Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Musk get their master plan for the world from these infamous science fiction books

Roel Dobbe, a researcher in data and algorithms at TU Delft, also points to Musk. ’The whole assumption of men like Musk is that people are inferior to AI. Civil servants should be replaced by AI systems. Musk uses AI to destroy human lives. In doing so, both scientific evaluation and the rule of law are being pushed aside. His DOGE AI-first strategy is literally science fiction in practice.'

The ’L' in Tescreal, for long-termism, worries Dobbe. ’That is a fairly dominant philosophy in Silicon Valley', says Dobbe, who has lived there himself. ’The danger is that the value of current human lives is being weighed against that of all future generations. For the long-termists, it is perfectly logical to sacrifice current generations for some future ideal to secure an `optimized humanity'.'
Although Tescreal thinking draws much of its inspiration from science fiction, it is too easy to blame the genre, says Stross.

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The desire for this kind of non-biological superintelligence is based on a ’second wave' of eugenics, Torres and Gebru warn. Just like the first wave, which was mainly practiced in Nazi Germany through selective reproduction, the second wave focuses on ’improving' the human population. This time through improvement via technology.

However, the high-tech highway to paradise is not accessible to everyone. Who will soon be able to afford Neuralink implants, the technology with which Elon Musk wants to improve the human brain? This is how new forms of exclusion arise, the two critics warn.

PREFERENCE FOR EFFICIENCY

Technology philosopher Martijntje Smits recognises in the ideas of people like Bostrom and Kurzweil the Western preference for efficiency, rationality and technical solutions combined with an aversion to imperfection.

According to her, much is lost in the excessive thinking about feasibility. ’People like Musk or Andreessen are concerned with the individual who needs to be improved. They have no regard for society or for the weak.'

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Of course, science fiction books pay little attention to the practical feasibility of an empire in the stars or the coupling of brain and machine. But, he says: ’Science fiction has no obligation to imagine a realistic future.'

In his new book - a distant future novel - he nevertheless wants to stab the knife deep into the ideals of Musk and his associates. Whether he succeeds, we will know around 2027.

Until then, Stross hopes that he does not accidentally invent the next Torment Nexus that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Andreessen will run off with, in their urge to spread their ideal of a technological welfare state that transcends humanity throughout the cosmos at all costs.

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Bibliography

AI Empire: Unraveling the interlocking systems of oppression in generative AI's global order | SAGE Journal |

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to captivate the collective imagination through the latest generation of generative AI models such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, the dehumanizing and harmful features of the technology industry that have plagued it since its inception only seem to deepen and intensify. Far from a "glitch" or unintentional error, these endemic issues are a function of the interlocking systems of oppression upon which AI is built. Using the analytical framework of "Empire," this paper demonstrates that we live not simply in the "age of AI" but in the age of AI Empire. Specifically, we show that this networked and distributed global order is rooted in heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and coloniality and perpetuates its influence through the mechanisms of extractivism, automation, essentialism, surveillance, and containment.

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In both theory and practice, there has been a connection between structural sexism (the patriarchy) and structural discrimination against queer and nonbinary populations (a heterosexual/heteronormative social order), jointly referred to as heteropatriarchy. In this system, "heterosexuality and patriarchy are perceived as normal and natural," while "other configurations are perceived as abnormal, aberrant, and abhorrent" (Arvin et al., 2013). Since it relies upon "very narrow definitions of the male/female binary, in which the male gender is perceived as strong, capable, wise, and composed and the female gender is perceived as weak, incompetent, naïve, and confused" (Arvin et al., 2013) and virtually erases other forms of gender expressions, the heteropatriarchy fuels gender and sexual violence (Davis et al., 2022). In fact, feminist accounts of anthropology demonstrate that the bodies of women have historically served as the "first colony," suggesting that colonialism and capitalism are both deeply rooted in heteropatriarchal hierarchies and binaries (Segato, 2016; Valle, 2023).

It is thus not surprising that AI systems are similarly marked by heteropatriarchal exclusions, erasures, violence, and discrimination (D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020). Sasha Costanza-Chock argues that in Big Tech culture, "white male geek culture, replete with heteropatriarchal cultural structures, forms of humor, and mechanisms for normalizing white cis male standpoints, came to rule the roost" (Costanza-Chock, 2020). This has led, among other things, to the entrenchment of predictive models supporting the patriarchal punitive state with its carceral logics in virtually every aspect of life (Ricaurte, 2022), the racist and sexist classification of women of color by AI algorithms (Crawford, 2021; Noble, 2018), and discrimination against women AI experts, especially women of color, who routinely report being perceived by their male colleagues as nontechnical and incompetent (Kantayya, 2020).

GENDER JUSTICE

Chapter Eight - Feminism is for Everybody
Notes on bell hooks

People at the 2017 Women's March demanding respect for paid and unpaid care work disproportionately done by femme people.

'White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy' and 'Feminism is for Everybody' in U.S. History and Politics

Surrogate Humanity

Historical forms of domination and power, encompassed but not limited to social categories and hierarchies of difference, get built into seemingly non-human objects and the infrastructures that link them, thus sanitizing digital media technologies as human-free.  Rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies about the revolutionary nature of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and re-universalize the historical specificity of the category "human" whose bounds they claim to surpass.