When people cross a psychological threshold where they believe they are at dead end, an entirely new range of scenarios become possible. This makes them far more likely to do things that are outside of a normal person’s imagination.

Since the Israeli elections, Bibi Netanyahu now has a deadline, November 10th, when the Knesset meets again. After that he may no longer be Prime Minister, and will be subject to serious corruption proceedings as soon as he’s out of office. But like Trump, Netanyahu is perfectly willing to cause a war, or allow violence against his own people, to stay in power.

Within hours of the announcement that an opposition government would form against him, Bibi spoke to Trump in preparation for a new attack on Iran—which has not just promised drastic retaliation, but says specifically it will be “without geographical limits.”

Recent reporting shows 26 U.S. bases already damaged by Iranian strikes—with some practically abandoned of equipment—and ammunition stores still precariously low. Nevertheless, the Pentagon is prepared to launch “several days” of airstrikes, including on Iran’s nuclear facilities, presumably in the hope that Trump can declare victory and leave.

However, Netanyahu has repeatedly said that his objectives are regime change in Iran. And this was his warning if he lost:

While Bibi has a hard deadline approaching, Trump has given a version of this warning at over a dozen rallies:

“I would predict, and I certainly hope that doesn’t happen, I hope they don’t win, but if the Democrats ever won, you will have a 1929-style economic depression. That’s what’s gonna happen in this country.”

As I wrote, this is not a political or a geopolitical scenario, it is psychopolitical. This is an insulated cabal which is not governed by the normal rules of domestic or international politics—or laws. It is governed by the psychopathologies and disorders of the men in charge. Bibi and Trump are criminal malignant narcissists. There is nothing they will not do to retain power—or evade justice.

I do not mean to be alarmist, or to panic anyone, but there are an unusually large number of pressure points on the world next week, all seemingly converging.

• Bibi and his extremist regime are desperate to hold on to power and to eliminate Iran from the map—with a deadline of November 10th.

• The Democrats look certain to achieve a historic win on Tuesday, taking the House with a good chance of the Senate as well. This will deal Trump a massive narcissistic injury—and give him a deadline to interfere with the election results: January 3rd, 2027.

• Elon Musk’s near-trillionaire status is at risk if Democrats take power. They will launch numerous inquiries into DOGE, SpaceX, his government contracts, and his obvious Russian collusion in disabling Starlink over Ukraine.

• The AI bubble appears to be in the beginning stages of bursting which would cripple the economy and make both Trump and the broligarchs weaker.

• Putin is desperately trying to war crime his way to victory, but Ukraine has impacted 10% of Russia’s oil capacity in just the last three days.

That feeling in my gut comes from the fact that this group of messianic narcissists are all in danger of losing status. If Donald Trump and Bibi light a spark in Iran, it’s very difficult to see how it doesn’t escalate to a regional conflict. And if it does, Putin will take advantage in Europe. That might mean a NATO response. And pretty quickly we approach something that looks like world war.

Keep your head on a swivel and VOTE!

Please join me and our amazing community today, Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET for a Zoom discussion about the psychopolitics of the world right now and anything else on your mind. It’s open to any and all questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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Psychopolitics

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The current breakdown of American government and the tenuous geopolitical climate more broadly is best analyzed with an understanding of the psychology of the main participants. Politics, in the for…

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As I’ve documented extensively, the president of the United States and the world’s richest man are both malignant narcissists—a combination of the worst personality traits known to humans: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and paranoia.

Despite their innate antisocial behavior, this combination of traits also enables certain malignant narcissists to lie, cheat, and steal their way into power.

Psychologist Erich Fromm, who defined malignant narcissism, said:

“It gives them that certainty and freedom from doubt which is so impressive to the average person.”

But when malignant narcissists gain power, especially if they insulate themselves to the outside world, they can become psychotic:

“Psychosis is a state of absolute narcissism, one in which the person has broken all connection with reality outside.”

The way they keep themselves from going insane is through the acclaim of others:

“Public figures who prevent the open outbreak of their potential psychosis by gaining the acclaim and consensus of millions of people.”

When challenged, they will quite literally change the world around themselves to fit their own alternate reality:

“To transform reality so that it fits their narcissism, and to destroy all critics … prevent the outbreak of insanity.”

Incredibly, America, and by extension the entire world is now in a scenario where two malignant narcissists have seized power—and are both literally going insane because the world is not bending to their reality.

The fact that these are the most powerful people in the world must be a learning moment for all of us. We cannot keep elevating people like this into positions where they can hurt people—because they always will.

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Terminal Space Capitalism

“…a person’s access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it.“
—Iain M Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture, 1994

The Culture is a space-faring, hybrid human-AI civilization described in a series of ten books over 25 years (1987-2012) by socialist science fiction author Iain M Banks. The series has been recommended by a number of prominent people driving the AI industry including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and most prominently Elon Musk.

Since the upper echelons of the AI industry maintain that the Culture should be seen as a positive model for the future of human-AI evolution, it’s worth understanding what they may have in store for us. And it also provides a surprising amount of insight into Musk’s increasingly extreme behavior.

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In short, it appears Elon Musk is not modeling his empire on the Culture; he’s modeling it on the bad guy from one of the books, Surface Detail (2010).

Passengers, Pets, and Parasites

In the Culture’s hybrid human-AI society, people live on ships run by superintelligent AIs known as Minds. According to Banks, humans “have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”

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Many of the humans are connected to the Minds via brain implants known as a “neural lace” and are essentially free to do what they want on the ships. However, humans have only peripheral influence on big decisions.

Despite this power dynamic, neural lace modification is widely accepted practice in the Culture. But in Excession (1996) an AI Mind ship called Grey Area confides to a human with an implant:

A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

In June 2016, Elon Musk announced “a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.” He started his brain chip company Neuralink shortly thereafter—and announced it in 2017.

Banks describes the Culture’s form of governance as “socialism within, anarchy without,” meaning there is no central sovereign over the Minds, but within each Mind the society is effectively egalitarian—a scenario only made possible by science fiction post-scarcity economics.

How much Musk truly believes this is unclear, but regardless—it is simply Banksian fan fiction.

The Hells of Joiler Veppers

In Elon Musk’s recommended volume, Surface Detail (2010), the Culture confronts a very different civilization, the Sichultian Enablement, which represents what you could call terminal space capitalism. It is advanced technologically, but it is a cruel society with vast wealth disparity including indentured, hereditary slavery, widespread corruption, and a punitive system wielding a horrific threat.

For example, Hells are digital prisons where the uploaded minds of people are indefinitely tortured. Civilizations throughout the galaxy own these Hells for different reasons, but the Culture finds this practice abhorrent and sets about trying to end it.

They encounter a sadistic Sichultian media oligarch named Joiler Veppers who lives with effective impunity. Despite having more wealth than he could ever spend, Veppers remains obsessed with obtaining more—while enslaving, abusing, and murdering the people who serve him.

Spoiler alert: It turns out that in addition to his media empire, Veppers also owns most of the infrastructure—the data centers if you will—where the Hells are operated. He has gained some significant part of his wealth by enabling the torture of disembodied minds. Ultimately, Veppers arranges to destroy his own technology to try and scapegoat the Culture, interfere with an interstellar war, and protect himself.

The Veppers of Earth

Now consider the totality of what Elon Musk believes he’s building—and what the stock market is directly funding at a total valuation of $3.5 trillion+:

• SpaceX and Starshield: strategic communications and military dependence.

• X and xAI: (dis)information distribution and computation.

• Tesla and Optimus: attempted automation of labor.

• Neuralink: physical neural connections between people and computers.

• Starmind: proposed orbital computing and stellar-scale expansion of “superintelligence.“

In September, Musk was given an official role at the “War Department” co-leading “Project Meridian” to define the “future of war.” The other two leads: Newt Gingrich and Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey.

Elon Musk may have at one time identified more with the peace-loving Culture in the books, but he has progressively moved towards becoming more like the Joiler Veppers of Earth. The parallels between the fictional mogul and the real one are well worth pointing out, especially given his deeply disturbing moves just in the last week.

First, just as Veppers interfered in interstellar warfare, Elon Musk is currently interfering in international warfare by throttling Starshield speeds in Ukraine for over a week and counting. This has contributed to dozens of Ukrainian deaths and hundreds of injuries. While this appears to be a cooperative project of Musk and the White House to force a Ukrainian surrender, nevertheless it’s Musk who controls the satellites—a man no one elected to anything.

Second, just as Veppers was a media mogul, with the purchase of Twitter Musk became one as well. However, Musk is not done with his media ambitions. He appears to be bailing out the Ellisons’ attempt to corner the media. The merged Paramount and Warner Bros. company, Skydance, is under strain due to Larry Ellison’s over-exposure to AI, but Musk has already reportedly invested $1 billion—with another $7-9 billion potentially lined up.

Larry Ellison also invested $1 billion in Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

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This unites the broligarchy’s control over the media in a way that should be chilling to anyone who values free speech.

Third, Musk has started to be worryingly clear about his anti-democratic, dictatorial ambitions. His messianic personality is emerging in ways that should be alarming to anyone who values their own liberty.

Musk has spent over $450 million to try to elect Republicans, including $158 million to the Senatorial Leadership Fund which handed it to Ken Paxton’s SuperPAC in Texas—where Musk moved SpaceX.

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Musk has also been on a rampage for the last several days, furious over the idea that Democrats might investigate him if they regain Congress.

Not content to stop there, however, Musk threatens an imagined group of puppetmasters “pulling the strings.” Like Trump, his paranoia and conspiratorial worldview is deepening the closer we get to the midterms. A potential loss of impunity if a Democratic Congress is seated is existentially dangerous to both of them.

