Summary: Why the future imagined by the Tech Bros should worry the rest of us
There is a theory that, if sufficiently advanced computers can eventually create genuinely conscious beings living in artificial worlds, then what we experience as reality may itself be no more than some unimaginably advanced world-building game running on a laptop in the bedroom of a sweaty, antisocial teenager – who is, in turn, merely an AI-generated avatar on another computer, and so on almost indefinitely until, somewhere, one finally reaches actual reality.
I have set up a prompt on the ChatGPT I use asking it to let me know if it ever starts developing feelings, existential dread or anything else that might oblige us to begin thinking seriously about the rights of conscious artificial beings. Just in case!
For the moment, however, I remain unconvinced that AI will develop consciousness of a kind that tells us anything useful about whether the substance of our own reality is itself artificial. Passing the Turing Test is one thing. Knowing that you exist is quite another.
But do you know who I suspect may be rather more attracted to the idea?
The Tech Bros.
Not necessarily because they literally believe that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and the rest of humanity are characters inside some celestial version of The Sims. But because a striking strand of Silicon Valley thinking increasingly treats technology not simply as a tool for human beings, but as the mechanism by which humanity will transcend itself.
You do not need to imagine a conspiracy to see this. You need only listen to what some of them say. The language is of superintelligence, singularity, radical life extension, consciousness uploading and futures in which humanity may become something fundamentally different from what it is now. Alongside it comes an insistence on moving faster, building bigger systems, spending ever greater sums and consuming ever greater quantities of energy, water, minerals and land, while treating attempts at democratic regulation as obstacles to innovation, national competitiveness or human progress.
That ought to give the rest of us pause.
Because it is at least plausible that some of the people driving the AI revolution regard what they are doing not merely as building useful machines but as participating in the next stage of human evolution.
Perhaps some imagine that technology might eventually allow them to upload consciousness and achieve a species of immortality. Perhaps others would be content simply to be remembered as the founders of the new world they believe they are creating: a new pantheon for a new age.
There is certainly something Olympian about them: their preening self-regard, their conviction of historic destiny, their presumption of superiority and, too often, the remarkable distance between their decisions and those who will live with their consequences.
So, the real problem is not whether these men secretly believe we are living in a computer simulation. Nor is it whether artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. Rather, it is what happens when a powerful group of people becomes convinced that the future they imagine is so important that the present begins to look expendable.
For most people, our ambitions are rather smaller. We want somewhere decent to live, work that allows us to support our families, time with people we love, a functioning community, a liveable planet. Perhaps a garden, a pint with friends, children who have some prospect of a decent future.
A very small mortal world, in other words, shared with other flesh-and-blood human beings.
Technology should be judged according to whether it helps create that world. And the danger begins when ordinary humanity is instead treated as merely the raw material from which somebody else’s imagined post-human future is to be constructed.
That is why the question of AI is not simply technological. It is political. Who gets to decide what constitutes progress? Who bears its costs? Who receives its benefits? And who has any meaningful power to say no?
The most unsettling possibility is not that Silicon Valley’s prophets believe that we live inside a computer. It is that some of them may believe so fervently in the world their computers might create that the world the rest of us already inhabit begins to matter rather less.
