musk, who is “five years away” from reaching Mars, always has been, and always will be.
What’s concerning, however, is that so many Silicon Valley billionaires hold sway over policy, in the current Trump government and more broadly around the world, and that many of them earnestly seem to believe that creating sentient A.I. is the only thing we (ie: humanity) should be focusing on. Fuck climate change. Fuck food shortages and microplastics and the growing trend towards fascism. Only the creation of the God Computer matters. I’ve already described how some followers of the new A.I. pseudo-religion believe that any time wasted now amounts to the snuffing out of billions of hypothetical future lives, making any delay tantamount to genocide, but again: They’re ignoring actual genocides in favour of preventing a larger one that is entirely hypothetical.
If A.I. doesn’t materialise in fairly short order (and it won’t) then these people could well start to believe that the reason it hasn’t succeeded yet is that we’re not pushing hard enough. It’s not that they’re simply wrong in their ridiculous beliefs - it’s the rest of us who are wrong, and we need to get in line so that everyone is working towards the God A.I. that they envision.
This is patently stupid, but when these people wield enormous power over the world’s economy and have the ear of Kings and Presidents, it becomes stupid AND scary. Because there isn’t really a fail condition for these people. Like End Times prophets, if they’re wrong, they’ll re-calculate dates and times but never stop believing in the fundamental truth that their ideas rest on. And unlike the Harold Campings and Jeane Dixons of the world, they could be in a position to make society work towards their delusional goals.
If the usual pattern holds - if the failures of their predictions make them MORE devout, not less - the absolute worst case is a world in which, say, you can’t use PayPal without being charged a small fee that will go towards building the God Computer. You can’t log on to social media without creating new text and images specifically for the training of ever-more-complex iterations of ChatGPT*. You can’t watch a streaming service without a mandatory pause so that some of your device’s computing power can crunch the numbers that will surely, imminently crack machine sentience once and for all.
This is an extreme possibility, obviously, and given all that I’ve said I’m not going to be stupid enough to make a prediction about where this all leads - I still understand that I could be completely wrong. But we should be very worried about Silicon Valley’s growing new religion, and its proselityzing force of powerful, connected men who have reached middle age and grown increasingly desperate to escape mortality. This is the potential recipe for a technological Taliban that will impose their weird zealotry on the rest of us for an end result that will never happen, and in the meantime doom us all by ignoring the real problems that need fixing today.
In a strange way, these apocalyptic thinkers are the real threat to the world, so caught up in their own ideas of the digital end times that they could cause far more predcitable calamaties to transpire in the real world. We should all do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen, not least because it’s a lot more productive than trying to build god from ones and zeroes.
*This already sort of happens - Facebook, for example, is having its A.I. read every one of your status updates (and everyone else’s) so that it can mimic human language. The Captcha that you have to complete to prove you’re human on certain websites is trying to train A.I.s on visual data - you have to click every square with a bicycle in it so the data can be used to teach a program somewhere what a bicycle looks like. It’s another depressing example of how tech companies have got us all working for them for free without really noticing we’re doing it.