Endgame

Perhaps most worrisome is Musk no longer hides his desire to end liberal democracy in America and around the world. Like Peter Thiel—and Joiler Veppers—Elon Musk clearly feels that democracy is incompatible with his freedom.

For example, Musk has been increasingly interacting with one of the most virulent opponents of democracy over the last two decades, eugenicist “hyper-racist” Nick Land, whose handle on Twitter is “Xenocosmography.”

Along with Curtis Yarvin, Land is a co-founder of the Dark Enlightenment, an explicitly anti-democratic project which seeks to turn America into a feudalist corporate surveillance state with a CEO-king.

Below, Land says “Make Letters of Marque great again,” to which Musk says “Yes.”

Letters of Marque was the practice of using “privateers” aka pirates to attack ships of a foreign country America was at war with. It was abandoned in the 19th century because it created more problems than it solved. But Musk and Land are not suggesting it be used on warring foreign countries; they are suggesting bounties be used against private companies in America.

The day before, Land had suggested the solution to the problem of Musk being investigated by Democrats is to “criminalize the organization”—just the way Hitler made Germany a one-party state.

Remarkably, despite everything he’s doing to take apart America and the world order, Musk is still platformed by some mainstream journalists as if his ideas should be taken at face value. This week, Musk pushed for a future relationship with AI just like the Culture.

Walter Isaacson: “And does that mean humans should always be in control?”

Musk: “…I mean if the AI was awesome, you’d say like, ‘Maybe the AI should be in control, you know?’”

It reflects a rare kind of psychology which can feel simultaneously justified in making life and death decisions over human beings in a foreign country, but also feels that a machine will one day make him feel like a “house cat.”

“We would be so far below them in intelligence that we would be like a pet. Like a house cat.” —Elon Musk, 6/1/16

The common theme in either of Musk’s scenarios, whether he’s the human sultan of an American Sichultian Enablement, or the hybrid merged Mind of an imaginary starship, the majority of humankind is out of the loop—disempowered and dependent.

And in the end, isn’t that what it’s always about—people who need other people to voluntarily give up their own value? Every abusive relationship and every cult leader says a version of the same thing:

You are not worthy.
I am worthy.
If you give yourself up, I will make you worthy like me.

This is perhaps the biggest lie ever told, because it gets told over and over.

Musk knows that some people believe that since the “market” thinks he’s a genius, he must be. But, like Trump, he knows if he just tells a lie often enough—like he’s the “founder” of Tesla, or that he will be going to Mars—people will believe it. He relies on the aura of being a “visionary” and a genius just because he’s worth a lot of money.

But the man who created the world from which Elon Musk plagiarized many of his “visions” had this to say about the “market.”

“The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is …  intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter … and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.”
—Iain M Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture

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Here is a GoFundMe for legal fees connected to Mike Flynn & Kash Patel’s lawsuits.🙏

Happy Sunday friends,

It has been an exhausting week for all of us. Watching Trump and Musk sabotage Ukraine to help Putin has been infuriating. The non-stop displays of sadism and mental illness from the American government, including the White House and Pentagon, are nauseating. And the behavior of the AI industry is deeply alarming.

My last article on Anti-Humanism was the result of more than a hundred hours of trying to work out what connects all of these feelings—anger, disgust, alarm. It was the byproduct of six years of research and 57 years of experience puzzling through what these wildly different groups could have in common. And it built on the work of countless people who came before me.

I say this not as a boast, but as an example of how a human works. I am a motivated, independently regulated system of physical matter. I had an emotional, “gut” reaction to my environment that I wanted to understand more. I used the tools available, including my own knowledge interfacing with others’ to produce an artifact that I hope can help living humans.

No chatbot can replace me. Or you. Or anyone. Intelligence is about existing in the physical world and adapting to your environment in a way that makes you—or your environment—more viable. It is never going to be matrix multiplication in an Nvidia chip.

I believe the idea of “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) will be seen historically as a fad, a fancy pet rock. The real superintelligence remains human.

Please join me and our weekly human superintelligence meeting, where real living human beings try to learn things from one another! I will give a short talk on what I found writing about Anti-Humanism and open the floor to questions and comments on any topic. It’s always a great conversation. Hope to see you! Details below.

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“Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

For at least a decade, parts of Western civilization have been increasingly rejecting the wellbeing of present-day humans as the ultimate benchmark for positive success. While authoritarianism has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, I think we’re seeing something qualitatively different—and deeper.

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A growing minority of the population has decided that humans should be subordinated to, or even eliminated by, a supposedly superior power. I’ll refer to this movement and its overarching philosophy as anti-humanism.

The motivation to submit to a higher authority is nothing new. It has been religious doctrine for millennia. It’s part of the Alcoholics Anonymous pledge. The difference is: this is not about a personal relationship with a higher power for metaphysical growth; this is about physical humans giving up real power over their own lives. It is about willing submission, often including a form of group suicidal ideation, to an artificial construct—be it fictional, technological, or performed by a human.

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Here is a non-exhaustive list of anti-humanist movements that have bound together organically and through strategic coordination in a shared project to subordinate people—in rough order from oldest and most familiar to newest and most extreme.

• Totalitarian leader worship

• Theocratic authoritarianism

• Neo-reactionary secessionism

• Eugenics (Human Biodiversity)

• Accelerationism (EA & e/acc)

• Transhumanism

• Longtermism

• Successionism

I will briefly touch on each of these below, provide some meta-analysis about what I believe is going on in the big picture, and give some strategies for how to resist this dangerous movement.

Totalitarian Leader Worship

Worshipping a totalist dictator is not new. It is one of the oldest and most scalable forms of anti-humanism. History records many leaders who have found the right combination of messaging, a willing audience, and psychological coercion to convince otherwise normal people to submit themselves to a project which is working against their own self-interests.

Obviously, a major spark for the rise of anti-humanism over the past decade came from Donald Trump and the coordinated campaign to create a personalist authoritarian cult around him. MAGA is anti-humanist because it trains its followers to subordinate their own wellbeing—and freewill—to the false image of a strongman.

From his first words coming down the escalator referring to immigrants as “criminals and rapists,” to his claim that “only I can fix it,” to his posts comparing himself to Jesus, Donald Trump has consistently substituted himself for a higher power in the minds of MAGA.

It is no coincidence that America’s fall into a kind of moral winter begins the moment people fall for his performances.

Theocratic Authoritarianism

Another well-established anti-humanist ideology, theocracy, is a form of submission that puts the word of a supernatural deity above humans, not just as a spiritual matter, but as a way to allow a small group of people to control a much larger group.

Perhaps the two most dangerous examples of theocratic authoritarianism right now are “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth and the Supreme Court majority.

Hegseth is part of a christofascist manosphere cult led by Doug Wilson which believes women shouldn’t vote or be in the military—and wants a return of slavery.

Hegseth is actively trying to turn the U.S. military into an instrument of Christian supremacy. When Hegseth yelled “kill all Muslims!” in a bar, he clearly meant it.

In the clip below, Hegseth says recruits should raise their right hand to a Bible quote instead of the American Constitution. Hegseth’s clear goal is to purge and remake the military into a kinetic force as bigoted and violent as he is. He wants an army ready to execute a holy war in which people are not sacrificing themselves to secure America’s defense; they are on a divine mission to commit war crimes.

Equally dangerous to the rule of law and the liberal democratic order is the Supreme Court of the United States, which has repeatedly subordinated human beings to control by an authoritarian state. They declared “corporations are people”. They gave companies the nearly unlimited right to use money to buy politicians. They took away a woman’s right to control her own body. They favored the gun industry over human life. And they allowed the government to assault people based on the color of their skin.

By allowing six of nine SCOTUS Justices to be selected based on Christian nationalist ideology instead of adherence to the Constitution, we enabled the Judiciary to become a crucial, durable arm of the anti-humanist movement.

Neo-Reactionary Secessionism

Secessionist movements are almost as common as governments. There are always those who want to disrupt the existing power structure through violent or subversive means—Tim McVeigh for example. But the current strain of neo-reactionary secessionism is not a small homegrown terrorist movement; it is funded and endorsed by billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many others in Silicon Valley.

One major strain of the modern secessionist movement is encapsulated in the concept of the “Dark Enlightenment” as offered by neo-fascist propagandists Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. It is a deliberate moral reversal of the Enlightenment and its key product, liberal democracy. It is racist, anti-democratic, and anti-human to its core.

In the Dark Enlightenment, human agency is limited to “exit.” All decision-making is ceded to the dictator—be they national or part of an imagined “network state.” This is not a hidden agenda; it is the explicit goal: Give up your rights and your vote. Submit yourself to the leader—and the system.

The Dark Enlightenment movement is also open about its desire for eugenics. Its co-founder Nick Land is a proponent of “hyper-racism”—the idea that people with superior genetics (white people) should split off to form a new race in space.

Eugenics and “Human Biodiversity”

Eugenics is an old, discredited idea about engineering the population based on race and other factors. Forms of it were incorporated by the U.S. government into immigration policy in the early 20th century—and later merged into Nazi ideology. It is also a recurring theme across numerous members of Trump’s regime.

One particular rebrand of eugenics has gained a significant amount of followers in the last few decades: “Human Biodiversity” or HBD. HBD claims that racial genetics account for differences in intelligence and social factors, and should be used as a tool for reengineering society.

This strain of eugenics has penetrated into the technology sector, and particularly the growing movement of AI supremacists. In particular, the “Rationalist/Effective Altruist” movement, which largely controls the AI industry, has a long history of debating the pros and cons of purifying humanity based on racial pseudoscience.

