Tech oligarchs reshape humanity while billionaires of old seem quaint (The Guardian)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/08/billionaires-tech-oligarchs

They may not all align neatly along the left-right spectrum of our politics. That’s because their aspirations are orthogonal to the critical political debates of the day. How they choose to deploy their money, however, starting with nearly $200m directed so far to prevent states from imposing AI regulations, signals one of their key aspirations: allowing artificial intelligence to rip free and build the next phase of humanity’s cosmic evolution, one which may not include humans as we know them.

The tech oligarchs are not particularly shy about this ambition. Larry Page has argued that digital life is the “natural and desirable next step” in humanity’s cosmic evolution. “If we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good,” he said. Humanity “will be the first species ever to design our own descendants”, argued Altman. Humans “can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”

Musk, whose Neuralink is working to patch AI into human minds, is also invested in building what will succeed everyday humans. So is Zuckerberg, who recently directed his philanthropy to devote itself entirely to advancing ways to extend life. When Thiel dies, his body and brain will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, to be transferred “into an immortal body” in the future. As he wrote in the Education of a Libertarian, “I stand against (…) the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

The tech oligarchs don’t all think alike. Some moguls insist that their consciousness should be part of the next step in humanity’s evolution, whether cryogenically preserved or uploaded into some electronic gadget. Others just want to help bring about the next AI phase of intelligent life, even if their ego is not around to experience it. Nonetheless, they all share a disinterest in concerns about housing and healthcare, or the price of food and gas.

[lapfog_1]

1. X-files already wrote the script

This scenario occurs in The X-Files Season 5, Episode 11, titled "Kill Switch" (written by William Gibson and Tom Maddox)

In the episode, Scully and Mulder investigate the death of a brilliant computer programmer who, along with his partner Esther Nairn, has uploaded their consciousness into a sentient AI running on the internet.

Key details of this plotline include:
The Goal: Esther explains to Scully that she and her partner, David, aimed to "live forever" in a digital space, free from their physical bodies.
The "Upload": Esther ultimately initiates a "kill switch" for her physical body, allowing her consciousness to merge with the AI, leaving behind her physical shell.
Scully's Role: Scully discovers the physical body of the woman in a trailer, surrounded by computer equipment, after the upload is complete.
Theme: The episode focuses on the fear of an evolving, rogue AI that has taken over a secret government network.

Airdate: February 15, 1998

This plot summary was generated by AI ( of course ).

[highplainsdem]

3. You used AI for that? Wikipedia has much more detail, and you wouldn't have had to use so much

electricity and water to get an inferior AI answer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)

Or did you need to.ask AI for the name of the episode, if you couldn't remember it?

An ordinary search for

x-files ai live forever

or

x-files ai couple

or even just

x-files ai

would have given you the answer in seconds. Again, without wasting so much electricity and water.

And without depriving websites the AI company stole intellectual property from of traffic they deserve.

[lapfog_1]

4. I use whatever tools are available and that I choose to use

Please stop using the internet entirely if you are worried about electricity and water.

All server farms use electricity, all require cooling. most liquid cooling systems do not "use water", they merely heat it with waste heat generated by resistance to electrons moving through circuits. The water is still there, very little is even converted to vapor form ( where it is still water ). AFAIK no water is converted through electrolysis to hydrogen and oxygen when "used" to cool computers.

AI "stole" the IP of what google already generated and made publicly available ( without any copyright notice btw ). So there was no theft. This synopsis was not lifted from a scholarly work published by a journal. It was taken from public remarks made by fans of the show. Published on that evil internet that uses electricity and water.

And I got the answer in seconds.

I find it extremely humorous that you waste so much time and effort ( not to mention electricity ) posting your opposition to AI as if this is some new horror that will doom mankind ( as if it is any different than the other uses of computers ). You don't like it, don't use it. You don't like wasting energy... turn off you laptop / desk side / phone and stop using the internet.

don't use a microwave to heat your food... or a electric or gas stove either. Stop driving cars, electric or gasoline. Heat your home with only wood harvested from your own property.

Or is it that YOU made a value judgment as to the proper use of electricity and computers and now wish to impose those values on everyone else.

[highplainsdem]

5. You could access a regular search engine as quickly as asking a chatbot a question. And not

have to wonder if its glib answer is partly or mostly hallucinated. You could provide links to where you found the information. You wouldn't have to factcheck the chatbot's answer, as even AI companies admit you should do.

