Monday, June 01, 2026
Tech billionaires are spending unprecedented sums in California races. Experts say it’s the tip of the iceberg | California | The Guardian
Tech billionaires are spending unprecedented sums in California races. Experts say it’s the tip of the iceberg
"From Google co-founder Brin spending $66m to fight a billionaire tax to Google and Meta funding a joint Super Pac, Silicon Valley is engaged in an existential fight for its political power at home
Tech billionaires have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the 2 June primary election in California, in an unrivaled attempt to influence who gets to run the state that Silicon Valley calls home.
The industry has used a cover-all-bases approach, funding candidates and ballot measures big and small, contributing to what looks to be the most expensive primary season in California history. The goal, experts say, is to gain both political and regulatory leverage that will perpetuate dominance in business.
“This money is flowing in the direction of politicians that can be influential in defining the regulatory agenda for the next five years,” said Francesco Trebbi, a public policy professor at the University of California in Berkeley. “Reinforcing the cycle of economic power produces political power, and political power further establishes economic power. So, this cycle is ongoing.”
Combing through campaign finance filings with California’s secretary of state, the Guardian found:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent $66m since January, more than any other donor, to fight a billionaire tax that’s up for a vote on the November ballot.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan has received more donations than any other candidate, including from top executives at Google, Amazon, Snap, LinkedIn, Reddit and Palantir.
Crypto mogul Chris Larsen has funded three Super Pacs with $26m to sway campaigns across California, including giving $1m to back a primary candidate for state insurance commissioner.
Google and Meta have collectively funded a Super Pac with $10m to back assembly and senate candidates in local district races across the state.
Silicon Valley money is flowing toward city primaries as well as state-level ones, with tech-backed Pacs sponsoring voter guides suggesting how to vote on local tax measures.
For Silicon Valley, pouring money into politics at this moment is existential as it races to develop artificial intelligence. With favorable candidates in office, tech companies say they will be able to grow at a breakneck rate while avoiding stifling regulations.
The vast amount of spending that’s been disclosed in public records likely isn’t even the half of it, Trebbi said. People looking to sway election outcomes often fund dark money entities that aren’t traceable through campaign finance filings.
“These people are sophisticated political givers, so they will use both visible and invisible forms of influence,” Trebbi said. What we’re seeing now is “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Money-for-influence leaderboard
The influx of dollars has meant that voters from Oakland to Bakersfield to Orange County have been bombarded with TV ads, robotexts and mailers touting various issues and candidates sponsored by super political action committees (Pacs) funded by the tech industry.
Top spenders for these Super Pacs include billionaires Larsen and Brin. Larsen, the co-founder of crypto company Ripple Labs, is worth about $12bn and has spent millions on more than a dozen primary campaigns up and down the state, targeting races and issues at a city and county level, as well as bigger state-level races. Brin, worth about $290bn, has homed in on fighting a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires up for a vote in November, the proceeds from which are intended to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs.
To date, Brin has donated at least $66m to a Super Pac dedicated to blocking the billionaire tax, according to campaign finance filings with the state. The former Alphabet president also spent $500,000 in San Francisco last month to battle a city measure that seeks to expand a tax on high-paid CEOs, which is up for a vote on 2 June. These donations come even as Brin moved out of California late last year to Nevada.
Larsen and Brin did not respond to requests for comment.
Along with contributing millions to Super Pacs and candidates in California, the tech world is also spending eye-popping amounts on lobbying.
An analysis by news site CalMatters found that in 2025 alone, the tech industry paid $39m to lobby the state government. That’s more than any year prior and surpasses what was spent by the oil and gas industry, which typically tops the high roller list. According to a Bloomberg analysis, the biggest tech and AI companies spent a collective $109m on federal lobbying in 2025; that their state lobbying in California is equivalent to 36% of their federal spend showcases the state’s importance to the tech industry.
Tech picks a favorite in the governor’s race
Of the 62 candidates listed on the 2 June primary ballot, one has stood out as the tech industry’s darling: Matt Mahan. The centrist Democrat and upstart mayor from San Jose, a large city in Silicon Valley, entered the race late and quickly made headlines as he racked up contributions from a who’s who of the tech industry.
Before Mahan got involved in politics in 2020, he had a career in the tech sector. He was an undergraduate at Harvard with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2014 co-founded a startup with funding from the Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, tech investor Ron Conway and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.
Since Mahan’s candidacy announcement in late January, he’s received nearly $50m in contributions, according to Politico – more than any other gubernatorial candidate (with the exception of Tom Steyer’s self-funded campaign of about $200m). Mahan has received donations from prominent venture capitalists, along with former and current executives from Google, Amazon, Snap, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Reddit, Netflix, Palantir, Anduril, Roblox, Riot Games and more, public records show.