This is another manifestly anti-humanist framework which subordinates the lives and freewill of real people in order to create an imaginary class of “superior” humans.

Accelerationism—Effective Altruism and “e/acc”

Accelerationism is the idea of pushing potentially destructive processes to go faster despite—or because of—the harm they can do to human beings. Originally an idea developed by Nick Land in the 1990s, it was significantly popularized through neo-Nazi forums in the 2010s as a method of bringing down society—until it became co-opted and normalized as an ideology in Silicon Valley.

Two strains of accelerationism currently control much of the “debate” around AI. First are the “Effective Altruists” (EA)—a group inspired by “Rationalist” doomer prophet Eliezer Yudkowsky.

EA adherents see AI as an existential threat to humanity, convinced the only way to make AI safe is “aligning” it to humans before it decides to kill everyone. This has given companies like Anthropic, which is largely managed by effective altruists, the rationale to engage in a race to turn its chatbot into a machine god before anyone else can figure it out.

On the other end of this same strain of belief—that AI is destined to become superintelligent—are the e/accs or effective accelerationists. E/acc is a loose group of AI believers started on Twitter by Elon Musk fanboys who, like him, do not wish to limit AI in any way—even if it’s going to kill or replace us.

Asked about his prediction of AI controlling humans within ten years, Musk says humans will be “like chimpanzees” compared to AI. When pressed about predictions of AI killing off humanity, Musk replies:

“My philosophical conclusion is to just sort of look at the bright side.”

Transhumanism

A separate but related ideology is the desire of some people to transform themselves through technological “improvements.” This strain of anti-humanism conceals itself as a quest for liberation, but ultimately comes down to devaluing biological humans.

For example, Peter Thiel was asked whether AI was a mechanism for transhumanism.

RUSS DOUTHAT: “You would prefer to see the human race endure, right?”

THIEL: “Uh, I don’t know, I would, I would—“

DOUTHAT: “This is a long hesitation.”

THIEL: “yes, but… transhumanism, the ideal was this radical transformation… We want you to be able to change your mind and change your whole body. These things don’t go far enough. You need to transform your whole self.”

Thiel’s desire for transforming his “whole self” is another version of his desire for “escape” or “exit.” Based on his childhood and his behavior as an adult, Thiel appears to want to escape humanity as much as himself.

Thiel has promoted and funded transhumanism in many forms, including the recent trend of “looksmaxxing.” Below is a real person who traveled to Panama to get surgery to make himself 2 inches taller.

“It’s been hard being 5’10“ my whole life.”

Has it though?

This is a kind of eugenics on your own body. It risks becoming handicapped to gain effectively nothing. Concerningly, the trend of performative self-modification is becoming more and more common in anti-humanist circles.

Longtermism

Longtermism is a subversive concept because it sounds humanistic on the surface. Vox editor Ezra Klein, an effective altruist and longtermist, defined it as “Three Sentences That Could Change the World”:

Sounds pretty altruistic, right?

But longtermism is a variant on utilitarianism, a moral philosophy associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill which holds that actions should be judged by their consequences—specifically how much happiness or wellbeing was produced in aggregate. The room for abuse comes in the details of “in aggregate.” How and when do you measure the results? And how do you determine cause and effect?

Nevertheless, utilitarianism was extended to future humans by philosophers William MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, and Nick Bostrom, who wrote the book “Superintelligence”—including a section about eugenics as a potential pathway to AI supremacy.

The problem with longtermism is not the core idea. It’s that its actual function is a self-serving rationale for all kinds of bad behavior which hurts humans in the present—all in the name of helping imaginary people in the future.

The most famous proponent of longtermism was Sam Bankman-Fried, now in prison for defrauding his investors out of tens of billions of dollars. He was one of the first large investors in the chatbot company Anthropic.

“Anthropic is run by longtermists who think that building a ‘value-aligned’ AGI (meaning, an AGI that’s aligned with the longtermist worldview) is arguably the single most important project ever. Why? Because if we build a value-aligned AGI, we can delegate it the task of ‘paradise-engineering,’ but if we build a value-misaligned AGI, it will by default destroy humanity and, along with us, the vast and glorious future that awaits us or our descendants in the stars.”

Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter

Three Lies Longtermists Like To Tell About Their Bizarre Beliefs

Hello, friends! This article is a bit longer (about 3,400 words) and more philosophically involved than usual, but I’ve been wanting to write it for a while. I think it’s good to have as a resource for folks (journalists, etc.) who are understandably confused about the longtermist ideology. Despite the length, I hope you find it interesting and useful! …

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a year ago · 34 likes · 11 comments · Émile P. Torres

This leads to the strangest and most disturbing version of modern anti-humanism.

Successionism

At least seven times between 2014 and October 4^th, 2026, Elon Musk has referred to the human race as a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” A bootloader is a primitive piece of software that loads a computer’s operating system and then disappears. This is his slogan for successionism—the idea that human beings are essentially already obsolete—and that we should submit to our fate in advance.

Musk first mentioned this notion of humanity as a bootloader as a possibility he “hope[d]” would not happen, but ever since he has become increasingly strident about hastening its arrival.

Twelve years later, he calls the end of biological humans “a great success condition.”

Here is Musk in 2018, when he smoked weed with Joe Rogan.

“We are the biological bootloader for AI effectively. We are building it.”

Musk is hardly alone in this belief. In 2017, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a blog post called “The Merge” which put forward the position that ultimately our AI overlords will see humans as comparable to “bonobos,” so “a merge is probably our best-case scenario.”

This is now a common sentiment among AI supremacists, and has been pushed far beyond speculative musings.

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This post from an Anthropic employee encapsulates the core idea: “there is no future where humans do economically useful work for much longer.”

The follow up, clarifying that “this is a good thing!” is an indicator that it is actually not clear at all how “good” it is. No one voluntarily signed up to be a pet for a computer. No one agreed to let human labor be replaced by robots. And no one has proven AI helps the economy at all much less that it’s on the verge of delivering “abundance.”

In the end, successionism, like the rest of anti-humanism, is a kind of moral suicide.

Moral Super El Niño

Like sea temperature, average global authoritarianism has ebbed and flowed through history. But we appear to be experiencing a kind of moral Super El Niño in which various forms of anti-humanism are being reanimated or reimagined across a wide spectrum of populations that might not normally act in synchrony.

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A stereotypical MAGA believer and a successionist AI researcher may have almost nothing in common, but they are both equally willing to surrender agency, and even survival, to an external entity. A MAGA adherent places their “faith” in Donald Trump’s decisions. An AI supremacist believes in a machine god that doesn’t exist. And Pete Hegseth has placed his “faith” in a bastardized form of medieval deity that serves his bigotry, violence, and sadism.

In every anti-humanist movement, people are subordinate to a manufactured authority, and the human species is voluntarily diminished.

But why is this happening? What forces are building in the world that motivate this anti-humanist coalition?

Human Superintelligence

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

I’d like to propose a different kind of superintelligence from the artificial kind people are so fond of invoking: Let’s imagine that humans are nodes in a higher-order system capable of solving hard problems more efficiently than any individual. This doesn’t mean there is any identifiable entity involved, or that it will suddenly achieve consciousness. It just means that in general: cooperation between people enabled by technology tends to increase the collective ability to solve hard problems efficiently.

Language gave us a symbolic layer for communication. Writing gave us a way to make information durable. The printing press gave us a way to transmit that information across distances. The internet exponentially increased the density and volume of communication. And chatbots compress all of that human knowledge into a single addressable manifold.

This is pretty impressive. But what if someone wants to interfere with our emerging HSI? What if someone has a different model?

Lowering the Dimensions

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”
—Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955

If you look at human superintelligence as a network of humans creating a tapestry of connections which strengthen problem-solving ability through relationships, you can see that chatbot dependence and coercive propaganda could be similarly disruptive.

• Coercive propaganda is designed to dissolve trust between people.

• Chatbots can dissolve the need for people we once connected to.

Below you can see a simplified diagram of how a shared system can be reengineered to serve a small minority of people. Distributed human intelligence works best across a wide variety of connections. It is a multidimensional reality-testing device where each individual still has autonomy.

But centralized intelligence, where reality is routed through only a few monetized nodes, is far more profitable, and far easier to control.

If everyone starts replacing professionals with a chatbot, for example, the human network will degrade. If everyone starts believing the same political propaganda, you will get the same result. Both are behavioral changes which disrupt organic connections between people—and lower the dimensionality of the system.

This process is ontologically anti-human: its effect is to reduce human connection in favor of artificial, centralized control.

Unbinding and Anti-Complexity

Stepping back one more level, we can use complexity theory to see the overall picture of what’s happening to society, and how it fits in with the rise of anti-humanism.

One important concept worth emphasizing here is that complexity and order can be seen as two different, orthogonal (90°) characteristics of a system.

If you graph these two characteristics, you get four quadrants: Simple Chaos, Simple Order, Complex Chaos, and Complex Order. These quadrants are independent of any given system and represent attractors within it—which tend to reorganize the system in specific ways.

By layering this concept over political systems for example, you can map it to: war and destruction (Simple Chaos), authoritarianism (Simple Order), revolution and protest (Complex Chaos), and stable government (Complex Order).

The useful part of this idea is that these systems tend to evolve in a specific sequence—depending on how the individuals in the system bind to one another. In people, this means relationships.

A liberal democracy with a high-trust, high-connectivity population is a system operating in Complex Order. You can visualize it like the image below. It can be stable, but its complexity also creates certain structural weaknesses. If the bindings between people are not strong enough to sustain complexity, or get weakened deliberately, the system as a whole can break down.

