AI ‘optimists’ who are down on us. And is the antichrist one of them?

 What follows is a small - though impudent - side riff from one of the chapters of my upcoming book about Artificial Intelligence (isn't everyone writing one?) In chapter two I cite many different AI Doom Scenarios, some of them just cautionary and others fiercely luddite or anti-technology.

But this riff... sampled here in advance... offers you a look at another kind of  “anti-enlightenment” zealotry out there. This variant is not luddite. Nor does it favor technology-relinquishment. Rather, the self-named “dark enlightenment” is eagerly gung-ho about cyber data gathering and utterly credulous about the likelihood of breakout AI. 

And yes, readers of Contrary Brin will find a few aspects familiar, while others are shockingly new.

 

As I write this passage, one wing of Silicon Valley ‘tech-bro’ billionaires has allied itself with unabashed proto-feudalists now roaming the halls of the White House, calling for an end to the “failed experiment in mass democracy” and a return to more classic social orders, of the kind that reigned across most continents, for most of the last sixty or so centuries – everywhere that agricultural surplus enabled local lords to hire thugs to enforce their ownership over masses of peasants, below. And never mind that the Liberal West accomplished far more, across the last century, than all other times and places in the human past… combined. Romanticism sees what it wants to see, especially when a delusional masturbation-incantation is self-serving.

 

This modern version of reactionary anti-liberalism – also called neo-monarchism – proclaims disdain toward the very system that educated, enriched and eventually empowered its devotees, providing every comfort and opportunity imaginable. Adherents promoting this cause now demand that mob rule be replaced by a “CEO-monarch” with absolute power to get things done, no longer impeded by bureaucrats enforcing so-called rule-of-law. And above all, that singleton king should get complete freedom from accountability.

 

While the preceding paragraph may sound polemically pretentious or excessive, it doesn’t exaggerate. Not even in the slightest. And I elaborate about this modern cult elsewhere. (Including how some members, having built their mountaintop ‘prepper’ fortress-redoubts, now openly avow wishing to ‘accelerate the Event,’ a purportedly-coming Civilizational Collapse that will topple corrupt western society.) 

For a chillingly excellent depiction of the outcome that they seek, I recommend Vladimir Sorokin’s short novel Day of the Oprichnik.

As for the Dark Enlightenment’s pertinence in a book about artificial intelligence and its implications, well, one feature of that movement merits some further mention… the  involvement of those ‘tech-bros.’ Because a number of the very same fellows whose names you'll see across the pages of my AI book – having been outrageously enriched by the relatively flat-fair-creative and socially-mobile University America – are now leveraging all of that to invest heavily in AI. 

 

Moreover, some (certainly not all) of them have also bought into a movement to end the very same social mobility that benefited them, in a modern West that they now denounce as inflexible and decadent. One that hampers their efforts to bring about…

 

…to bring about what? 

 

Well I elaborate in Chapter 9  of my book the widely shared motive of achieving some form of personal immortality, perhaps through AI-driven medical advances. Or else by pairing-with or uploading-into cybernetic entities. But those redemptions will likely lack one ideal trait that these fellows desire – exclusivity to a narrow, ruling caste. The goodies would normally become available to everyone, even people they don't like. That is, unless some scenario erects a caste system, monopolizing all the great-leaps only for an elite. Which, of course, is part of the fantasy.

 

Then there is a different form of immortality. One that propels male reproductive strategies all across Nature… maximization of offspring. Indeed, we are all descended from the harems of brutally insistent men who pulled off that trick across the ages, passing along some of their traits and drives. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to spot and name those in the tech community who clearly fall into each of the categories listed in the preceding two paragraphs.)

                             == The archetype exemplar isn't who you think ==

But here I want to mention one more type of immortalist drive. One that may strike some readers as quaint, as it is also terrifying. It was typified in a September 2025 series of ‘confidential lectures’ by Paypal/Palantir impresario Peter Thiel. Confidential lectures (that were recorded and leaked, of course) offering his unique perspectives concerning the antichrist.

