Extinctionist Exhibitionism
Zoom Today, Noon PT / 3PM ET
Hello friends,
We’re in a tenuous moment. Just ahead of the State of the Union, with Epstein and the SCOTUS tariff defeat on his degenerating mind, Donald Trump has moved the largest force deployed since the 2003 Iraq War into position to attack Iran—after claiming he can “destroy foreign countries.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s psychology combined with Pete Hegseth’s make an attack effectively a certainty. The human beings at risk from this dangerous, unnecessary escalation will never enter Trump and Hegseth’s minds. For Hegseth, it’s holy war. For Trump, it’s repairing his deeply wounded ego.
The new trend in billionaires seems to be performative extinctionism—deliberately minimizing the people in favor of the things. For example, this is one of the most telling tweets I’ve ever seen.
You see, for the richest man, the centuries of oppression and feudalism in France were totally worth it. Look at the cool castles you got!
This is enthusiastic misanthropy. And it didn’t end well for people like Musk.
Lastly, a protege of Musk and Peter Thiel, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said this when asked about the nightmarish energy costs of his technology:
One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart.
And not only that, it took like the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learn not to get eaten by predators and learn how to figure out science and whatever to produce you. And then you took whatever you took. So the fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT your question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way.
There are many falsehoods here. First, the brain is exponentially more efficient, and exponentially cheaper to “train” than any chatbot. Second, the amount of energy it takes to run a query on a data center is astronomically higher than the tiny signals in your brain that create thought and emotions. He’s just making stuff up.
But more importantly, he’s making a (false) cost calculation about how his technology can literally replace people. It is extinctionist fan fiction from the CEO of a company that believes it’s worth nearly a trillion dollars.
Chatbots will never replace people, no matter how big they make the data centers, but they will keep trying until it’s impossible for people to live. Either way, the people are the losers.
They just say this stuff out loud now. Extinctionist exhibitionism.
Zoom today at Noon PT / 3PM PT for paid subscribers to process the week and prepare for what may be a very consequential next few days. Hope to see you. Details below.