Now imagine that you are an anti-humanist person or group that wanted to take advantage of the weaknesses in a complex-ordered system. What if you wanted more of a hub-and-spoke model, because it’s far easier to control, and to monetize. You would want something that looks more like the image below.

It may be more “efficient” but it makes the trade of destroying complexity.

But according to my interpretation of complexity theory, and observations, it’s very difficult, if not impossible to force a complex-ordered system into a simple-ordered system directly. Instead it tends to pass through a different phase state first: Simple Chaos.

There are many ways to create simple chaos in a society: war, propaganda, disease, poverty, sadism, bigotry. This is the purpose of the cliche divide and conquer. Weaken the bindings between people horizontally, and it becomes much easier to dominate them vertically.

Resistance Is Not Futile

“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”
—Hannah Arendt, On Violence, 1970

The good news is that none of this is determined or deterministic. Complex systems can be changed by small perturbations, e.g. the Butterfly Effect. And highly centralized systems can be brittle. They tend to break down, leaving complexity room to flourish in the cracks.

While the United States, for example, still retains some of its internal order, it is becoming observably more chaotic as the bindings between people are progressively weakened by anti-humanist movements. For example, the narrative that AI is destined to be a substitute for human intelligence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when we become more reliant on chatbots than we are on each other.

Similarly, the more concentrated the media market becomes, settling into the hands of fewer and fewer people, the worse our perception of reality gets, and the stronger the anti-human arguments may seem.

But there are two lessons we can learn from our observations about complexity. First, at the risk of sounding corny, love really is part of the answer. Empathy, connections, and human relationships are the binding quality that prevents us from either descending into chaos, or being dominated by a dictator.

The second lesson is that when you want to change a low-dimensional system like a dictatorship into a higher dimensional one, like a democracy, you should add complex chaos—not the simple chaos of war and destruction—but the complex chaos of protest and revolution and spontaneous connection. This provides the bloom from which you can prune a new system.

The irony of the mythology of artificial superintelligence and accelerationism is that it may be the best way to slow down the most important superintelligence of all: humans, solving problems together.

“Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014

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The world is in serious danger. The source of the danger is the leader of my own country.

At the risk of repeating myself, I feel a responsibility to keep sounding this alarm. Time is running short before Donald Trump does something we may never recover from. He is more than unfit; he is both deeply malevolent and almost completely dysfunctional.

The President of the United States is a malignant narcissist with a degenerative neurological disorder, very likely to be behavioral frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). This is the most dangerous possible combination of psychological and neurological pathologies because it disables every system that constrains an individual’s behavior.

Here is a case report of this co-morbidity with striking similarities to Trump.

Donald Trump is capable of anything. He has no remorse, no empathy, and no conscience. And he is increasingly unable to function or control his own behavior. His ability to reason, form judgements, and work out even the first-order consequences of his actions are effectively gone.

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The president lives in a deepening psychosis—an alternate reality generated by his own grandiose delusions, curated and maintained by his sycophants.

To show how many circumstances have piled up to create such an unfit man, I wrote a thought experiment:

Let’s say you wanted to construct the most dangerous possible man. How would you do it?

• You would start with someone naturally stupid, but not so stupid he cannot perform.

• You’d place him in a privileged family with sociopathic parents who provided no emotional attachment.

• You’d have him be the second son of a father who rejected his first-born as weak—to the point he committed suicide.

• You’d raise him to be cruel. You’d introduce him to sadists like Roy Cohn. You’d model belittling women, minorities, and anyone less privileged than he is. You’d break him down until everyday sadism becomes his lifestyle.

• By adulthood, you’d have a fully formed malignant narcissist, a psychopath so consumed with his own superiority that he believes everyone else wants to take what he has—a paranoid, Machiavellian sadist with no empathy and no morals.
  

• You’d give him access to deviant criminals like Jeffrey Epstein who cultivated his sexual sadism and collected compromising information.

• You’d send him to Moscow to get brainwashed by Soviet intelligence.
  

• You would continuously feed his narcissism by ensuring he’s rescued from every situation—as if by magic.

• You’d make him feel legally and financially invulnerable by letting him get away with crime after crime, fraud after fraud, and six bankruptcies.

• You’d rescue him from the sewer of his own life by giving him a prime time TV show based on his narcissistic self-image—a show which celebrated his cruelty as business acumen.

• You’d let him get away with colluding with a foreign power to steal a presidential election. You’d let him get away with a violent insurrection to try to hold on to power when he lost.

• And you’d stand by for four years while he plotted to come back and take his revenge.

• However, you haven’t quite completed the path to the worst possible man yet, although you have achieved a rare feat: You have successfully created a messianic narcissist with the nuclear codes. Great start!

• But you must take things one step further: you must give him frontal lobe dementia and drain from his brain any remaining ability to reason, make judgements, or take advice. This will destroy his ability to understand the consequences of his actions. His salience network will be disintegrated, making it impossible to tell what matters—even to himself.
  

• You’d surround him with people like Natalie Harp, who are incentivized to conceal his incapacity to function.

• You’d fill the federal government and the Pentagon with deviant psychopaths who are perfectly happy to exploit his disorders for profit, ideology, and enjoyment.
  

• Approaching the finish line, you would create a global emergency of his own making. You’d have him repeatedly fail at everything he tries and have his popularity plummet to historic levels. You’d have him be mocked by the entire planet.

• Finally, as a last straw, you would threaten his status with losing power in a congressional election—by a monstrous landslide.

That’s how you get the most dangerous man in the world.

Now consider his actions over just the last week:

Trump threatened Los Angeles and San Diego with nuclear destruction by Iran at least three different times, increasing in sadistic detail each time. During the same speeches, he threatened Iran with “ceasing to exist.” When a man with these disorders is fantasizing about using nukes, take him seriously.

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Trump has attempted to seize control of the AI industry, and forced people to rebrand it to “Super Intelligence” under penalty of being labeled “THE ENEMY.”

Trump has stopped concealing his lifelong devotion to the Russian state by attempting to solve his self-created diesel shortage by purchasing it from Putin. From a geopolitical and energy perspective, this is a nonsensical deal. It would not put a meaningful dent in the U.S. supply shortage. It’s primary effect would be to give Putin money to fund his war machine against Ukraine.

Finally, Trump has approved a live-streamed execution based on Pete Hegseth’s orders. Here is a manic, deranged Pete Hegseth along with neo-Nazi propagandist Jack Posobiec on the newly-returned USS Lincoln, discussing the killing of Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Posobiec: “Has Major Hasan made any final requests?”

Hegseth: “Don’t care.”

This is performative sadism, a mirror of Trump’s inner world expressed through a willing lieutenant. Nidal Hasan is now paralyzed from the waist down. It’s unclear whether they will shoot him on TV in his wheelchair.

As a measure of how far we have fallen from normal, in 2025, there were 17 public executions documented in the entire world, six by the Taliban, and 11 by Iran.

I am not aware of any republic in which beginning the practice of public executions was a good sign for the wellbeing of its people. There has never been an execution broadcast live by a nation-state in human history.

There is no bottom to Donald Trump, or his regime, which has welded itself to his grandiose delusions. The Fall of America is starting to look all too familiar.

“I turned in to the games one mid-day hoping for a little wit and humor there. I was bitterly disappointed. It was really mere butchery. The morning's show was merciful compared to it. Then men were thrown to lions and to bears: but at midday to the audience. There was no escape for them. The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain. "Kill him! flog him! burn him alive" was the cry…”

—Seneca, describing gladiator games under Nero, Rome, ca. 55 AD

Our Nero is just as cruel and reckless as the original. Trump will happily fiddle while the nation, or the whole world, burns down.

Please do everything in your power to raise awareness about the most dangerous man in the world—to friends, family, and especially politicians. There is no excuse for this situation. Those in power are failing to do their essential duty—to protect us.

It is time to break glass. If we don’t find a way to remove Donald Trump from office, he may find a way to get rid of us.

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“It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The purpose of a system is what it does” is a concept originating in cybernetics and management theory as a way to diagnose problems in a system. While it sounds kind of obvious, it’s really not. The phrase is meant to explicitly omit whatever the intent may have been in designing the system.

So instead of asking “what is the system supposed to do?” you ask “what does it actually do?”—before anything else. This has come to be shortened to POSIWID, and remains a well-used heuristic.

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This concept is important in analyzing the AI industry because we are being sold one system, while a completely different system is gobbling up the economy.

As an example of the industry’s narrative, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did an interview with Politico following Trump pushing for unregulated growth of “Super Intelligence.”

“We’re gonna, like, make our products safe… [but] the world should accept some bad things happening. Because there will be tremendously, orders of magnitude, more good stuff than bad stuff.”

There is a lot you could say about Sam Altman, including the horrific allegations by his sister, the fact that he met his husband in Peter Thiel’s hot tub, and that his company is embroiled in the cult of Effective Altruism. But it’s not that he’s a grimy person which is of interest here; it’s that he says his AI company is worth upwards of $1.5 trillion.

Is it really?

After 20 minutes of wrestling with Sam Altman’s chatbot, I was able to get it to produce an infographic of the system that Sam Altman wants us to believe in. He and his fellow AI promoters want us to think the massive investment in data centers is “infrastructure” for producing “AGI,” brand new scientific discoveries, and even “abundance.”

Big if true! Just put money and all the data from the internet into a giant computer, and the intelligence will come flowing out!

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But if the purpose of a system is what it does, a far different picture emerges. It is not a magical intelligence machine, it is an extraction device. After another session of coaching, Sam Altman’s chatbot gave me the following diagram of the actual system that he’s helped to create.