 

Subsequent articles and summaries emphasized Thiel’s blithe slurring of “candidate antichrists,” a list that includes Bill Gates, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, a panoply of Democrats… and Greta Thunberg, of all people. Yudkowsky because he now supports moratoriums and restrictions on AI development. Bostrom because he warns of potential AI failure modes. Democrats because they support international banking transparency. As for Thunberg and Gates, they appear – in Thiel’s eye – to support some kind of global governance, ostensibly to save the planet, but in ways that might shine light upon international money flows... and constrain or guide further AI developments. 

While it's true that some of Thiel's bêtes noirs do favor some degree of greater world coordination and law, one is prompted to wonder which proposed future system would seem more antichrist-ish? 

Which is more to be feared? A diffuse, constitutional, planetary confederation of free and knowing citizens and still-sovereign nations, loosely bound by transparently basic rule-of-law? And conditioned by Hollywood to always question authority?

... or Peter's openly yearned-for opaque oligarchy of CEO-kings, "ex"-commissars, inheritance brats, petro-princes and -- of course - tech bro billionaires? All of them united, first, by Thiel's openly-avowed goal to "hide my money"? But overall by the shared, reflexively un-sapient compulsion of would-be tyrants and harem-builders to re-create the very same feudal-imperial pattern that crucified Jesus and that Nero later used to torture John of Patmos? 

I agree that those two versions of world governance are incompatible. It will be one or the other. 

Since Peter once had his Stanford class read my book The Transparent Society - he could guess that I'd choose the looser system based on universal rights, rambunctiously critical citizenship, competitive churn-replacement of elites, and free-flowing light. 

Moreover, when you stare clearly at that looming fork in the road, it seems plain which system would be preferred by any 'antichrist.'

                     == I want to know more! ==

 

All of that is, of course, boringly unsurprising. I've commented many times on the reflexive predictability of instinct-driven proto-feudalism. And so, that's not the intellectual content I wanted from Peter Thiel's exegesis. No, I want to learn something new from his agile rationalizations!

Alas, for those of us wishing to grapple with Thiel's theological specifics, these have been glossed-over, or entirely ignored in subsequent articles about the event. (This piece in The Guardian is better than most, filled with interesting details, while still entirely missing the keystone paradoxes.) I can understand most secular journalists being uninformed about the subject matter. 

But you don't have to be!

And hence, for a fun and easy intro to the BoR (Book of Revelation) see Patrick Farley's manga version - Apocamon - wherein you’ll get a gist of the New Testament’s gruesomely sadistic back-end. The part that so many of our neighbors prefer over the actual words of Jesus -- His diametrically-opposite, gently-wise sermons that Jimmy Carter touted, across 80 years teaching Sunday School. Two incompatible versions of Christianity that are diverging right now, before our very eyes.

I've written and posted about armageddon yearnings elsewhere. For example, in "Whose Rapture?" I dissect the recurring millennialist yearning for End Times that has wracked every generation in most societies, not just the Christian West. Spates during each new wave of vehement Jonahs claimed to recognize and identify every BoR character in prominent figures of their day. 

I am left to wonder about Thiel's four-part Antichrist Lectures. Did he mention that almost every Pope across 2000 years has been denounced by Vatican-foes as the fulfillment of BoR prophecy? An accusation that was also hurled at Martin Luther and - indeed - at Martin Luther King? Or that dozens of books in the early 19th Century meticulously attributed the central role to Napoleon, or to the Russian Czar? Or that later screeds accused Abraham Lincoln of being the Bible's arch villain? 

Or more recently Vladimir Lenin all the way to Buckminster Fuller?  Everyone from Woodrow Wilson to UPC barcodes has been identified as the Antichrist... though especially Franklin Roosevelt, who attracted great ire from BoR devotees, precisely because the WWII Greatest Generation adored him, above all other living humans.**

Because if Peter never mentioned that long litany of failed jeremiads, it might - kinda - speak to his own tendentiousness.***

(And in "Whose Rapture?" I predict that the 2030s will likely feature some of the biggest such spasms. So we had better sane-up plenty, before then.)****

         == This is all about perception, manipulated to serve desire ==

 

What makes all of the above pertinent to the AI Revolution is the common element. That all of Peter Thiel’s assigned antichrist candidates stand – in one way or another – athwart any path to achieving his own desired place in the world to come.

