Peter Thiel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought somewhat akin to the English 17th century, where everything was very fertile? There’s a scientific revolution. Tech, you could say, is revitalized again. A lot of people went crazy, highly diverse theologies. They execute a king. Many strange things happen. In many ways, we’re living in the world of the English 17th century, right? With constitutions, political parties, central banks. Is this the new millenarian age? This is, again, an absurdly cyclical frame you’re putting on things. No, I don’t think any moment ever repeats itself. It is just radically different. Of course, there are things that are apocalyptic about our world. We have all these kinds of dangers that, unlike the 17th century, they seem to come from this place that’s very nonreligious. Science, technology. It was nuclear weapons after 1945. Maybe it’s environmental degradation, climate change. We can debate about various forms of the environment. There certainly are fears people have about bioweapons. We can ask what really happened with the Wuhan lab. There are apocalyptic fears around AI that I think deserve to be taken seriously. Yes, if it’s millenarian or apocalyptic, it has a very, very different feel. It’s sort of an apocalyptic violence that comes from a purely human source. It’s not really being orchestrated by God. One of the points that René Girard always liked to make was that, in the Catholic Church — it was, I think, during the Advent season — you’d often have these sermons on the end times, the terrible things that happened at the end of the world. In Girard’s telling, the Church stopped those sermons after 1945 because people needed to be reassured that the nuclear weapons had nothing to do with Armageddon or fire and brimstone or anything like this, even though, of course, there were all these slight mythic elements. The first nuclear test was called Trinity, or you named it after all these Greek gods: Saturn, Jupiter, Zeus, whatever. There are elements of that that I think are very true. If I’ve had to do my anti-millenarian frame, or maybe it’s not a pro-tech argument — this is sort of an anti-anti-tech argument — is that if we, again, talk about all these existential risks today — nuclear weapons, climate change, biotech, nanotech, killer robots, the AI that’s going to turn everyone into a paperclip or whatever — I always think you should at least include one more kind of existential risk if we’re going to throw it in. In my mind, one other existential risk is a one-world totalitarian government. I find that at least as scary as the others. In a biblical eschatological context, you’re supposed to worry about Armageddon. You’re also supposed to worry about the Antichrist. Maybe you’re supposed to worry more about the Antichrist because the Antichrist comes first. So, if we’re going to find a pathway through this apocalyptic age, you have to navigate between the Scylla of all these existential risks and the Charybdis of this political totalitarian catastrophe. If I had to do a more literary version on this, it’s very hard to write a literary account of the Antichrist. The two good Antichrist books that were written, the two best fictional ones in my mind, were pre-World War I. There was a 1908 Robert Hugh Benson, sort of a Catholic book, Lord of the World. There was a 1900 one by Solovyov, War, Progress, and the End of History. ctional ones in my mind, were pre-World War I. There was a 1908 Robert Hugh Benson, sort of a Catholic book, Lord of the World. There was a 1900 one by Solovyov, War, Progress, and the End of History. They both had these accounts of this future totalitarian world dictator who took over the whole world. Both of them — it’s kind of a daemonium ex machina. It’s really unclear how the Antichrist takes over. It gives these hypnotic speeches, and no one can remember a word he says, but they all just sell their souls for no apparent good reason whatsoever, and he just takes over the world. It seems to me that if one were to try to write a novel like this post-1945, it’s very straightforward. It’d be like One World or None. This was a short film by the nuclear scientists after 1945. If we don’t give nuclear weapons to the one-world government, it’s going to blow up the whole world. Basically, the literary version would be that the Antichrist comes to power by constantly talking about Armageddon and constantly telling us scary millenarian stories. That’s my complicated, nuanced answer. There’s a lot of truth to these existential risks. I don’t want to completely dismiss them, but that’s also how we’re going to get this totalitarian state. There are all these versions of this I can go down, but do you want to worry about Dr. Strangelove or Greta? It seems like Dr. Strangelove’s more dangerous, but if everyone’s going to have to ride a bicycle, that’s not just going to happen on its own. That requires some real, real enforcement of this stuff. There’s a short Bostrom essay from 2019 on how to stop all the AI risks, and it’s basically, maybe we can change the culture so that nobody will have heterodox ideas anymore. A few different ideas like this, but then what you really need is really effective global government and really effective policing, and you have to have some global compute governance. That sounds to me at least as scary as the AI.…

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