One of the world’s most powerful technology leaders has reportedly warned that regulating artificial intelligence risks hastening the coming of the Antichrist.My first thought, too, was “bad metaphor.” No, it seems not:
Peter Thiel, the conservative billionaire who co-founded Palantir, the data analytics group, and PayPal, the payments operator, is said to have made the comments during a lecture delivered in San Francisco this week.
Thiel, a former donor to Donald Trump and mentor to JD Vance, the vice-president, said that fearing or regulating promising technology and scientific progress, including in AI, risked courting the devil, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people who attended the event.
The Times has previously reported on Thiel’s devout Christian views and their mingling with his business interests and how he is among several Silicon Valley figures who have been speaking more openly about their faith.And sure enough, it gets worse:
Thiel, an investor in defence and weapons development technology companies, is in the midst of delivering a sold-out series of lectures on the biblical Antichrist.And worse, still:
The talks have been organised by a collective known as Acts 17 Collective — “Acts” standing for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society”. The nonprofit group was founded last year by Michelle Stephens, a healthcare start-up executive and the wife of Trae Stephens, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. Stephens is also co-founder of Anduril Industries, which makes and sells autonomous weapons systems.I do wish everyone would stop using “existential” that way. It’s like fingernails on my epistemological blackboard. The fact that Thiel is still using it is perhaps even worse than his theological musings about Satan.
The talks were marketed as “off the record” but a guest at the first of four talks published notes of the first lecture on his personal website.
His post, which has since been removed, was picked up by the San Francisco Standard, and had reportedly said that Thiel argued that because we are increasingly concerned about existential threats, the time is ripe for the Antichrist to rise to power, promising peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation.
Thiel has previously warned against the emergence of an individual or system that could exploit fears of global catastrophe driven by AI to enforce a “one-world totalitarian state” that undermines human freedom.Then again, maybe not.
He has previously suggested that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist, but her name is not thought to have come up at the talks so far.
Well, if it wasn’t clear before, it is now. Thiel is a nutter.
I used to be able to distinguish between pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, and amillennialism. But that was 50 years ago, and The Late Great Planet Earth (which sparked my interest in the categories) is now deader than Dickens’ proverbial door nail (along with Left Behind, which is no less, and no more, lamented). So I lost interest years ago, and don’t intend to find it now. Not even for Peter Thiel. Make that especially over Peter Thiel.
Leave it at this: the entire subject is of academic interest, but I’m no longer an academician (if ever I was). I never really ascribed to the idea of a millennia of peace, an idea that largely comes from the gross misreadings of the Revelation to John. I prefer Isaiah’s vision of God’s holy mountain. Revelation is a book I used to conveniently (for me) despise, but now accept as the palimpsest to the Book of Daniel. A little apocalyptic literature is a good thing. It’s in line with the Magnificat, after all. But just as the dangerously radical nature of Mary’s song is often overlooked, the metaphors and symbolism (and purpose) of the Revelation are often overlooked, and so misunderstood.
But this is not the place for a full explication of that thesis. Lucky you. Leave it at this: the Revelation is a valuable study, but most exegetical forays into it are crap. Thiel’s interest in the Antichrist is proof enough for me he’s in the Scofield camp of the truly ignorant. (But I am not so ignorant. I’ve dusted off my knowledge to affirm Scofield was a pre-millennialist, while champions of the Antichrist are post-millennialists. Revelation 20:1-6, is the source of all this. That is, if you read Revelation literally. Which is tricky, as that passage explicitly says that the “dragon” hurled into the abyss for 1000 years is “the devil, or Satan.” So, not literally a dragon 🐉, but a metaphor. This is always my problem with literalism: it only applies as the literalists want it to.) I have no intention of refuting him in detail, in part because I have no details on what he thinks. In larger part because I know enough, to know he’s a nutter. I mean, he identifies anything he thinks is against him as a sign and the work of the devil.
Even Trump only thinks those who are not with him are his enemies. Thiel thinks he’s a warrior in a battle against cosmic evil.
A nutter, as I said.
You cannot serve both God and Mammon and Thiel's bunch serves Mammon. It's harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. . . etc. Christianity ain't what it used to be, I mean like sometime in the late 1st century.
ReplyDeleteI'd say they were all pure capitalist materialists but who like Henry IV of France who decided Paris was worth a mass but they're more like the worst of the worst of the Renaissance papacy, So interesting to see that reproduced in evangelical "christianity" and the worst of the Anabaptist branches.
What's most remarkable is that I have heard not a single anti-LGBTQ+ conservative comment on Peter Thiel's sexual orientation and practice. He's in a same sex marriage and his hypocritical politics. I've only heard other LGBTQ+ People bring that up. And not the conservatives among them.
I didn’t know about the marriage, but then I know almost nothing about Thiel. It doesn’t surprise me, though. Another sign of how absolutely unreliable he is, as a source of ideas. Then again, he’s promoting AI, an idea as reliable as the “hard” science fiction of my youth, which was written by people who didn’t understand the first thing about engineering or science, but imagined they did. It was all extrapolation into a future of flying cars and the “3 laws of robotics.” Ignorant adolescent male bullshit, IOW, treated as gospel. Same as it ever was.
DeleteMy only interest in this is that Thiel is commonly described as a follower of Rene Girard (that might have been parenthetically mentioned in the article you quote), and the reason that I care is that, though I've only read one of Girard's books (his later Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair), what little I've seen of Thiel's reading of him seems to entirely miss the point. Girard's description of the scapegoat mechanism is in fact a perfect exemplar of what this administration is doing, singling out the poorest and weakest as the cause of all our conflicts and expelling them. Girard interprets the crucifixion and resurrection as the overturning of scapegoating Not a major point, but I hate to see what I consider an original and powerful critique of our assault on the poor corrupted into a rationale for it by a rich, powerful techie wrapping himself in the mantle of the Christian faith.
ReplyDeleteAs I say, I know nothing about Thiel, but this is enlightening, and calls to mind why Thiel named his company after an obscure object in LOTR. I can’t even remember where I read it now, but it was a description of Thiel’s analysis of LOTR, and as you say about Girard, Thiel got Tolkien absolutely backwards. Tolkien’s work is , to over simplify, about the triumph of justice. Thiel reads it as a treatise on power, and who deserves to wield it. Almost as if Sauron was the good guy.
DeleteWell, the palantir is a tool of Sauron, so….