 In both worlds to come. One of them above – amid clouds and harps – after mortality. But far more urgently, in this temporal reality, wherein ultimate supremacy awaits those who consolidate unaccountable empires of data-collection and data-crunching. And sure, the universal surveillance panopticon that Peter dearly-desires to own and control certainly must incorporate plenty of AI!  At first, as his servant-tools. Then, later, he as theirs.

 

And hence, completely separately, I would love to see a point-by-point checklist of antichrist traits that were described by John of Patmos*, when he predicted that dire fellow’s imminent arrival within a single generation… 

...whereupon we might compare that list to Greta Thunberg, to Bill Gates, to Eliezer Yudkowsky, to Donald Trump… or to Peter Thiel.

== But the news-of-distration doesn't pause for theology ==

A perfect case for the WAGER CHALLENGE. Some mere millionaire should offer a $1M prize to any of the '247 Biden FBI' guys who infiltrated the January 6 mob at Biden's behest. 

Surely ONE of the 247 would step up for the prize? Small problem though: "Trump himself was president on January 6, 2021, and had been president for nearly four years at that point. As such, it was Trump’s FBI, so to speak, not Biden’s, and in any event, the claim is false."

But the real problem? 

Shouting "That's not true!" doesn't work. Because MAGAs don't care. In fact, yelling it gives them food. It reminds them of when they bullied nerds on the playground, relishing the whine "That's not fair!" 

On the other hand, there are tactics to confront lies that do confront them where it hurts... terrifies them. And no one - certainly not a single rich person who could do it and help save America - has the imagination or gumption to try.

=============================

*And with some hints and traits attributed to Thessalonians and the Book of Daniel etc. 

** Funny thing. FDR created the United Nations and fostered the World Courts. He and then Truman and Marshall and Ike established the American Pax that in many ways truly was the World State (if rather loose, in most ways.) And by the end of FDR's life he had created conditions leading to the most peaceful (per capita), educated, prosperous and scientific era the world ever saw, and a nation whose free citizens then set upon a course of chipping away at old prejudices. One has to wonder, with so many boxes checked on the PRE-antichrist diagnostic chart, how come we never saw any of the -- well -- any of the antichrist-ish shit? 

Oh, this relates to Peter Thiel's notion that his fellow citizens are all cowards who will presumably be so terrified of nuclear armageddon and other modern dangers - exaggerated by 'liberal and science' and antichrist media - that they will flock to an antichrist who promises peace and prosperity. Set aside, for now, the way the current president repeats daily that he is the "peace president!" Let's go back to FDR who oversaw a pretty tense time... then Truman and Ike and charismatic JFK, who led during an era of nuclear brinkmanshiip and fear... and yet citizens did not flock to any such banner, but retained courage. Even after the trauma of losing in Vietnam. In other words, I call bullshit.

*** As evidence that Thiel either does not know of the long, long series of antichrist railings, almost every decade across the last 20 centuries... or else he deliberately wants to obfuscate them, is this, taken from a transcription of his recent lectures:  My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer."

Whaaaaa? 17th & 18th & 19th and 20th Century antichrist depictions flowed like torrents from a stricken rock. They are right there for a supposed antichrist scholar to see. And none - except perhaps glancingly the story of Faust - had anything to do with a "Doctor Strangelove " type. Though TODAY only one thing can save us from downside technological effects - and maximize the good effects - and he knows what it is. NOT luddism, but transparency, so that progress can be rapid, WHILE mistakes are spotted and addressed at a rapid pace.

What's most telling though is his contempt for the fellow citizens who made the science and technologies that he so counts on, as well as the mighty universities that were the greatest pride of the GI Bill Generation, that truly made America Great, and that he ungratefully denounces at every turn. Citizens raised by Hollywood's central theme of Suspicion of Authority. Citizens who are now soundly rejecting Peter's tyrannical "Gimme credit as a peacemaker!" dear-leader, the archetype of every one of the 7 deadly sins, a caricature-leader who would thusly be a prime antichrist candidate...

