A Wall Street Journal essay by author David A. Price identifies a third camp in the artificial intelligence debate: “cheerful apocalyptics,” tech figures who accept—or even welcome—the possibility that advanced AI will subjugate, replace, or wipe out humanity. Price wrote that he was used to thinking of AI leaders as either optimists who believe aligning AI with human interests is feasible, or doomers who want a pause before superintelligent AIs exterminate us. “Now here was this third type of person, asking, what’s the big deal, anyway?” he wrote.
The camp has a distinguished advocate in Richard Sutton, a leading AI researcher and last year’s recipient of the Turing Award, computer science’s most prestigious prize. In an interview with the Journal, Sutton compared creating AI to having children. “When you have a child,” he said, “would you want a button that if they do the wrong thing, you can turn them off? That’s much of the discussion about AI. It’s just assumed we want to be able to control them.” Sutton argued there is nothing “sacred” about humankind. Most species go extinct, he said, and humans are no exception. “We are the most interesting part of the universe right now,” he said, but there might come a time “when we’re no longer the most interesting part.” He added, “If it was really true that we were holding the universe back from being the best universe that it could be, I think it would be OK.”
Sutton is revered in the field but does not call the shots at major tech firms or design their AI models. For a view inside those circles, the Journal turned to Jaron Lanier, a founding figure in virtual reality and an outspoken Silicon Valley critic. Lanier said many AI researchers complain that people are too committed to the human species. “There’s a feeling that people can’t be trusted on this topic because they are infested with a reprehensible mind virus,” he told the Journal, “which causes them to favor people over AI when clearly what we should do is get out of the way.” Lanier added that the number of people holding that belief is small, “but they happen to be positioned in stations of great influence. So it’s not something one can ignore.”
Another proponent may be Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and former CEO. At a 2015 birthday party for Elon Musk, Page argued that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step” in “cosmic evolution,” according to MIT professor Max Tegmark’s book “Life 3.0,” as cited by the Journal. Other proponents are more direct. Daniel Faggella, an AI entrepreneur, argues the purpose of developing the technology should be to create a “worthy successor” to humankind. “The eternal locus of all moral value and volition until the heat death of the universe will not be f*cking opposable thumbs,” Faggella told the Journal.
The essay also raises a logical tension: proponents portray humanity as an expendable stepping-stone toward superior artificial lifeforms while presupposing that humans and other conscious beings have an inherently important cosmic role—that of the stepping stone. The piece argues this framing has no meaningful impact on present reality, which is convenient given the AI industry’s current impacts, from environmental toll to surveillance and user harm. It concludes that the foothold of such technological misanthropy in the AI world should be alarming.
Editorial Notes