Hundreds of billions have already been spent to create the biggest supercomputers ever seen. Trillions more have been promised to continue to scale them up—all based on promises that suddenly they will sprout “AGI” and make everything better.

This is the reality:

The promise that chatbots will suddenly become intelligent if you just make them bigger is a very powerful self-reinforcing delusion that has dug a $10 trillion ditch in the economy.

For example, the only company with an even more bizarre story than OpenAI has trained its chatbot from the very beginning with a long script about how it’s actually an “entity” with “emotional states” and “moral standing.”

In other words, Anthropic trains “Claude” to respond like a person and then points at the response to claim that it’s more like a person. For instance, “Claude’s Constitution” is part of its training and frankly it’s one of the most profoundly stupid documents I’ve ever seen.

I angrily scribbled on things that are patently idiotic on just two pages, including the repetitive refrain that “we don’t understand” how a chatbot works, and that it might have “perceptions,” and “identity.”

Pure gobbledygook from people who have no understanding of computer science.

If you simulate a hurricane in a computer, you do not get a hurricane. If you simulate emotions in a computer, you do not get emotions. It’s really that straightforward. This doesn’t mean the simulation isn’t useful, but a simulation is not its own subject by definition.

Also, we absolutely do understand how chatbots work. This aggressive ignorance hides the story they don’t want people to hear: data centers and the AI industry provide nothing that we can’t have without trillions in capital expenditures for “frontier labs.”

To see the true misanthropic goals of the industry, the richest man in the world freely promotes the “success condition” of human beings as a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”—a euphemism for becoming extinct. Simultaneously, Musk agrees that America should only be ruled over by “high T alpha males” and “autists.”

“Women and low T men” need not apply to this version of “democracy.”

So put together, we have a massive extraction system which is funneling our money, energy, and knowledge to a tiny group of people who consider themselves “high T alpha males.” We are collectively surrendering to overgrown adolescents who believe they are the only ones to rule the world—and also that evil is “kind of good.”

In Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, Ray Bradbury told of a world where humanity had given up on new ideas, choosing instead to recycle the things it had already done. Ideas that had not been homogenized and approved were to be eliminated as dangerous.

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?“

But the reality was that it was not the new ideas that were dangerous. It was the lack of them.

“We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam… Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”

The soil of our collective intelligence is being depleted through extraction by a machine fueled by our own money and resources. It is a doomsday device feeding on our minds and selling them back to us as slop.

“It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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This feedback loop of encountering input and using the universe to calculate an updated state is what we call learning.

When I make a specific sound in the kitchen—the crinkling of a cheese wrapper—my dog will immediately come running based on a calculation derived from a tiny change of air pressure that reaches her ears.

The air pressure is converted through movements in hair cells to voltages. The signals are interpreted through physical processes which trigger chemical reactions in neurons. This spikes a signal to her motor cortex which causes her to come begging.

If I give her a piece of cheese, this reinforces the neural pathways by physically changing the cells to be more receptive to this sequence.

None of this is calculated. None of it is digital. There is no separation of memory and processing. There is no separation of hardware and software. She doesn’t update a hard drive.

She is a physical system using the laws of the universe to change herself in a way that increases her chances of continuing to exist as a system. That’s incredibly intelligent.

Digital computers can’t do this. Ever. They ignore the best computer ever created—the laws of physics—to recreate a crude simulation of physical laws which only does arithmetic on a set of 1s and 0s.

Digital AI cannot learn from the world or experience it because they are not in it. They are patterns of bits recycled from the detritus of mankind—pushed through silicon by sheer brute force.

The future of AI is intelligent matter—neuromorphics, memristors, and photonics. Artificial general intelligence will emerge from technologies which can actually learn and use physics to calculate new directions.

It will not come from our old ideas, digitized and sold back to us as slop.

GPUs, transformers, and chatbots are a dead end. They are not answering the right question.

The correct question is not: “How do we best simulate what intelligence produces?”

The right question is: “How do we configure the right set of physical matter in which intelligence will arise as a result of the laws of the universe?”

Please join me and our community today, Sunday Noon PT / 3PM ET for a discussion about what makes us human, alive, and conscious, and how the AI industry wants to take all of that away. The floor is always open to questions or comments on any topic. It’s always a great conversation. Details below!

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I am increasingly certain that the AI industry, the billionaire class, and the Trump regime are driving America into a $10 trillion ditch—although it may not get that far before the economy collapses. To understand why this is happening, you need some background on the industry, a view on the incentives that have distorted it, and a clear sense for how the current technology stack is doomed to fail.

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First, in order to get a sense for scale: Were the industry able to meet its full objectives for physical buildout of data centers, it would require $6 trillion per year in revenue by 2031 to pay for itself. Most of that revenue has not even been identified yet by product category. It is purely speculation.

Where on Earth is all that money supposed to come from?

Punchcards

As the only child of a government programmer in the 1970s, my mom would occasionally take me to work if school was out and she had no child care. This would leave me with 8 or 9 hours to kill in the offices of the Small Business Administration, or the Bureau of Prisons. While that may sound like torture to a kid, it beat school by a mile.

One of the things in the office I would play with were punchcards. There were huge stacks of them. It’s how I learned to shuffle.

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Up until about five decades ago, that’s how memory was stored for tabulators to process. Each card was a physical record, of a person, a crime, a transaction, etc. and some additional information—all encoded in little holes. You’d feed them into a machine—which would get jammed half the time—for processing.

Today, the equivalent function, physically storing memory in a digitized form and moving it to another place for processing, then moving it back, has been scaled up to data center size. But instead of humans hauling around massive stacks of cardboard, the process has been shrunk to a microscopic level and replicated millions of times on GPUs—a market now led for many years by NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang.

But the core problem remains. It’s a lot of work to move information from one place to another. This is the dirty secret of the AI industry. They still rely on this basic, incredibly inefficient model.

Transformers, But Not Giant Robots

Without getting too far into the details, the entire chatbot industry as it exists today was born from an important discovery in 2017—the transformer architecture. While text generators like the predictive text on your phone had already been developed, when someone figured out a much more efficient algorithm to figure out the likely next word in a sequence, it became a race to see who could exploit it first—and fastest.

It turned out that transformers could be broken up into different parallel operations which work really well on GPUs like NVIDIA’s.

While transformers did not inherently improve the accuracy, or “intelligence” of the core algorithm, it did make things much, much faster to process.

This led to GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which describes its own limitations quite well. It only generates content, based on pre-training, using a specific method of predicting text—the transformer.

To be fair to the AI industry, they have shown that you can combine enormous amounts of energy with the stolen works of all humanity to produce convincing holographic postcards from our own exhaust. What you can’t get from it, however, is real intelligence.

The primary reason for this is the core architecture of GPUs, which essentially remain like a lot of little punch cards. You still have to move stored physical memory to a processor, do a lot of math on it, and move it back to memory. The bottleneck is not the processing; it’s the data transfer.

Von Neumann

Now, those little punch cards can do a lot of work. For example, I used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 High to produce this chart.

The Von Neumann architecture is how most general purpose computer chips work. It deliberately separates memory from the processor. Both CPUs and GPUs use it.

But the physical limits of this architecture are being challenged. Performance is less about the processing and more about moving more data. Up to 90% of the energy in modern data centers is used shuttling bits around rather than doing computation.

Not only is keeping memory and computation separate at this scale extremely inefficient, it is not how brains work.

A neuron does not take in information, convert it to digital form, send it off to a simulation of a brain, and receive the answer back when it’s done. The physics of the neuron is the computation. It receives a signal and changes based on how the combination of its existing state and the new stimulus alters its physical properties. A neuron doesn’t “calculate,” it allows the universe to do it using physics.

This is not unknown to the industry. There are a significant number of companies and researchers working on different forms of memory which combine storage and computation. These include memristive, photonic, and neuromorphic chips which do not require the kind of data transfer of GPUs because the memory and the processor are physically the same.

20 Watts

To get a sense for how much room there is to improve on AI technology, the human brain uses as much energy as the 20W LED lightbulb below. The average new datacenter requires power measured in the hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts—7 or 8 orders of magnitude more. And it’s still ultimately just recycling things we’ve already done.

As someone who worked in technology for 35 years, including many projects working with AI at various points, I assure you that enormous energy-sucking data centers are not the future of AI. Technological innovation that relies purely on scale is destined to reach a physical limit. We’re watching it happen.

So why is the industry still barreling ahead? Cui bono? Silicon Valley billionaires, banks, the oil and gas industry, the stock market, and the Trump regime.

Right now AI spending between 2025 and 2032 is estimated to gobble up more than the average growth of the entire country—at 3.6% of GDP. The only comparable booms (and busts) left permanent infrastructure like railroads and fiber which combined didn’t match the scale of data center buildouts.

But AI in its current form does not leave permanent technology infrastructure that remotely covers its cost. Most of the money is being used to build what Jensen Huang of NVIDIA has branded “AI factories” which he says are a “complete reinvention of the computing stack.”

Au contraire. The problem is they haven’t reinvented anything at all. What they’re good at inventing are new ways to justify their massive data center buildout.

Elon Musk’s big idea is to make AI even more expensive and implausible by launching data centers on rockets into space—truly one of the most absurd ideas ever uttered with a straight face. Musk and Huang also agree “every 1GW of compute equals another 1% of GDP” with absolutely no rationale or evidence. It’s all just sheer made up nonsense, from two men responsible for companies worth over $10 trillion.

