Why Silicon Valley Wants to Leave Humanity Behind

Behind the AI race, there's a philosophy with an intellectual lineage and a body of work that holds that human beings are a defective early draft, that the things that make us humans are bugs to be fixed, that this planet is expendable and we can move on to the next. And that the suffering of real people today is a rounding error against the value of a cosmic future.

Broadly speaking, these ideas fit under the umbrella of transhumanism. You might hear it referred to as techno-optimism or accelerationism. Twenty years ago, these were the beliefs of an ideological fringe in Silicon Valley. Today, they are held by many of the people who build and govern the most powerful technology in human history.

In this episode, we name and explore these underlying beliefs and the people who hold them — so that you can recognize this anti-human vision of the future when it appears in a press statement, or buried in a manifesto, or in a carefully worded thread on X. And we discuss how to counter those ideas with a pro-human vision that embraces the full complexity of our world.

Our guest this week has devoted his career to thinking about these critical issues. Alex Thomas is a senior lecturer at the University of East London and the author of "The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism." He first started studying transhumanism years ago when it was an abstract academic curiosity, and he's watched as it's become, in his own words, "arguably the most powerful ideological force on the planet."

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS

• Alex referred to the art exhibit that inspired his interest in transhumanism as “The Future Superhuman.” It was actually just “Superhuman”.

• Alex stated that the Extropians “debated privatizing air and water.” This is true, but they were referring to bodies of water, not drinking water.

• Alex cited 2015 as the publication year of Sam Altman’s blog about The Merge. It was actually 2017. Additionally, he characterized The Merge in stronger terms than how they characterize their own mission: "we could restore lost abilities, support healthier brain states, deepen our connection with each other, and expand what we can imagine and create alongside advanced AI."

• Alex mistakenly referred to Nick Bostrom’s idea of the cosmic sublime as the “cosmological sublime.”