Google’s Brin donated the maximum limit for an individual campaign donation at $78,400 and contributed $1m to the pro-Mahan Super Pac Deliver for California, according to public records. Mahan flew to Lake Tahoe where Brin lives in March to make a personal appeal to the billionaire and his conservative influencer girlfriend, the New York Times reported. Brin’s girlfriend alleges that Mahan texted Brin afterwards to apologize for attending a No Kings rally.
Mahan’s overtures to both progressives and conservatives haven’t won him many friends among the state’s leading Democrats. Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna chose Steyer to endorse and state assembly members from Mahan’s district have publicly criticized him, saying he was “handpicked” by the tech industry. Similarly, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the powerful California Labor Federation, saidMahan is the only democrat she’s not promoting because she’s “opposed to the candidate funded by Trump’s big tech billionaires”.
Mahan said he has no plans to cater to special interests and his goal is for the system to work for everyone.
“I’m not running for tech, and if you look at my record – I’ve been in public office now for six years – I think you’d be hard pressed to find – you would not find a single example of me ever doing something to benefit the industry to the detriment of the community,” Mahan said. “If anything, I’ve fought hard to get them to do their fair share.”
The influx of tech cash into Mahan’s race hasn’t bolstered it as much as early predictions forecast. His campaign has failed to gain traction with a wider audience and polls have put him at just 4% of the vote. The Brin-funded Deliver for California Super Pac shuttered last month.
Mahan did not respond to further questions about his interactions with Brin or the termination of the Super Pac.
Targeting state and local primaries
Although the tech industry has mostly focused on a sole candidate for the governor’s race, it has taken more of a scattershot approach in local campaigns. Silicon Valley money has infiltrated nearly every segment of politics – from local ballot measures to state congressional campaigns to the race for California’s new insurance commissioner.
The tech executive who appears most dedicated to local politics is Larsen, the crypto mogul. He’s funded Super Pacs aimed at different causes and candidates. The Golden State Promise Super Pac has received a total of $10m entirely from Larsen and Ripple Labs, public records show. The Pac, which is devoted to combating the billionaire tax that’s up for a vote in November, launched an attack ad against the tax earlier this month.
Another Super Pac supported by Larsen is geared toward the state’s insurance commissioner race. Earlier this month, Larsen donated more than $1m to the Pac, Californians for an Affordable Future, which is dedicated to electing Ben Allen, a democrat. It’s a heated primary race with several candidates vying for the seat, including Bernie Sanders-backed Jane Kim, also a democrat.
Larsen has spread his money across elections for California’s state legislature too, mostly through a Super Pac called Grow California. He’s donated $15m to the Pac, while crypto evangelist Tim Draper has contributed $5m, according to public records. Grow California’s stated goal is to “rebuild a state capital”.
The Super Pac has injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into roughly a dozen state assembly and senate primaries across California. For example, Mark Pulido, who’s running for assembly in Orange county, has received more than $1.5m from Grow California. Likewise, a senate candidate in Northern California’s Alameda County, Scott Sakakihara, has received more than $500,000 from the Pac.
“We have a group of people who are not acting in a pragmatic way. They’re not looking for balance. They’re completely fucking owned by one side,” Larsen told Politico, in reference to organized labor’s power in the legislature. “So we’re going to work on taking out those people who are not working for the people of California.”
Google and Meta have supported a similar Super Pac, California Leads, with $5m each and have distributed funds to several candidates in the Central Valley, as well as to many of the same contenders as Grow California. According to public records, Pulido has received nearly $750,000 from California Leads. The Super Pac’s stated mission is “supporting leaders focused on California’s future”.
John Bennett, director of the advocacy organization California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, said spending upwards of $500,000 on a local district primary is a “huge sum of money”. He’s been studying the races and said the bulk of tech spending has gone to about a dozen open seats in the state legislature.
“They’ve been hyper-focused on those open seats, not going after incumbents this time around,” Bennett said. “So, it seems like they’re doing a long-term strategy to slowly turn the legislature to become more friendly to them.”
Other companies, like Airbnb and Uber, have also donated to local assembly and senate races across the state but with smaller contributions.
City campaigns are seeing a tech infusion too. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder, contributed to former reality TV star and Los Angeles mayor hopeful Spencer Pratt – even though Lonsdale lives in Texas, records show. And several 501(c)(4) groups backed by Silicon Valley money have cropped up across the Bay Area sending out mailers and robotexts with voter guides that highlight preferred local candidates, along with suggestions to vote down issues like a union-backed parcel tax.