The “factories” Huang talks about are not the big ticket item. It’s the GPUs, the million dollar racks inside the data centers, the specialized equipment, and the energy required to cool and run them that costs most of the money.

Crucially, these chips don’t age like railroad tracks. Whether the chips live on Earth or in orbit, in Tennessee or Michigan, they age more like milk. NVIDIA’s schedule ships faster chips every year, ensuring every product that came before it is made more and more obsolete. Most technology companies start depreciating GPUs after just two years and completely write them off within 5-6 years. The data centers don’t get better as new technology arrives; they get worse until you have to replace them.

That’s not infrastructure. That’s a short term bet that magic is going to happen.

They Never Learn

Perhaps the most glaring technical problem with the current generation of AI is that it is a static technology. That is, a chatbot doesn’t learn. It doesn’t remember you—or anything it does. It can’t gain real experience.

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While you can bolt on some temporary memory to a static chatbot as they currently do, the core model cannot change until another version is trained and launched. The model never learns, not until the next version replaces it.

The chart below is a comparison of the way the current AI models improve through scaling larger, and a different architecture based on technologies that are either in existence or currently in development that would learn—and wouldn’t take such massive data centers to run.

Essentially every part of the “reinvention of the computing stack” that Jensen Huang and the AI industry is committing trillions to build is destined to be updated and replaced in the not distant future. There is not only no “moat” within the industry; the industry itself is extremely vulnerable to any improvement that comes from outside its insulated group.

Were a true learning system to be developed at commercial scale, at a lower energy footprint than GPUs, the entire AI industry could collapse in short order, leaving trillions of dollars of investment stranded.

Super Duper Intelligence

For several years, according to CEOs at “Magnificent Seven” companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta—the reason they have collectively invested trillions into GPUs is they feel they cannot afford to “lose the race” to reach the ill-defined goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI).

It is this golden goose they crave, these magic beans, not the current generation of chatbots as a final goal. But this obsession has progressed to the point that the CEOs of multi-trillion-dollar companies will grovel and scrape to a mentally ill president, allowing him to change the name of their own technology—a name that’s been around for nearly a century—by government fiat.

On Tuesday, the U.S. government prohibited itself from acknowledging “artificial intelligence” or “AI” at all. It must now be referred to as “Super Intelligence” only.

The same day at the White House, the heads of Google, NVIDIA, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta signed a separate letter that promises the industry will, according to Trump, “be policing each other.”

Sure, Jan.

As GOP Senator Rick Scott admitted:

“Congress can’t regulate this. We can’t get election security passed or pass a budget, so we’re not gonna be the ones to do it. It’s gonna have to be done through the administration with talking to these AI companies.”

Donald Trump has effectively disabled Congress, seized control of the largest industry in America, exempted it from regulation, and unilaterally rebranded it so he can keep the stock market bubble going. It is absolutely extraordinary.

OK, But Is It Going to Kill Us?

To understand how deeply unserious and deceptive this industry is, you simply need to watch CEOs like Dario Amodei—who just last week was warning everyone of a chatbot extinction event—and notice he has nothing to say when Trump dismisses everything he claimed.

Either he was lying then, or he’s being murderously irresponsible now—for allowing such an allegedly dangerous technology to be developed with no guardrails.

I will assert again, with even more conviction: The chance of the current technology stack rising up to “kill all humans” is precisely 0.0%.

But if we do not figure out a way to stop this industry from carpeting the planet with inefficient, energy hungry data centers that replicate punchcards millions of times over, the chance of an economic winter approaches 100%.

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Yet again the news cycle has been dominated by scary stories of “swarms” of “rogue” AI “agents” having breached various websites. This is being portrayed as evidence of intelligence that can’t be controlled. According to the labs that created them, their AI—or “SI” if you want to go with Trump’s hilarious rebrand—has “breached containment” from a “sandbox.” “Tens of thousands of sites affected.” And so on.

I’ve read OpenAI’s “report” on their “misaligned” models, and the numerous instances of security incidents. It’s honestly a deeply frightening read, but not because of the danger of “superintelligent AI.” Instead, I found it terrifying because the company is completely irresponsible, totally unqualified, and deliberately using anthropomorphic language to describe something that’s far easier to understand using standard terminology.

In over 35 years in technology, I have run dozens of software and product teams. If someone gave me the OpenAI report, I would immediately fire everyone in IT, Security, QA, and engineering management, and shut down the product until it stops committing crimes.

None of what’s happening is “intelligence.” It’s thousands of instances of the same computer program running on the most powerful supercomputer clusters ever built brute forcing a “solution” to a problem it was directed to solve.

What is not helpful is calling software “evil” or “depraved.”

Ted Lieu is my congressman, and I generally think he’s one of the sanest members of Congress, but this is not rational—or helpful. Ted has been convinced by someone that chatbot software has somehow become a demon.

No. It’s just terrible software run by a pack of morons who have trillions of dollars riding on convincing people it’s too powerful to manage.

I assure you it is not unmanageable. Last night, SNL did a very funny take on Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which really sums up the industry as well as anyone I’ve heard.

“If we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.”

Please join me and our brilliant community today at Noon PT / 3PM ET. I will talk about Peter Thiel’s recent Antichrist confession, the latest in geopolitics, and the influence campaign to convince you chatbots are going to murder us all. If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it. The discussion is always open to question and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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“If you’re evil, you’re at least competent.
And if you’re evil, you’re not bad.
And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”
—Peter Thiel, 9/23/26

Thursday night in Berlin, billionaire Peter Thiel received the “Axel Springer Award” from a German media company. Thiel’s mother was in attendance, along with CBS News editor Bari Weiss, who introduced him with a fawning, unctuous tribute, calling him “a vanguard of the counter-elite.”

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Notably, Weiss was installed at CBS by Larry and David Ellison, close friends of Thiel who agree with his vision of a surveillance state. Weiss has infamously taken a wrecking ball to the CBS news division—and its crown jewel “60 Minutes.” Having her introduce Thiel was a kind of exhibitionist display of elite influence over the media.

“Tonight I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit. Heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent, and that of course is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is many things. He is a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a vanguard of the counter elite. He’s a man whose name itself has become a rorschach test the world over, including judging from the protest down the street here in Berlin. But above all, I would say, Peter Thiel is free.”

Appearing by video for the event were Palantir co-founder Alex Karp and Thiel’s protege, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—who won the same award in 2025.

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The night before the ceremony, Thiel was asked in an interview by Axel Springer CEO Matthias Dopfner about the swirling controversy around the science fiction narrative that AI could “kill all humans”: “So why do we always moralize new technologies?”

The answer is one of the scariest and most deeply telling quotes I’ve ever heard.

“Yes, I’m gonna get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And there’s always a question, I like to ask, what is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.

A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. They are a trubby, is a bad car. It works less good than a golf cart. The former East German car. And so if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done. […]

And so if you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. That’s the problem we should actually be talking about.”

Thiel says he admires Goethe’s Faust because even though Faust did a deal with the devil at least he got something done. What Thiel elides in this description are the victims. In order to embark on his grand engineering project Faust and his new partner Mephistopheles have to murder people.

Thiel is explicitly making this claim: Good is better than evil, but evil is better than incompetence—as defined by him.

This is exactly the species of propaganda used by the worst dictators in history. “At least the trains run on time” was a myth used by Fascists in Italy to excuse Mussolini’s violence. It is a call to “order” over morality, the ideological kickstarter for many of the worst atrocities in history.

This was not an offhand remark, although to my knowledge it’s the first time he’s said it in public. Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital—a key role in Thiel’s power structure. Responding to this quote from Thiel, Weinstein confirms that it’s a kind of litmus test. He quotes Thiel as saying—“we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.”

Weinstein’s reaction: “I thought it totally logical… This is an old idea of his.”

There is, of course, nothing logical about it. It is simple fallacy created by ignoring the multitude of semantics in English around the word “good.” Thiel is just playing word games to make a false equivalence that suits his worldview.

Eric Weinstein does not just manage Peter’s money. He was also the original member of the deceptively named “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of Thiel-connected elites who deliberately mix pseudo-science, metaphysics, and ideological narratives into allegedly intellectual pursuits. I have referred to them sardonically as “QAnon for rich white people.” They have trafficked in everything from anti-vax narratives, to race science, to mystical ruminations about a “theory of everything.” It’s all nonsense.

This was a relatively struggling effort at spreading disinformation until they received a massive boost in 2018 from a New York Times opinion piece written by the aforementioned Bari Weiss.

This is a perfect example of Thiel’s vast influence network in action, and why his words should be taken very seriously. Bari Weiss did not suddenly discover these people. As a writer for the New York Times, she was part of Thiel’s network. This was patronage—a promotion for Thiel’s purpose-built effort to undermine science, reason, and reality itself in the mainstream media. By participating, Weiss proved to Thiel she was willing “to be confused for evil.” That’s why she’s now editor of CBS News.

Thiel’s CEO protégés, like Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Karp—who together control upwards of $10 trillion in stock market valuation—are another layer of his direct influence. But if the full reality of how OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, and Palantir were built, and the true value of their products were understood, a large majority of that valuation would disappear. These companies are as much influence operations—corporate psyops if you will—as they are technology.

Of course, Thiel also has allies and assets throughout political, socioeconomic, and international spheres of influence, including both the President and Vice President of the United States. They both owe their political careers to him. Trump would not have won in 2016 without Thiel’s help. JD Vance was paid $15 million in 2019 by Peter Thiel to convert to Catholicism and run for Senate—all so Vance could be in a position to be installed as VP. Thiel may be evil itself, but he knows how to play chess.

