I forget that outside the left/tech bubble, people don't know what tech billionaires are about.

I don't think you can truly understand what they're planning without understanding the mental models they have for the world.

There's a combination of geek boy* topics that have formed them:
- Rome and other Imperial histories
- the biographies of "great" Emperors and warmongers
- sci-fi, and sci-fi-leaning spec-fic, in particular the singularity, true AI, and digital surveillance empires (Gibson, Vinge, Doctorow)

They believe that eugenics is good if they're in charge. They want all powerful AI. They think they'll live forever, either with or without a body. They believe society is better when ruled by an elite, all-powerful and extremely intelligent ruler. They think there's something inherently wrong with humans, probably empathy, and that they can fix it.

They are not scared of the new, even if they might get crushed by AI too. They can't help themselves, they need to see what happens on the next page.

They want to be Ghengis Kahn with a digitised antebellum slavery eugenics program and a robot butler in space.

Yes, they took the wrong side after reading those stories, and failed to see the warning. But they did read them.

* I love geek boys, I'm not dissing you. Just pointing out the most geek girls didn't get into empires, and most people didn't get into hard SciFi. This combo is specific.

#ai #TechBillionaires #StopTheBillionaires

Edited for typos, as always