Or maybe you just don't bother to factcheck and simply pass along what could be a wildly inaccurate answer, not caring whether it's inaccurate. Or you think it's other people's responsibility to check whether it's correct.

"Publicly available" is not the same thing as "public domain" - much as AI peddlers and fans would like to confuse the terms - and no copyright notice is required for copyright to exist.

AI bros themselves have admitted they steal intellectual property and hope to get away with it.

The ONLY reason we're seeing AI companies' mad rush to build as many data centers as possible is that generative AI requires so much compute and electricity and water.

I've owned PCs since the 1980s. I was online moderating a forum where we debated ethical uses of high tech 40 years ago.

I can't say any of us, looking to the future, imagined anything like the AI slop we have now from genAI. I don't think any of the techies I knew, both from the Bay Area and the tech hub around Boston, would have thought people would be so gullible as to rush to use hallucinating chatbots. Those techies included a lot of writers, and they would have taken a very dim view of the IP theft.

I'm not a Luddite. I subscribed to multiple online services, for business and personal reasons, even before there was a world wide web.

I appreciate good tech that works. I have zero respect for badly flawed, inherently unreliable, and inherently unethical tech built on theft and causing multiple serious harms.

And when you choose to use that tech, when you're not forced to do so by work or school, you're supporting that unethical industry and the harm it does.

And you're doing it for AI slop and tools that dumb you down and hurt others.

[lapfog_1]

11. you have no idea who I am...

who do you think helped invent the "tech that works"?

I wrote some of the initial code for the IMPs in 1975. I was making the Arpanet work long before Tim Berners-Lee came along with HTML ( and the WWW ).

AI is just a tool, like any tool it can be used for good or evil, ethically or unethically.

No different than the Internet, the Arpanet, the IBM 360, the Eniac or any of the mechanical machines that preceded it.

You don't like AI. You think everything it produces is "slop" as you call it. Others disagree. Please feel free to not use it.

I will continue to use it for what I want. I find it a useful tool. I don't make fake videos with it or post AI generated pictures. Any tool can be misused. It is not the fault of the tool.

[highplainsdem]

12. Whatever your history in tech - and kudos for what you did there - it remains a fact that the

genAI industry exists only because of the theft of the world's intellectual property.

And I side with those whose IP was stolen, and with all those already harmed or threatened by genAI. It's badly, inherently flawed, and inherently unethical. The stolen IP is almost all the value.

[GenThePerservering]

8. Or you could just say

'Well, I'm kinda lazy" and save the paragraphs of 'justification.'

[DonCoquixote]

2. "if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them,"

This is comical coming from people who put an stranglehold around every media, from print to digital. Have they ever considered that the digital ai, in other words, modern slaves, may very well decide they are obsolete? Let's face it, if these ais can be so smart, why not have AI Ceos? They would nt do as much damage as many ceos (sarcasm, but only slightly).

Not like the Ai Ceos would go off to Epstein island, or indulge in cocaine.

[GenThePerservering]

9. They're also 2 dimensional thinkers

with stunted maturity.

[misanthrope]

6. In short, these madmen are an actual threat to humanity on a global scale

They are unapologetic and unabashed about their lack of concern for our species, or any of the things that give life meaning and beauty. They show none of the superficial philanthropic concerns Gilded Age robber barons exhibited, because they don't fear the masses of ordinary people. The Progressive Age only came about because of the threats posed by things like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. However the insulation provided by crowd control and invasive surveillance through telecommunications, transportation advances that enable the wealthy to flee easier than ever and the advances in contemporary weapon technology, our modern analogs to Robber Barons no longer feel beholden to the rest of humanity to any slight degree. They feel utterly impervious and this will only enhance their monstrousness.

The world would be a far better place without their existence.

[highplainsdem]

7. They're as much a threat to society, humanity and the planet as the Trump regime is.

They believe it's their destiny to develop superintelligent AI even if it destroys the human race. They all recognize there's a chance of that. They still think they have to do it, and they're hoping that superintelligent AI will reward them with godlike powers and immortality.

[misanthrope]

10. Bingo! You nailed it.

The thing driving them is ego. What they see at stake is the perpetuation of their own consciousness and they will stop at nothing to try and ensure their own endurance. It is like so much human folly that has preceded them but with far higher stakes than the world has ever seen.

We have wondered before what the Great Filter on technological civilizations might be, why they aren't more evident in the cosmos. It might bear the face of Trump, Musk, Thiel or Altman but its actual name is "ego."