“Now they’re going at this from multiple fronts,” Bennett said. “They’re spending in elections, they’re spending in the legislature, and they’re trying to do whatever they can to ensure that they don’t lose their foothold in this economic system.”
Lauren Gambino contributed reporting"
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: A.I. Belongs to the People, Not to Billionaires - The New York Times
Bernie Sanders: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
By Bernie Sanders
"Mr. Sanders, an independent, is the senior senator from Vermont.
Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the life of every man, woman and child in our country. It will bring — and is already bringing — unimaginable changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment and how we educate and raise our children. Further, there is a very real fear that as A.I. becomes smarter than humans it could eventually function independently, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
The question, then, is not whether A.I. will change the world. It will. The question is: Who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it? Will A.I. be used to make life better for working families? Will it enrich our quality of life? Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies and solve the climate crisis? Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed A.I., with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?
That is the choice before us.
Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations. That is not just the opinion of Bernie Sanders. According to Mr. Altman, the head of OpenAI, A.I. models were trained on our “collective experience, knowledge” and “learnings of humanity.”
For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.
Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity. Not just Mr. Musk, Mr. Altman, Dario Amodei and other moguls whose companies are positioned to dominate the industry. Not just venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or money managers on Wall Street who undoubtedly see A.I. as the next great wealth-extracting machine.
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That is why I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.
If passed, this legislation would do two crucial things. First, it would give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology. No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.
Second, this legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer. If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.
This is not an original idea. It has been proposed by scholars. It has been endorsed by some of the leading A.I. companies in America. OpenAI, for example, recently proposedcreating a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” Anthropic, led by Mr. Amodei, similarly proposed the creation of “national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in A.I.” Mr. Musk, who runs xAI, wrote, “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”
Dozens of sovereign wealth funds exist all over the world to ensure that ordinary people benefit from national wealth. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest in the world, was funded from the country’s oil wealth and is now worth more than $2 trillion. Instead of a few oil executives pocketing all the benefits of this national resource, Norway made the decision that this wealth should be used to improve life for all of its people.
This concept has already been put into practice right here at home. Fifty years ago, Alaska created a sovereign wealth fund from the state’s oil revenues. For decades, it has paid annual dividends directly to Alaskans. Moreover, public pension funds in states across the country already hold hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock of companies throughout America. Even President Trump, in an executive order, has proposedestablishing an American sovereign wealth fund.
To start, the billions, if not trillions, of dollars generated by this fund would provide direct payments to the American people. And as the fund generates more and more wealth, the proceeds would be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living, including health care, education and housing.
Needless to say, I recognize that for the government to have a major stake in a company, particularly one for which A.I. is only part of its business, is complicated. More details — including the specific spending priorities and the mechanics of implementation — will be included in the legislation I unveil in the coming weeks.
But the principle is simple: When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth. A.I. is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity and labor of mankind.
The future of A.I. and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. It must not be dictated by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities and the American people. It’s our future. We must decide it."
Sunday, May 31, 2026
Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Technology | The Guardian
Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Technology | The Guardian
"Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote.
More recently, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued on his social media platform, X, that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” – our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.
And Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to Silicon Valley lore, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page’s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.) Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.
It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future.
Their dreams are not all perfectly aligned. But like the folk stories and superstitions that have for ever revolved around more established religious traditions, the collection of far-fetched scenarios valley oligarchs are writing into our future exhibits the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project.
In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a “transhuman” future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.
The mythopoeic infrastructure assembled in and around San Francisco carries risk for humanity as we know it. It justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe.
Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.
These beliefs have pushed to the fore over the last quarter century, accompanying the advance of information technologies that have delivered enormous wealth and power to a new IT elite, one committed to science-based progress and hungry for transcendent meaning, but indifferent or even hostile to the propositions and moral constraints of organized religion.
“Silicon Valley has been a militantly secular space,” a prominent thinker about technology whose employer would be unhappy if he went on record told me. “It created a God-shaped hole, which it filled in its image.” Having rejected standard religious sources of purpose, they found an alternative path to provide their lives with significance via sci-fi transhuman dreams. Or as Musk observed in a singsong post on X: “Atheism left an empty space. Secular religion took its place.”
While this newfangled cosmogony has been cobbled together at least since the early days of the Internet, it reached toward breathtaking new horizons on the shoulders of artificial intelligence, which opened up vast new possibilities for the transhuman dream. Douglas Rushkoff, a critic of the technological oligarchy and its ambitions, put it thus, referencing the 1980s-era satire featuring the first ever “computer-generated” TV host. “I guess AI makes the notion of having a Max Headroom existence plausible.”
