Thiel sees global government as an existential risk too

Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

1. 23:43

   Let me read you something you once said, because I'm sort of wrestling, and I mean this genuinely, with the whole Antichrist thing and what you mean by that. But it ties into this new AI moment we're in. which you said the way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop. The Antichrist wouldn't seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by convincing everyone that the apocalypse was coming.

2. 24:15

   Is that what's happening now? Well, since I said that like a year and a half ago, yeah, I'm tempted to take a victory lap of sorts that you have to... You have to at least ask certain questions, and that's what I would want people to do. Oppenheimer and the nuclear scientists who wanted a global authority to control all the nuclear weapons and who thought after 1945, it was too dangerous for the US to have them and they should be handed over to the United Nations with a stronger UN, a real world government. And if you didn't hand it over to the UN, then we'd have a nuclear war. And so there was a certain parallel with the nuclear debates. We got partial global authorities where we, you know, regulated, controlled nuclear weapons. We never got rid of them altogether. So maybe, you know, maybe Oppenheimer's still right in the long run.

3. 25:08

   Yeah, I mean, Oppenheimer's that morning led to Atchison, Lilienthal, and it actually has kind of worked.

4. 25:14

   It partially worked, although, you know, it's only been 100 years or 80 years or whatever. But on the AI thing, yes, let's— I would always concede that there are a bunch of these existential risks that are serious. I think climate change is pretty serious. There are other environmental risks that are serious. I still think the nuclear weapons thing is pretty real. I think there probably are other technologies and AI is this very fast, very big one. And so there are existential risks surely that are also tied up with AI.

5. 25:48

   And then the existential risk that I also want to always throw in the hopper and the balance of the discussion is the risk of a, you know, softly totalitarian one world government. And that also seems like, you know, if the whole world becomes totalitarian, there's no outside left. That feels like this catastrophic singularity, which might not be reversible. You know, Soviet Union was a totalitarian system. At some point it could decay and fall apart because there was still an outside left. You know, if the whole world is North Korea, that might last for a really, or, you know.

6. 26:28

   Well, wait, explain to me, though, what you mean by the Antichrist. Well, it is, I mean, it's a sort of, I

7. 26:35

   don't know, medieval, biblical concept of sort of a tyrant who will somehow rule the entire world at the end of history. If you think of it in a literary way, or, you know... sort of a creative way, you can say, well, how would the Antichrist come to power in different times and different places? And in early modernity, 17th, 18th century, perhaps the Antichrist would use science and technology to build weapons and take over the world. In my telling, in late modernity, we in some ways still think of the Antichrist in 17th century categories. We still think it's like a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller type person who builds nuclear bombs to to conquer the world. But if you think of it as a political dimension, the way I think the politics work in our society is that the fear of science and technology are far more powerful and that

8. 27:31

   that's the kind of thing that would really crystallize things. I don't think Greta is the antichrist. I think Greta Thunberg, I don't think she's the antichrist, but I think environmentalism, you know, there are real fears.

9. 27:43

   People pushing back on progress is what you're saying. Pushing back on progress, but then also pushing for these very, very powerful global political structures. Because something like climate change, it sounds like the sort of thing where you need a global regulatory authority.

10. 27:58

    So your big feel is some global regulatory authority. Yeah. And again, there are probably versions of that that could be good. You know, the nuclear ones we ended up with were definitely more good than bad. But there also are versions of it that can be quite bad. And I tend to think they're bad if they're not theorized. You know, globalization can be good. It can be bad. We didn't think about it a lot. And because we didn't think about it a lot, you know, there were a lot of bad things that came with globalization that maybe could have been avoided had we been able to be more critical about it. You know, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote this book last fall, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

11. 28:36

    And he's talking about AI. He's talking about AI. And it's, again, very precise, detailed on some of the risks, some of these scenarios. We can debate what the probabilities really are. But that part is quite detailed, quite technical. The part that's completely hand-wavy is it needs to be globally regulated. He's very clear on that. But then the details of how you do that, that's incredibly fuzzy, incredibly vague. And so I worry that we're not thinking about that. And so we're worrying about Armageddon.

12. 29:06

    We're not worrying about the Antichrist. And my contrarian intuition is that alone tells you you need to worry more about the Antichrist than Armageddon.

13. 29:15

    I sort of have a personal question. A lot of people think you're kind of like spooky.

14. 29:19

    Or whatever it may be. Why using the Antichrist? Why does that help clarify things when even I look at you giving lectures on the Antichrist and I go, what's that all about?

15. 29:33

    Well, it got people's attention. So it certainly worked on that level. There are probably ways you could describe all these things in philosophical or more neutral, less religious language. The way the Federation of Atomic Scientists, they put out a short film after 1945, and it was one world or none. It shows a nuclear bomb blowing up the world. And You know, the way I often describe it is, yeah, one world or none. In a way, it's a very similar question to Antichrist, the one world authority versus Armageddon.

16. 30:06

    But the reason I prefer the religious formulation to the, let's say, the political formulation, one world or none, without asking any questions, we sign up straight for the one world government. That's clearly better. There's no debate, no thinking through it at all. If you can reframe that question as Antichrist or Armageddon, The point of it is not to be fatalistic. The point of it is, okay, we need to avoid both. They're both equally bad. We need to think about all these existential risks. They're serious, but also the risk of this sort of totalitarian one-world state.

17. 30:40

    And Antichrist or Armageddon pushes us to find a moderate third way. One world or none pushes us towards an immoderately powerful UN.