Happy Sunday, friends.
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.