Silicon Valley’s ‘Great Replacement’ theoryA commitment to bringing about a transhuman future allows you to ignore today’s very real problems.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/12/silicon-valley-artificial-intelligence-ethics/It is no surprise that the appetite for oddball science fiction ideas that gave America everything from Scientology to Heaven’s Gate would be irresistibly drawn to artificial intelligence. The image of Silicon Valley’s enlightened CEOs hotly debating the merits of various paths toward a “transhuman” future — in which AI empowers humans to supersede our “biological substrate” and expand across the universe — is almost funny.
But the vision loses much of its charm when you consider the power these men can wield. And it becomes downright terrifying when prominent members of this cabal are given the keys to the government of the most powerful nation in the world.
Take Elon Musk, who is busy tinkering with the machinery of the federal government, occasionally throwing chunks of it into the woodchipper. Musk has a well-documented affection for “longtermism,” the ethical foundation for the proposition that ensuring the future population of the cosmos by whatever-succeeds-present-day-humans is the moral imperative of the day.
The thought flows from a slightly tweaked utilitarian worldview: We should strive to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of people, no matter whether they live in the present or in the future. If you propose that we could reach the stars and beyond to populate the universe with bazillions of “people” living happy lives, you are left, morally, with no alternative but to devote yourself to ensure that this future comes about.
The Silicon Valley crowd is convinced AI has brought that prospect within clear view.
Our meat-based body is not the best vehicle to expand our consciousness beyond the galaxy. We die too quickly for interstellar colonization. We require lots of maintenance. “Your body is a deathtrap,” Nick Bostrom, director of the now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, wrote in “Letter from Utopia.” AI can take our consciousness to the next level — maybe by living in a simulated reality in some piece of software. Or something.
Musk loves this stuff. He heartily recommended longtermist philosopher William MacAskill’s book “What We Owe The Future,” which proposes “a moral case for space settlement” and concludes that “the future of civilization could be literally astronomical in scale.” He has gone on record to say humanity is most likely already living in a simulation and has endorsed another of Bostrom’s propositions: that humanity’s overriding priority should be to mitigate the risk that some catastrophe prevents us from developing the techno-utopian version of ourselves that can populate the universe.
And Musk just made a $97.4 billion bid to buy ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
He is not the only believer in our transhuman potential. Google’s Larry Page has argued that digital life is the desirable next step in the cosmic evolution and that AI paranoia would delay the advent of utopia. OpenAI boss Sam Altman believes that “unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen.” Humanity, he says “will be the first species ever to design our own descendants.”
Indeed, Musk’s views are on the tame end of the posthuman-colonization-of-the-universe debate. He at least appears to accept a case for government regulation to prevent AI from simply destroying everybody. A couple years ago, the “Future of Life Institute,” of which Musk was a prominent donor, issued a letter signed by a bunch of intellectuals calling for a “pause” in big AI experiments lest we “risk loss of control of our civilization.”
Another branch of posthuman enthusiasts, who call themselves “effective accelerationists,” would rather let AI rip. Their argument is not dissimilar to that of the foes of gun control: Just as they argue that the best way to limit gun violence is to make sure everyone is armed at all times, effective accelerationists say that the solution to killer AI is not regulation but rather a world populated by many AIs designed by competing firms.
The debate could almost (almost!) justify a tear for ethno-populists such as Stephen K. Bannon, who are straining to protect the red meat, bruised white privilege end of Trump’s political coalition from oligarchs espousing a vision of the world in which working Americans are not only replaced by immigrants but eventually superseded by code.
Though the whole thing might sound a bit too “Blade Runner” to take seriously, it should nevertheless inspire some alarm. These people are powerful. And it’s not just Musk. Altman just carved himself a place in President Donald Trump’s inner circle, apparently by promising that OpenAI will achieve human-level general artificial intelligence during this administration. The rest of them are jockeying for position around Trump’s dinner table.
Their overriding concern for humanity in the far future not only devalues the critical concerns of the present — things like abject poverty and its attendant conditions. Their utopian scheme glosses over more mundane perils — such as undermining the notion of reality — that AI is provoking in the here and now.
For the technorati’s embrace of a posthuman future universe rests on unlimited contempt for the bread-and-butter concerns of billions of imperfect meat-and-bones people walking the planet today. Musk and his fellow techno-billionaires tend to cast themselves as the greatest version of man. They see no reason to acquiesce to less-endowed people that might stand in the way of their utopia.
They are the builders, entitled to impose upon us their wildest dreams. They claim their goal is to maximize the well-being of humanity. But it’s a humanity that they get to design.
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