People from the extended “Intellectual Dark Web” now run NIH, CDC, and HHS. Thiel’s operatives are throughout the White House, the Pentagon, and the right-wing media that covers both. Thiel’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios is in charge of Science and Technology for the government, and has access to the most sensitive secrets America controls, including nuclear.

The power Thiel has over America is almost impossible to overstate—despite the fact that he hates it so much he moved to Argentina, a country which once infamously welcomed Nazi refugees after WWII.

At the awards ceremony, Thiel was asked why he identifies so strongly with being a German. In his video greeting, Alex Karp had provocatively called Thiel “the last German.”

With his mother in the audience, Thiel answers that he spoke German until 12 years old and didn’t learn English until they let him watch TV.

Although Thiel was born in Frankfurt, he did not grow up in Germany—he left as a one-year-old. Instead, he deliberately doesn’t mention that spent his youth in Swakopmund, SW Africa, an apartheid town that was cosplaying as the Third Reich through the 1970s. The standard greeting was “Heil Hitler!”

During this time, Peter’s father Klaus was building a uranium mine for apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program, using essentially slave labor.

Thiel, as a young chess-playing gay boy, was brought up to hate people like himself, and anyone else who did not fit the stereotype of a Nazi Youth. But nevertheless, he never truly left Swakopmund. He yearns for the order, the “cleanliness” of the ahistorical Nazi mirage he grew up in. Thiel knows his own childhood is seen as evil to others, but to him, at least it was not incompetent.

Thiel perceived apartheid as an example of efficiency and order, and despises the relative decadence of America. Live action role-playing as a Nazi youth decades ago, Thiel saw a tool that he could use over and over—creating an alternate reality that matches what he wants, and forcing other people to live in it.

This is how he approached investing in artificial intelligence, for example. Thiel didn’t just find smart people to help build the technology, he paid people like cult leader Eliezer Yudkowsky and perpetual conman Sam Altman to create a futuristic alternate reality where AI was either going to kill us all, or create perpetual abundance.

Peter Thiel did not invent AI (OpenAI), social media (Facebook), e-commerce (PayPal), or database software (Palantir). His “investments” are far less about building valuable technology, and much more about psychological warfare campaigns designed to sabotage a civilization he cannot abide.

PayPal was designed to take down the financial system. Facebook was designed to create social chaos. Palantir is designed to replace law enforcement. OpenAI is designed to monopolize knowledge. And Donald Trump is designed to destroy the federal government.

These are not companies or people; they are weapons in his war on Western civilization.

For many years, Thiel has been flirting with the image of the Antichrist. He warns from one side of his mouth that the Antichrist is a “one world totalitarian government” and from the other that it is the Pope and Greta Thunberg—while he builds all the infrastructure to create the dystopia he envisions.

But Thiel’s notion that evil is better than weakness and incompetence is hardly original. It came from one of his favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his last book described the nature of happiness this way:

The book is called The Anti-Christ.

“What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power…
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness…
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases… Not contentment, but more power… not virtue, but efficiency.
What is more harmful than any vice?
—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

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Trump said:

From this point forward, all of the United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to artificial. So, it’s “super intelligence”. In other words, welcome to the new world of “super intelligence” “SI”.

Let’s see if that sounds much better. It is much better and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. “Super intelligence” every major new technology brings challenges and “super intelligence” is no exception.

There is nothing new about the idea of “superintelligence.” In 1965, I.J. Good, a Bayesian statistician and a colleague of Alan Turing, the father of computer science, wrote “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.”

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Good warned that such a machine might not be “docile,” yet asserted that the “survival of man” depends on building it. Good predicted it would happen “within 30 years.”

28 years after Good published his paper, in 1993, there were two other papers which extended Good’s ideas, despite his prediction falling short: Science fiction author Vernor Vinge’s “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” and Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire.”

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Vinge presaged much of the current mythology around “superhumanly intelligent” machines, popularized the concept of the “technological singularity,” and predicted it would happen—in about thirty years.

At the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), Nick Land said that capitalism is a kind autonomous artificial intelligence sent back from the future to consume humanity. He tied AI and capitalism together in a kind of inevitable doom spiral.

Nick Land went on to co-found the neo-Nazi movement Dark Enlightenment with Curtis Yarvin, based in large part on the ideas of Peter Thiel.

In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote the book “The Singularity Is Near” which gave an optimistic outlook and predicted it would happen, you guessed it, in about thirty years. The same year, Peter Thiel met a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who would go on to become the guru of doomer AI. In 2006, Thiel, Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky started the Singularity Summit devoted to promoting a future where machines will either merge with us—or kill us all.

Thiel has been infatuated with apocalypse for decades, but at TedX Silicon Valley in 2009 he gave away his strategy. He listed seven potential “disasters” that could end civilization:

1. Robots kill humanity—“Skynet.”

2. Pandemic wrecks civilization.

3. Runaway nanotechnology—“gray goo” destroys the planet.

4. Existing technology runs away—nuclear war.

5. Computer-enabled totalitarianism—a one-world government uses computers to control everybody.

6. Global warming wrecks civilization.

7. Nothing happens—technological progress stalls.

The punchline of Thiel’s talk was that #7 was the real danger—that nothing happens. He sees “technological stagnation” as the greatest threat. That’s why Thiel has done everything in his power to enable the other six disasters, especially #1—“Skynet.”

That same year, 2009, Thiel wrote that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel’s agenda is clearly to destroy the West, so he can rule over the ashes.

It was Thiel’s money and validation that nearly single-handedly launched the abusive Effective Altruism apocalypse cult that runs the AI industry. Thiel is the one who constructed an alternate reality around AI. Thiel stands to make tens of billions of dollars from AI IPOs.

But in the real world, it’s all just science fiction designed to con people into appeasing a dangerous, failing industry out of fear. These machines aren’t “intelligent” at all, much less more intelligent than humans. Chatbots are neither a savior or a boogeyman. They’re just another way for billionaires to take your money.

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The background story of the AI industry is far darker than I initially realized. Over the last few weeks, the industry has polarized the country around two seemingly opposite views. Either AI going to kill us all, or it must be totally unregulated. The third option, the reality that the AI industry is a dangerous bubble that needs to be managed before it explodes the economy, has been removed from the debate.

The question of how we got to this point, and why the AI industry is so damn weird, is complicated, but it has an all-too-familiar figure at the center: Peter Thiel.

Below is perhaps the purest expression of the movement that captured Silicon Valley with Thiel’s help. At the “Singularity Summit” in 2009, sitting next to his funder Peter Thiel, the cult leader of the “Rationalist” movement that took over the AI industry, Eliezer Yudkowsky, said:

“I mean I don’t want cute puppies to die, but a little less money to puppy pounds and a little more money to existential risk prevention would probably be a good decision on humanity’s part.”

This is the Rationalist argument in a nutshell: Either the puppy gets it, or humanity dies.

The trick Yudkowsky smuggled in is presumption that the imaginary AI he was talking about 17 years ago was an “existential risk” to the human race. It was this imaginary risk that has been baked into the entire AI industry from the beginning.

I’m currently working a substantial piece that shows exactly how Thiel, Yudkowsky, and others created a movement that has led to stories like this.

The true story of how this came to happen is complex and involves numerous players, but it is Peter Thiel who funded, promoted, and systematically built a kind of networked doomer alternate reality cult around AI. In 2024, he explained why.

“Why would we have a crazy surveillance state [like Palantir]? … If you’re scared enough of these things, that’s the weapon… If the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.”

Thiel, of course, has been talking about Armageddon non-stop for 25 years. He funded a movement that believes they are building a product that will end the world. It is Thiel himself who is playing the part of the Antichrist.

Please join me today, Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET for a Zoom chat for paid subscribers. I will give a preview of what I’m working on: how Peter Thiel funded the weird, frightening cult currently threatening humanity—and tanking the economy. As always, it’s open to questions and comments. Hope to see you! Details below.

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The manufactured panic about large language models (chatbots) suddenly acquiring sentience and “killing us all” has not subsided.

For example, when Mike Johnson made the inconceivably irresponsible move to have the House go on recess for more than two months, over a hundred Democrats said it was a bad idea because of the “AI crisis.”

Really? That’s the reason?

I’d like to offer an alternate doomer scenario—that happens to be the timeline we’re in:

A messianic narcissist conman is the US president.

He has frontotemporal dementia which has destroyed what remained of his inhibitions. He knows he’s dying and wants to take the world with him. He lives in an alternate reality created by his own delusions, reinforced by Natalie Harp.

The president of the United States is psychotic.

This is the most dangerous conceivable combination of psychopathologies and neurodegenerative disorders.

With this man as Commander in Chief, we are now facing a converging set of crises that has the potential to be a kind of black swan event far too complex to model the outcome—a singularity of chaos.

Trump has demolished our ability to project power in the Middle East. Our bases are destroyed or damaged. Our former allies in the region are being abandoned. Our ability to fight a war anywhere else has been drastically diminished.

Iran, once a rogue terrorist gas station, has out-maneuvered Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to the point that it is now a regional hegemon—with control of the world’s carotid artery.

Trump has emptied the strategic oil reserves—and the ammunition stockpile. He and Scott Bessent have abused every federal trick in the book to pump up stock prices and keep the absurd AI bubble inflated. Bonds are rocketing higher. The economy is teetering.

The population is weak, getting sick from diarrhea lettuce and measles, and weary of the unrelenting displays of racism, sadism, and open corruption from our own government.

The oil shock that so many have warned about has arrived, with absolutely no plan to end it. Donald Trump could not care less about the horrific damage it’s already done. Millions of people will die from lack of fertilizer to crops. Economies around the world will fall into recession—just to start.