Weird though the valley’s proposed utopia may appear, it fits a longer tradition of business titans with vast unrestrained wealth seeking to endow their endeavors with transcendent value. Henry Ford, as historian Kati Curts has written, also believed his calling was about more than transforming manufacturing to make cars; he believed he was on a mission to re-engineer the world to improve society.
Ford built Fordlândia, an attempt to create a harmonic social order supported by an industrial-scale rubber plantation in the Brazilian rainforest. Altman, Musk and the valley gang want to merge consciousness with AI and conquer the cosmos. The distance between these visions has mostly to do with the technological possibilities of their time. The proposition that they are engineering some utopian vision that humanity should be grateful for is not that dissimilar.
As Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote: “The handful of people unleashing this technology on the world are guided by an ideology of control (over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.”
The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.
While Americans are starting to show some signs of discomfort over the unrestrained appetites of this crop of AI moguls, the Trump administration has shown few signs so far of wanting to put in place regulatory guardrails and constrain their efforts in any way.
Future utopias on the menu
There are a variety of views in the valley about what a future humanity should look like.
Altman and Page are perhaps the most committed to the goal of merging humans with superintelligent technology and abandoning the flesh. Altman was an early subscriber to Nectome, a valley startup that proposes to retrieve information present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review.
Musk wants something a bit different, also spacebound but committed to flesh, enhanced by computers via something like his own brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink. Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir fame, frowns on “just a computer program that simulates me”, but is drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.
And yet, the visions converge. Page, for instance, has suggested that rather than giving money to charity he might just give it to Musk. As he once told Charlie Rose, Musk wants to go to Mars to provide a backup planet for humanity to expand and that is a worthy goal to contribute to.
There are shared sources that provide some sense of moral purpose to the various flavors of sci-fi ambition. One of the core starting points is rather earthbound: the movement for effective altruism (EA), which seduced the technological elite with its appeal to unflinching rationality. Philanthropy, the EAs argued, was largely wasted by funding, say, the local library. Donors had to be purposeful, carefully directing their money to where it would do the most good for the most people.
That is not an unreasonable proposition. It encouraged laudable efforts to, say, eradicate malaria in Africa, on the grounds that one could save a whole human life for a small fistfull of dollars. But it eventually departed from the needs of present earthlings.
First, it was the longtermists, who emerged from effective altruism to argue that improving the world of the future was worthier than spending on the present. From there it took but one small step to move the goalposts to the cosmos: how about focusing on the wellbeing of myriad future transhumans populating the vast reaches of the galaxy in the far future? Maybe they will be of the flesh. Maybe not.
It’s easy to get lost in the tangle of beliefs and aspirations – articulated and refined by academics like William MacAskill and Nick Bostrom, at university departments or thinktanks funded by the techno-oligarch’s mushrooming wealth. They draw from unorthodox ethics, and from idiosyncratic readings of the laws of physics. The goal: to justify the imperative to take humanity (or at least the most privileged part of it) where it has never gone before.
One of this crew’s goals is to advance up the Kardashev scale – a measure of the amount of energy a civilization consumes – to harness the energy and acquire the technological capabilities needed to transcend our biological confines. Present day humanity, at the bottom of the ladder, doesn’t even consume all of the energy of the Earth. Advanced civilizations, the thinking goes, are expected to consume all the energy of their star, at least, if not all that of the galaxy.
One of the earlier groups pushing for a transhuman future in the 1990s were the ultra-libertarian Extropians, which included leading intellectuals such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Bostrom and economist Robin Hanson. Outlined in their core principles, they proposed “Boundless Expansion: Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.”
Another, more recent branch, are the effective accelerationists. They have tried to conscript physics to their cause, arguing – controversially – that maximizing intelligent life is an imperative, because life is good at extracting available energy from the environment and dissipating it – increasing what is known in physics as “entropy”.
As Beff Jezos – the online identity of Guillaume Verdon, one of the leading lights of the movement – puts it: “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales.”
In a philosophical twist that surely pleases Silicon Valley’s billionaires, effective accelerationists argue for rampant techno-capitalism, unhindered by regulation, government and other nuisances, because this would maximize the consumption of the universe’s resources, “capture civilizational utility”, and dissipate the residue into the disorganized void.
The details of the dream don’t actually make much of a difference. Because they all take us roughly to the same place. What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.
The signs are not great. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemiesencompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.