...if he only had a brain.

****Anyway read JONAH, among the best and most moving of all books in the Bible, wherein it is made clear that God can change His mind. And hence a tantrum threat that was issued 1900 years ago, even if it was real at the time (it wasn't) is clearly way, way, way obsolete. If He can (and clearly has) move on, then maybe we should too.

The Seldon Paradox, our faulty memories... the death of vaccinations and the unintentional resurrection of Karl Marx

For your weekend pleasure - or else your daily drive to work - here's another interview that probes issues that are far more important today than they were, even then.

Also... before diving into this weekend's topic, may I first offer one remark on current events? A fact not noted by any media I've seen - that maybe a quarter of the sagacious grownups who were yanked from their jobs all over the world to get yammered at, in Quantico, were not generals or admirals, but sergeants! 

Sergeants-major or command chief petty officers or guardians who are treated with respect, as comrades, by the flag officers... and whose faces at the 'meeting' bore the same, icy-grim flatness as the generals, while being harangued by two jibbering... And yet, they were unable to quite hide their revulsion and a taste of acid in their mouths. Anyway, the presence of those NCOs and their reactions were as significant as anything else in that week of news.

But on to something more big picture than our present day crises.

== A couple of basic patterns of psychohistory ==

In his book The Disruption of Thought, Pat Scannell describes the Collingridge Dilemma.

 

“In the early stages of an emerging and complex technology, no one – certainly not institutions – can accurately predict or control the potential negative consequences. We don't know the problems they may cause, so we can't regulate or shape them optimally. Later in the technology's maturation, as it becomes more established and widely adopted, the problems become more apparent. But by this time, it has become embedded in societal structures and practices. By that point, we can see the problem, but there is a 'lock-in' – technological, economic, social, and institutional—where various interests, incentives, and norms prevent any change, however well-intended.” 

Philosopher David Collingridge articulated it succinctly: "When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming."

As Scannell re-stated: even very good ideas must pass through the Overton Window – from unthinkable to accepted policy. 

“And with technology, the Collingridge Dilemma creates a double bind: early on, harms are hard to foresee; later, the system locks in and becomes costly to change. We tend to work where problems are both legible and tractable – leaving the largest, entangled ones to fester.”

This very much correlates with the phenomenon that I cite in Chapter One of my nearly completed book on Artificial Intelligence, that crisis always accompanies every new technology that expands human vision, memory and attention. And it usually takes a generation or more for positive effects to start overcoming quicker, more-immediate negative ones.  

This Collingridge Dilemma takes on a twist when it comes to crises engendered by AI. The widespread temptation – expressed by many inside and outside of the field – is to go: “Well, AI will handle it.” 

Okay. The very same cybernetic entities that we worry about, that will shake every institution and assumption, will also be the ones (newly born and utterly inexperienced) to analyze, correlate, propose and enact solutions. 

Or shall we say that they should do that? Ah, that word. "Should."

== Hari & Karl ==

There is another, related concept – the Seldon Paradox, named after Hari Seldon, the lead character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe, who develops mathematical models of human behavior that are sagaciously predictive across future centuries. In that science fictional series, Seldon’s methods are kept secret from the galaxy’s vast human population – on twenty-five million inhabited worlds – because the models will fail, if everyone knows about them and uses them.

This effect is well-known by militaries, of course. It is also why so many supposed tricks to predict or game the Stock Market – even if they work at first – collapse as soon as they are widely known. 

But the Seldon Paradox goes further. A good model that stops working, because of widespread awareness, might later-on start to work again, once that failure becomes assumed by everyone.

One example would be what happened in my parents’ generation, that of the Depression and the Second World War. At the time, everyone read Karl Marx. And I do mean almost everyone. Even the most vociferous anti-Marxists could quote whole passages, putting effort into understanding their enemy. 

