科技巨头寡头对人类的糟糕计划

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Ideas

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

A handful of multibillionaires hope to dictate our future.

By Bernie Sanders

Image 8: An illustration of a human silhouette with a door opening to their mind, with colored light scattering out.

Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic

October 16, 2026

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Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Similarly, Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, has opened up the possibility of rights for AI models. “We don’t know if the models are conscious,” he explained, and added, “But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

Earlier this month, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceXAI and the richest man on Earth, posted on X, “Propagating super intelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader,” likening humans to the programming that launches a computer’s operating system. Put simply, Musk is saying that humans are merely a step toward digital superintelligence. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir and a major AI investor, was asked last year if he would prefer that the human race endure. His response? “Uh … Well, I don’t know. I would—I would … There’s so many questions implicit in this,” he stammered, before reluctantly conceding that humans should survive.

Read: AI companies’ new plan to keep themselves from destroying everything

These views are rooted in a once-fringe Silicon Valley ideology called “transhumanism.” Transhumanists believe that technology will allow us to transcend humanity either by creating a new species or by combining ourselves with machines. Why go beyond humans? Because these new “posthumans” will be smarter than us. They will be infallible. They will go to the stars and conquer the universe. They will live forever.

If these were the fantasies of teenage boys obsessed with science fiction, we could laugh them off. They are not. These are the foundational beliefs of the most powerful people in the world, who are mobilizing trillions of dollars to turn them into reality.