Thiel is unusual in this crowd in that he is fiercely committed to an idiosyncratic variant of Christianity in which anybody standing in the way of technology, or governments that try to tax him, show up as the antichrist. But though he claims little affinity with Andreesen, he seems to have similar tastes. A diehard libertarian, he is contemptuous of government redistribution. His philanthropy is about for-profit investments in projects to further technological progress. Charity, as commonly understood, amounts to wasting resources that technologists will need to transcend our present. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”.
Regardless of the specific features of their transhuman dreams, the narrative crafted by Silicon Valley billionaires justifies their vast accumulation of power. As computer science pioneer and tech visionary Jaron Lanier told me: “If you create God but you own God you become the dictator.” And these dictators don’t seem to believe earthbound humans – most of us, at least – are particularly valuable. Questioned in February about the vast amounts of energy sucked up by AI, Altman noted, somewhat disparagingly, that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”
The flat-out indifference toward the rest of us is evident in their frequent assessmentsabout what AI could bring down upon us – ending human work, building weapons of mass destruction, even bringing about human extinction in the service of making paperclips. Palantir’s manifesto notes that “one age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” Or as Musk once put it, before he changed his mind, launched xAI and merged it with SpaceX, “with AI we are summoning the demon.”
Yet they admittedly have no idea what they are doing. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work,” Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” Amodei has deep ties to effective altruism; his sister Daniela, Anthropic’s president, is married to a founder of the movement. Recently, though, they’ve both distanced themselves from it.
What’s particularly distressing is how unconstrained these moguls are, as they pursue the futuristic utopia they plan to build with their machines. Tech billionaires are plowing hundreds of millions into political campaigns, to fend off attempts at regulation and evade accountability lest their endeavors go awry. They want to make sure nobody butts in as they work to reshape society. And they are largely succeeding – for now, no one with the power to stop them is butting in.
What is to be done?
How should society intervene? Does our political system provide the tools to help steer the process in a pro-social direction? Beyond the uncertain impact of technology on our future economic and social landscape, how should we address the narrow concentration of the fruits of these endeavors to build transhuman cyborgs with silicon brains?
The Trump administration has shown little interest so far in resisting the tech oligarch’s fantasy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the valley oligarchs’ project of techno-domination is inevitable. Misgivings are emerging among the Maga base: The folks in rural Virginia who push back against datacenters hogging power and water supplies, evangelicals wary of a cosmopolitan elite claiming recourse to a tech-inflected higher authority.
Other signs of trouble are brewing for the AI project – from college graduates booing commencement speakers who extol AI, to Trump’s brief moment of concern over the potential criminal capabilities of Anthropic’s new Mythos model before deciding not to regulate the thing after all. In the latest Times-Siena poll from earlier in May, more than twice as many registered voters said AI is mostly bad, compared with those saying it was mostly good.
Perhaps the most forceful, pro-human position has come from the Holy Father himself. On Monday, Pope Leo published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity. “This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.
One might also take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs’ dreamscape is so far-fetched. Ford and his civilizatory dream again come to mind. Fordlândia today lies in ruins. A pointless water tower pokes into the sky from the banks of the Amazon, large decrepit houses in the American suburban aesthetic surround a lifeless playground and a long-empty swimming pool.
There are the ruins of nurseries, where as Federico Guzmán Rubio writes in his book There is Such a Place, Ford’s aversion to cows meant the children of workers were introduced to soy milk, shipped in from miles away. There are the ruins of schools where kids were taught about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What’s left is testament to the incongruous dreams of an oligarchy that overvalued its power and confused its appetites with the greater good.
The AI-fueled cosmic fantasy is no less nuts. Forget the part where human consciousness is rendered in digital form, merged with AI and beamed across the galaxy. The ostensibly more down-to-earth proposition that conscious AI is not just possible but around the corner is in fundamental tension with our tenuous grasp of what consciousness is. Even more mundane objectives, such as getting artificial intelligence to train itself, keep getting pushed forward into the event horizon.
Perhaps this time too the outlandish claims will fade into irrelevance; the Star-Trek vision of people being dematerialized and beamed up and down around the galaxy will decay into some rustbound heap. Maybe the transhuman project will give way to a more or less recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins. Maybe it can even be achieved in a way that serves our long-forgotten dream of equitable prosperity.
So far, though, our technological visionaries are pushing for something else, a future marked by vast concentrations of wealth and power, indifferent to the humdrum aspirations of the unwashed many. In the unlikely event that it succeeds in taking the essence of Page, Musk and their ilk aboard a silicon body to “where no man has gone before”, here’s hoping that they don’t destroy the world we know in the process.
Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He is a Guardian US columnist and writes the newsletter Being There on Substack"
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