You can see this embedded in many works of the time, from nonfiction to novels to movies. All the way to Ayn Rand, whose entire scenario can be decrypted as deeply Marxist! Though heretically-so, because she cut his sequence off at the penultimate stage, and called the truncated version good.

Indeed, Asimov’s Hari Seldon was clearly (if partially) based upon Marx.

Particularly transfixing to my parents' generation were Marx’s depictions of class war, as power and wealth grew ever more concentrated in a few families, leading – his followers assumed – to inevitable revolt by the working classes. So persuasive was the script that, in much of the wealthy American caste, there arose a determination to cancel their own demise with social innovations!

One, innovation, in particular, the Marxists never expected was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose game plan to save his own class was to fork over much of the wealth and power by investing heavily to uplift the workers into a prosperous, educated and confident Middle Class. One that would then be unmotivated to enact Karl's scanario.

Or, as Joe Kennedy was said to have said: "I'd rather have half my fortune taken to make the workers happy than lose it all, and my head, in revolution." (Or something to that effect.)

== It worked, SO well that eventually... ==

Whether or not you agree with my appraisal here, the results were beyond dispute. The GI Bill generation built vast infrastructure, supported science, chipped away at prejudice, and flocked to new universities, where the egalitarian trend doubled and redoubled, as their children stepped forth to confidently compete with the scions of aristocracy. And thusly brought a flawed but genuinely vibrant version of Adam Smith's flat-fair-open-competitive miracle to life! That is, until…

…until all recollection of Karl Marx and his persuasive scenarios seemed dusty, irrelevant, and mostly forgotten. Until the driving force behind Rooseveltism – to cancel out communism through concentrated egalitarian opportunity – became a distant memory. 

At which point, lo and behold, conditions of wealth and power began shifting back into patterns that fit into Old Karl’s models with perfect snugness! With competition-destroying cartels and cabals. With aristocracies greedily and insatiably vampiring the system that had given them everything. (Ayn Rand's elite 'looters.") With the working classes fleeced, like sheep. And then (so far figuratively) eaten.

At which point the writings of Marx – consigned for 80 years into the dustbin – have regained interest from disgusted, formerly upward-mobile classes. Books that are now flying off the shelves, all over the world, pored-over eagerly… 

...but not by those who need awareness the most. Surrounded by sycophants and flatterers, they will deem themselves to be demigods, until the tumbrels come for them. Or until another FDR rescues them, in the nick of time. (Don't count on it.)

Because of the Seldon Paradox. 

-- And yes, the anti-vax movement is another example ==

There are reasons why the Greatest Generation adored FDR above all other living humans. And the next American so-beloved? His name was Jonas Salk. The Man Who Gave Kids Back Their Summer....

...because until the miracle of his vaccine, parents terrified of polio kept their children away from public parks and swimming pools... and I barely remember parent-talk of their joy and relief, letting me stroll the neighborhood and nearby streets in safety.

How does this relate? Childhood vaccinations worked so well that most citizens forgot how much people suffered from two dozen lethal and "non lethal" diseases such as measles, mumps, etc. And they forgot the horrors of polio and diptheria and tetanus (reputed to be the very worst way to die.)  And yeah. The Anti-Vax movement well resembles phase one of the Seldon Paradox. 

And woefully we are already seeing signs of phase two. 

== Okay, it is kind of a 'cycle' ==

And what the heck does any of that have to do with Artificial Intelligence, Brin?

Just everything. Because the new, helium-cooled AI seers might have longer memories and perspectives on time than we do… or else much, much shorter. 

Either way, perhaps they will be immune to the primitive reproductive strategies that drive class conflict… 

...or else they might redefine self-interest to awesome degrees that I elaborate in my forthcoming book. 

Ideally they will understand the Collingridge Dilemma… and the Seldon Paradox, and other crudely human traps... and help us with our faulty memories. 

 

That is one reason that I am writing all of this. For their consideration.

 

======================================

 

PS... I finished Isaac’s Foundation series for him, after his passing, tying together all of his loose ends, in Foundation’s Triumph. So... yeah. Hari Seldon was my character, too.