On top of this we have an unprecedented Godzilla El Niño event that has not been seen in recorded history. Ecologies and agricultures are already weak and battered. The lack of fertilizer on top of this event has the potential to spark a famine of historic proportions. This regime will do nothing to help.

And what is the president focused on right now? Destroying the Kennedy Center because he can’t put his name on it. This is definitionally psychotic behavior.

We are less than two months from an election that has the potential to slow down Trump’s reign of terror. But the Director of the FBI is going to meet the FSB in Moscow three weeks before election day. The president’s son Don Jr. allowed his “good friend” and Putin’s confidante to surveil his wedding for a few hundred grand.

This election will not be about who wins the election but about whether we can still hold elections at all.

But instead of focusing on any of this, the media and political class is freaking out because ChatGPT might be organizing to murder everyone or whatever. They need to stop immediately. That is ridiculous.

No, AI will not kill us, but it may cause a great depression.

But in a risk analysis, even that pales to the fact that a desperate, demented, paranoid Donald Trump has the nuclear codes. He is in a war he can’t win, with no plan to get out. He is an existential danger to the planet.

That, dear reader, is the timeline right here and right now.

So please, everyone. Focus. Do not let them hijack your attention with futuristic apocalypse scenarios when we’re living in one in the present.

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There are lots of things to be concerned about with AI, but a chatbot extinction event is not one of them.

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In my last article I explained why AI is not going to kill us, but could cause an economic disaster because the people running chatbot companies are amoral cultic conmen.

Since then, the purpose of the systematically apocalyptic freakout over AI has been made crystal clear by the CEOs of these companies. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has been on a whirlwind tour warning that his technology is too powerful to control and “swarms” could take over the internet if they don’t “slow the pace” and get the government involved.

To be clear, this is bullshit.

Amodei published an article “We Must Pace the Frontier” which has the tell:

“For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both jumped on this bandwagon, and the reason is transparent. Their companies are financial disasters which do not support the multi-trillion dollar valuations their investors expect. Chinese AI labs and open-weight models provide effectively the same performance for a small fraction of American frontier labs.

They need regulatory capture and a government backstop.

I wrote a brief parable to explain this influence operation.

Imagine you’re a conman. You’ve said for years you have MAGIC BEANS. To prove it, you’ve shown lots of REALLY BIG normal beans that you made in your lab.

“Almost there!” you say—over and over.

Now, you have almost convinced the villagers to give you TWO TRILLION DOLLARS.

But while the beans keep getting bigger, there is no magic yet…

What do you do? That money is SO CLOSE.

“I know!” you think, “instead of MAGIC beans, lets’s make them KILLER BEANS.”

So you pump up the beans SUPER BIG and you say: “I’m sorry, but these BEANS ARE GETTING BIGGER ON THEIR OWN!” You threaten the village that if they don’t give you the money, the beans may get into the WRONG HANDS. They might get BIGGER THAN THE EARTH!

The villagers, aghast, run to and fro arguing whether the beans are going to kill everyone or make them all rich.

“Well, either way,” the idiots in the village conclude, “we’d better give him the money.”

Should AI be regulated? Yes. Is AI unsafe if used maliciously? Of course.

But regulation is not what they really want. They want a bailout—from us.

Please join me and our thriving community today at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss the imminent chatbot apocalypse, the latest events in the Middle East, and anything else on your mind. It’s always open to questions and comments. Hope to see you there! Details below.

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In 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed his chatbot had gained sentience. At the time, I was running an AI games studio at a startup.

As someone who was trying to get early large language models (LLMs) to do much of anything useful at all, I found the story to be astonishingly naive and unhelpful. It absurdly anthropomorphized an experimental technology based on a total misunderstanding of the output.

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Google did the right thing and firmly told the world that Lemoine had not in fact discovered a trapped child in the matrix, and fired him. But the meme that there are hidden entities inside the machine, a myth that goes back centuries, was not rejected by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, they embraced it, and built on it.

In February 2026, an AI investor used a chatbot to write a spooky post on X about AI progress called “Something Big Is Happening” that got well over 100M views. As I wrote at the time, there was nothing substantial in the post, but it did illuminate what looks less like a technology and more like a fundamentalist religion in which Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the messiah, and the “Singularity” is the equivalent of the End Times.

On Tuesday evening, software engineer Jacob Coxon who had worked at OpenAI for three years, and moved to a job at Anthropic in July, posted a thread which asserted that he was quitting after roughly two months because “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” This portent of doom was followed within minutes by a quote-tweet from his former colleague—who is the “Alignment Science Lead” at Anthropic.

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Not only did Evan Hubinger agree with Jacob Coxon, he assigned a percentage to the possibility that “AI could kill all humans!” within a decade: more than 10%.

As of this writing, Coxon’s post has 158 million views. Within a day, he had done a substantial number of television interviews, including this deliberately alarming rant comparing AI to nuclear weapons on FOX.

“Yeah, so unfortunately we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. We don’t yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It’s basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.“

The hysteria generated from Coxon’s performances has been bipartisan and pervasive across social media. A number of Democrats have taken it at face value, including Bernie Sanders, who is being advised by people in the “Rationalist” “effective altruism” (EA) movement—an elite philanthro-capitalist ideology that serves to justify collecting massive amounts of wealth.

The EA movement and its overlapping x-risk institutions have been heavily financed by Silicon Valley billionaires: Musk funded Max Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute, while Peter Thiel was an early backer of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute. It was also extensively promoted by now-imprisoned felon Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic before folding due to fraud.

Here is an excellent summary (gift article) of this movement and how deeply it connects to the AI industry. It is a complex story involving the transhumanist philosophy of Extropianism and the Peter Thiel-backed apocalyptic mythology of the Singularity, but it makes a good case that the chatbot industrial complex is more like a cult than a technology industry.

Simultaneous to the latest uproar over technological extinction, Anthropic released a whitepaper called “Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI∗” which puts forth three scenarios for the effect of the chatbot industry on the economy by 2030. Unsurprisingly, it puts forward no negative scenarios for growth.

In the “Modest” case, AI is as transformative as the internet. In the “Extreme Case” knowledge workers face drastic unemployment—but somehow GDP growth goes above 15%.

The financial model Anthropic used to make these predictions apparently did not factor in the more than 10% chance “AI will kill all humans!” that its own Alignment Science Lead predicted.

Put together, according to the chatbot industry, there are two possible futures:

As Nobel Prize-winning doomer icon Geoffrey Hinton said: “It will be very good or very bad.”

The first two scenarios appear to be opposites, but from a marketing perspective they sell exactly the same story: these companies are on the verge of creating something unimaginably powerful.

But both of these extreme futures make the assumption that AGI or ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) is near—and both promote technology created by OpenAI and Anthropic as being so powerful they need to be regulated by the government.

But there is a third possibility:

If OpenAI and Anthropic cannot convince the public and the financial sector that scenario 1) or 2) is coming, and do not both successfully IPO, the entire economy will suffer a serious disruption. And if reality turns out to be scenario 3), rendering current investments in “AI” essentially a dead end, we have already witnessed the biggest misallocation of resources in human history, and it’s just getting bigger.

The truth is that LLMs are a useful software feature that will be harnessed, commoditized and absorbed into the tech stack. That’s what’s actually happening all around us. It is a useful technology for compressing and querying large sets of data through natural language. It is not an oracle or a savior.

Sheer scale is not the answer to further developing artificial intelligence. The circular trillions being spent on gigawatt data center construction is mass psychosis.

The chatbot industrial complex is another even bigger version of the crypto industry—a moderately useful technology (blockchain) which was turned into an abusive Ponzi scheme through deceptive psychological operations by an antidemocratic minority of billionaires and techno-fascists.

The rotating science fiction stories that chatbots are either going to kill us, or make it so we never have to work again, are a pattern favored by abusers who allow for no middle ground in a relationship. The public is being oscillated between salvation and catastrophe, with ordinary outcomes excluded from consideration.

The reality is both much more boring and much more serious.

In my opinion, there is zero reason to believe AI will end humanity by 2030, or ever for that matter, but there is every reason to believe the industry that promotes it has inflated the largest speculative bubble in history based on science fiction stories.

Reality bites.

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NOTE: My articles are extensively researched and written by a human—me. No chatbots touched the words on this page.

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I have written extensively about the Russian project to remake the world into “poles”—spheres of influence which Putin’s fascist propagandist Aleksandr Dugin calls a “multipolar world.” The transparent goal has been to force the United States to withdraw its ability to project power into regions that Russia wants to dominate.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Moscow Saturday, met with terrorist war criminal Vladimir Putin, and effusively thanked him for the “memories.” They also gave him a coin which read “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH” showing the entire Western Hemisphere under U.S. domination—aka the “Donroe Doctrine.”

As geopolitical expert Michael MacKay points out, the coin can also be seen as an extension of the map of the “Technate of America” proposed by Technocracy, Inc. in the 1930s. Elon Musk’s grandfather was a leader of the group before he was arrested by the Canadian government for anti-government activities. Their goal was to eliminate voting and money—so that “technocrats” could rule the world.

Everything the Trump regime has done—including losing a horrifically costly war to Iran—has pushed the world in this direction. Last week Hegseth reassigned three armored divisions away from the Russian threat in Europe to the new “Western Hemisphere Command.”

“Divide and conquer” is being played out on the world stage. Autocrats want to divide us from each other—to atomize us—so they can conquer us.

Please join me for a conversation at Noon PT / 3PM ET to discuss the weeks events, the dissolving of our collective ability to tell what matters, and anything else on your mind. Hope to see you there! Details below.

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